Today Syrian state television showed human bodies and detached limbs floating down the Orontes River.

They are the remains of dead soldiers torn apart by protestors in Hama. Or so the state claims.

A more objective report identifies them differently:

They are the victims of Syrian tank fire and ZU-23 automatic anti-aircraft artillery trained on residential buildings and streets in the last 48 hours as the dead pile up …

Citizens cowering in their homes are throwing the dead out of windows and off roofs into the river. …

The dead are believed to be in the hundreds and rising all the time because the thousands of injured cannot be reached for medical care.

But the numbers of the dead and injured are not known, because the Syrian authorities have “cut off all the city’s ground and cell telephone and Internet links”, and “the satellite phones in the hands of some of the dissident leaders provide the only source of information on the situation in the embattled city.”

Assad has no reason to fear that any power or combination of powers will try to stop him slaughtering his own people by the thousands.

Turkish units had been waiting on the border to enter Syria, and possibly establish a refugee camp on Syrian territory to stop the flow of refugees into Turkey itself. But a few days ago all the chiefs of the Turkish army resigned, and the threat to Assad receded.

The UN will not actively intervene in Syria. Those passionate protectors of “human rights” are not easily distracted from their supreme task of censuring Israel.

The US Congress had exhausted its energies raising the US debt ceiling:

After the Senate … had approved the bill raising the national debt ceiling, the lawmakers were scheduled to turn to the crisis in Syria. However, US Ambassador Robert Ford, on hand to brief the senators, saw them hurrying to leave Capitol Hill.

Only one senator [Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA)] remained for the briefing.

Michael Ledeen writes:

There is no reason to believe that this administration grasps the dimensions of the world war in which we are engaged, like it or not. To look at Syria alone is a failure of strategic vision, because the battle of Syria is part of the larger conflict, involving our current major enemy Iran. Indeed, the Syrian slaughterhouse is a repeat performance of the earlier (and still ongoing) massacre in Iran, and is assisted (perhaps even instructed) from Tehran.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have a special force for operations outside Iran called the Al-Quds Force. (Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.) It is assisting Assad in his attempts to crush the popular uprising. Iran has also lent him technicians to help identify and track down activists through their use of the Internet.

The Iranian tyrants tremble at the thought of a free Syria, since, as in Iran itself, the odds favor a successor regime that would devote its energies and depleted resources to the care and feeding of its own people [hmmm- JB] rather than to the support of terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Moreover, the spectacle of the overthrow of Iran’s closest regional ally might well inspire the Iranian people to take to the streets once again against Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.

The Heritage Foundation comments:

The [Obama] Administration has a long way to go to correct its ill-advised efforts to seek better relations with a gangster regime that has murdered more than 1,400 of its own citizens in the last four months; thrown more than 12,000 in jail; served as Iran’s chief ally in the Middle East; supported a wide array of terrorists against the U.S. and its allies; and conspired with North Korea (and probably Iran) to illegally build a nuclear reactor designed to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

The collapse of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy is yet another example of how the Obama Doctrine has undermined U.S. national interests in a naïve effort to engage a despotic regime. Now that the Administration’s timid and weak policy toward Syria has emboldened the Assad regime to attack the U.S. embassy [on July 11], it is time for President Obama … to replace his myopic engagement strategy with meaningful efforts to help the Syrian people oust the predatory Assad regime.

But does he want to? Perhaps Senator Bob Casey could tell us.