Much has been written about whether the instability in Iraq, the warfare in Syria and the crises this causes for Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, the Kurdish drive for autonomy (at least) in Iraq and Turkey, will at some point combine to unravel the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and England in 1916. Put another way, the question is whether the borders established in the context of the First World War will stick.

Here is one answer: they are effectively gone already, whether as a legal matter they disappear or remain. After all, when Iran can send any amount of arms through Syria and Iraq to its allies and proxies in Lebanon–ignoring the Lebanese government and Lebanese border–what is left of borders? Iran has in effect an open space running from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean, where it can place arms and soldiers almost at will. We know that Iranian IRGC forces are in Syria, and we know that Hezbollah forces from Lebanon are fighting there too. We know that just as jihadis from all over the world crossed from Syria into Iraq, ignoring that border to fight the Americans, today they are arriving across borders into Syria, now to fight the Assad regime.

Other examples can be cited. The border between Gaza and Egyptian Sinai is breached and mocked by hundreds of smuggling tunnels. The huge flow of Syrian refugees, now probably 1.5 million, moves across borders to seek safety. In fact it seems the only real, stable borders still existing are those of Israel. And that is in good part because Israel has built elaborate security barriers north, east, and most recently south, to demarcate and defend them. Israel’s borders exist on the ground, and the great irony is of course that they are the only boundaries in the region that do not exist on maps and are viewed as temporary until a peace agreement with Syria and with the Palestinians is achieved.

Most of the lines Sykes and Picot marked on maps still remain, but they have less and less reality. Changing national borders formally, with the approval of all parties and the United Nations as well, seems nearly impossible. But ignoring them, breaching them, and erasing them on the ground, where actual human beings live, seek refuge, make war, survive, or die–well, that has already happened to a very striking degree.

The newest polls tells us that President Mohamed Morsi’s popularity continues to decline. Today 47 percent of Egyptians say they are dissatisfied with his performance while 46 percent approve of it. Only 30 percent would today vote for him for president.

Meanwhile, Tom Carothers of Carnegie has written a persuasive essay reminding us to take a second look at the “dismal opposition.” As Carothers wrote,

Overly harsh views of the Egyptian opposition—combined with a lack of recognition that many once-weak opposition actors in countries emerging from authoritarian rule have gone on to win elections—fuel the unhelpful idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only political force likely to hold power in Egypt for the foreseeable future. And that idea in turn encourages the problematic belief evident in U.S. policy in the past year that no alternative to the Brotherhood is likely to be viable for many years and the resultant tendency to downplay the Brotherhood’s significant political flaws.

Carothers rightly says we should not be supporting the opposition, but we should be supporting democracy and human rights in Egypt far more actively than we have been. Permanent Muslim Brotherhood control of Egypt and a steady decline in respect for civil liberties are not inevitable, but we help make them so if we abandon our role in supporting the principles of liberal democracy.

On April 17 Mr. Kerry testified on the Department’s FY 2014 budget and was asked about these vacancies. He acknowledged the problem but blamed the White House personnel office. This was the story in Foreign Policy:

The White House vetting process is to blame for all the senior-level vacancies around the State Department, but nominations for some of those positions should be coming soon, Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday.

Now it is nearly a month later and there has been no real progress. Critical jobs like Assistant Secretary for Europe, for Africa, for the Near East–and the list is quite long–sit vacant. Nor can Kerry blame the Senate for a slow confirmation process, for there are no nominees. His own web site proudly states that he has logged 41 travel days and now he is off to Stockholm.

Secretary Kerry will travel to Stockholm, Sweden, on May 14, where he will meet with Swedish Prime Minister Reinfeldt and Foreign Minister Bildt to discuss the Arctic Council, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, and other issues of global importance. Secretary Kerry will then travel to Kiruna, Sweden, where he will attend the Arctic Council’s Ministerial Meeting on May 15.

Does this seem essential, compared with filling those vacant jobs? My (unsolicited) advice: stay home and go to the White House. See the National Security Advisor, the Chief of Staff, the Vice President, and the President, and tell them you cannot function without filling those vacant positions. A month ago Kerry said nominations would be coming “soon” but they have not come. It’s time for him to make this–not a discussion of Syria with the Swedes–his top priority.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe, Osanlu revealed that he had fled into Turkey three months ago. He explains that the human rights situation in Iran is getting worse “day by day,” and that his life was threatened.

We were trying to bring unity among various workers groups in order to reach a solidarity society or a workers federation, I had become very active in this since last year and It didn’t remain secret from [authorities] who would send me all kinds of messages and threats,” Osanlu said. “They had told my two bailsmen who had secured my release from prison in 2011 that I should present myself at the prosecutor’s office or at the prison. All of these events in addition to the information I received that there were discussions to kill me, hit me with a car, or do some similar to the chain killings [of intellectuals] — I was also told by friends that it wasn’t right for me to stay in Iran — made me reach the conclusion [that I had to leave].

With elections around the corner in June, repression in Iran has been increasing. That Lech Walesa was able to stay in Poland (like Havel in Czechoslovakia) but Osanlu must flee to save his life is a measure of that repression. The concentration on nuclear negotiations with Iran sometimes obscures that the real problem is not the weapons but the regime itself, and any negotiated deal that makes that regime more secure and extends its life would contribute to repression in Iran and instability in the entire region. In the end Iran’s aggressive support for violence and terror in the Middle East, and indeed well beyond it, will end when the Islamic Republic itself is replaced by a democratic government in Iran.

Russia and the US have agreed to work towards convening an international conference to find a political solution to the conflict in Syria. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State John Kerry announced it would follow on from an Action Group for Syria meeting in Geneva last June. Mr Kerry said they would try to “bring both sides to the table”.

International conference…Geneva…Middle East…Russia…it all brought back memories. Once upon a time, the Carter Administration had the same idea. In 1978 it decided this was the way to move forward in the Middle East. So opposed to this idea were Egypt under Sadat and Israel under Begin that they worked together to thwart it; this was a central factor in Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem to address the Knesset. In particular Sadat feared that Syria, backed by the Russians, would have undue influence at any such conference.

Today’s situation is different in very many ways, yet there is a thread that ties these two efforts together: the foolish American view that the Russians really mean to help. Sadat and Begin doubted it, and they were right. It is difficult to understand why Secretary Kerry thinks Vladimir Putin and we have common interests, because Putin has been arming and supporting the Assad regime. Nor does Syria’s humanitarian crisis appear to move him. And as for the fate of Jordan, a key American strategic interest, Putin no doubt thinks it would be just fine to see Jordan unstable.

This time around, there will be no Begin and Sadat to rescue us from a foolish American diplomatic effort. But the Syrians fighting to overthrow the regime, and the Israeli determination to prevent the current crisis from strengthening Hezbollah, seem likely to have a greater impact on events in Syria than words spoken by American and Russian diplomats. The American position so far appears to be to evade action, using words, red lines, visits to Russia, and next an international conference to provide justifications for doing too little to protect our interests.

And all of this comes in the aftermath of President Obama’s apparent bluff and the disappearing red line. Last January, months before the President made that great error, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz spoke here at the Council on Foreign Relations and had something to say about the subject. Words of wisdom:

When I was in the Marine Corps boot camp, sergeant hands me my rifle. He says, take good care of this rifle; this is your best friend. And remember one thing: never point this rifle at anybody unless you’re willing to pull the trigger. No empty threats.

Now, I told this to President Reagan once. He kind of blanked on it, and I said, Mr. President, we need to be very careful in what we say. Because if we say something is unacceptable, that means there have got to be consequences if it happens. You say something is unacceptable, and it happens and you don’t do anything, nobody pays attention to you anymore.

Vladimir Putin made the American Secretary of State cool his heels for three hours before seeing him. Perhaps there is a connection here.

But the background makes this insult less startling. Kerry was in Moscow to plead for Russian help in sorting out the administration’s terrible dilemma in Syria. President Obama does not wish to intervene but the humanitarian toll–75,000 killed since he said in the summer of 2011 that Assad must go–and the presence of Iranian and Hezbollah forces in Syria make that position increasingly indefensible. We may not want some sort of proxy war in Syria but Iran and Hezbollah do. And their presence has helped attract some 6,000 Sunni jihadis, whose presence destabilizes not only Syria today but potentially several other countries tomorrow.

Faced with this challenge what did Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry do? They asked Putin for help. This is astonishing in itself, for the last four years offer proof that Putin is an enemy of the United States and seeks to weaken us, not to help us. The notion that we have common interests in Syria beggars belief.

There are messages Mr. Kerry might theoretically have delivered that might have elicited a different reaction from Putin. Try this one: “We will not permit a Hezbollah and Iranian victory in Syria and we will not accept Assad’s continuation in power. Nor will we accept a never-ending civil war there that produces a million refugees, whose presence may destabilize Jordan. So we will destroy Assad’s air power and he will lose the war, unless you get him out of there.” That might wake Putin up and maybe he would see American representatives without the humiliating three-hour wait. Today, we look weak and irresolute and he treats us accordingly.

In fact there are roughly 550,000 refugees in Jordan and the number grows by 60,000 a month. Are we prepared to see Jordan destabilized? Are we prepared to see Iranian and Hezbollah expeditionary forces changing the outcome of a conflict in the Middle East?

Perhaps. Nothing we have yet done in Syria really answers that question, although the unwillingness to act suggests that we are, and that the worst outcome the White House can contemplate is action–not defeat.

But defeat is possible. Should Assad stay in power due to Russian and Iranian and Hezbollah support, and should Hezbollah’s domination of Lebanon thereby be solidified, and should our long-time ally Jordan be destabilized by the presence of three-quarters of a million or a million Syrian refugees, we will have been defeated and our position in the Middle East dealt an historic setback. Any hope of a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis would be gone. The alliance system we have built up in the Gulf would be shredded because our own credibility would be gone.

This is what is at stake in Syria. The picture of an American secretary of state hanging around for three hours, desperate to see Putin and seek his help, is pathetic–and suggests a profound misjudgment of Putin (who has nothing but contempt for weakness) and of Russian policy. There is little room for pity in the international politics of the Middle East: the strong prevail and the weak suffer. Our allies have believed we were the strong party, but must now doubt our will. The Israelis know that there is no substitute for power and the will to use it, so they are giving demonstrations in Syria of their own policy–in the absence of any American determination to prevail.

This is a situation fraught with danger for American allies and American national interests. Appealing to Russia for help is the true measure of this administration’s failures.

Consider the humanitarian issue, now with an estimated 75,000 dead and 4 million displaced. According to a New York Times story, at a meeting last summer an Obama administration official asked “If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

As I note in the Weekly Standard:

How soon they forget. According to the Times that line was uttered last August, not quite four months after Mr. Obama established his “Atrocities Prevention Board.” In a speech on April 23, 2012 he said this at the Holocaust Museum:

And finally, “never again” is a challenge to nations.  It’s a bitter truth — too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale.  And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save.

Four months to go from there to “If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

They are in Syria already, as press reports have stated–and as funerals of Hezbollah soldiers in Syria confirm. The American reaction has been weak, and certainly has not been strong enough to deter either party, Hezbollah or Iran, from sending more fighters to help save Assad.

As I argue in National Review, loose tough rhetoric is not the answer, for no one wants the President to bluff. Nor can he act if the facts do not support claims he is making. But the facts regarding Syria include, now, 75,000 dead, 4 million displaced, 515,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan (and growing by 60,000 per month), two uses of chemical weapons, the presence in Syria of roughly 5,000 jihadis, and the presence there of Iranian IRGC and Hezbollah soldiers.

The American response, two years into this war, has been pathetic: humanitarian aid went largely through the Assad government until just weeks ago, non-lethal aid has just started arriving, and lethal aid has been ruled out until now. The administration is said to be considering it. And what if Hezbollah and Iran see us and raise us, increasing the number of their fighters in Syria? The President said two years ago that Assad must go, and he said it again yesterday. It always weakens a president, and weakens the United States,when such talk is not matched by a policy that will achieve the stated goal. As I argue more fully in National Review, it is long past time for the President–who has previously rejected proposals from his top advisers for more vigorous action– to adopt and to implement a determined policy that will bring Assad down.

It is certainly wise to look closely at the evidence, for intelligence can be and often has proved to be wrong. But the refusal of the intelligence community (IC) to state a conclusion with absolute certainty cannot always be the best guide to action–or inaction. In the case of the Syrian nuclear reactor discovered by Israel in 2007, the IC told the president that it had “low confidence” that reactor was part of a nuclear weapons program. Why? The reactor was not connected to Syria’s electric grid, so it was obviously not meant to produce electricity. What else could it be? The IC said they could not find, yet anyway, the rest of the program: efforts to build a warhead, for example. Thus the “low confidence” judgment. When asked what they thought the reactor was, they would say “part of a nuclear weapons program.” That was the only logical conclusion. But they could not say it as an official assessment. Once burnt in Iraq, twice shy. That was one reason President Bush did not act against that reactor, leaving any action to the Israelis–who fortunately destroyed it.

The problem today is not only that this may leave Assad free to use chemical weapons again. A related issue of great consequence is what the administration has said about the use of chemical weapons: that it would be a game changer, that it is a red line, that it is unacceptable, and that all options are on the table for a U.S. response. Sound familiar? The administration has used exactly such language–”unacceptable,” “all options are on the table”– about the Iranian nuclear program. If such terms become synonyms for “we will not act,” the regime in Tehran will soon conclude that there is no danger of an American military attack and therefore no need to negotiate seriously. They may have reached that conclusion already. What is at stake here is not only the future of Syria, but our own government’s credibility. In March 2012 the President said “as president of the United States, I don’t bluff.” Let’s hope not, but that’s the way it begins to appear in Syria.

A small side note: in discussing this issue, Secretary of Defense Hagel said this week “As to a red line, my role as secretary of defense is to give the president options on a policy issue. That’s a policy issue. And we’ll be prepared to do that at such time as the president requires options.” This echoes a position Mr. Hagel offered during his nomination hearings, that as secretary of defense he “won’t be in a policy-making position.” Former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird eviscerated that view in a Wall Street Journal article, and many people thought Mr. Hagel had just misspoken. But apparently he continues to view his job this way. That’s wrong, and confuses the role of the uniformed military–say, that of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs–and of the IC with that of SecDef, a key Cabinet post. Harking back to Bush administration discussions of the Syrian reactor and what to do about it, DNI McConnell, DCI Hayden, and CJCS Pace were careful to offer professional and technical advice about the options presented and not to stray into policy areas. But Secretary of Defense Gates rightly did offer policy advice, which the President rightly sought from him. I disagreed with that advice and might disagree with Hagel’s, but our system will not work if secretary of defense is viewed as or turned into a technocratic position. There’s a reason there is a high position called Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Mr. Hagel ought to reflect on that.

I am willing to bet that a White House statement is released noting our close relationship, our friendship, Qatar’s hosting of al-Udeid air base, the World Cup, and Qatar’s helpful role in many regional crises.

Such an anodyne or positive statement is predictable and I would not be worried about it if I could be sure the President and his staff know better. If they are being diplomatic in public but tougher-minded in private, that would be easy to defend. If it’s all a love fest in private as well, that’s indefensible.

For one thing, Qatar is no model of human rights, much less democracy. The State Department’s last annual report on the country says this: “The principal human rights problems were the inability of citizens to change their government peacefully, restriction of fundamental civil liberties, and pervasive denial of expatriate workers’ rights. The monarch-appointed government prohibited organized political parties and restricted civil liberties, including freedoms of speech, press, and assembly and access to a fair trial for persons held under the Protection of Society Law and Combating Terrorism Law.” Human Rights Watch notes that “forced labor and human trafficking are serious problems. The government has failed to address shortcomings in the legal and regulatory framework despite the initiation of many large-scale projects in preparation for Qatar hosting the World Cup in 2022.”

The Obama administration has never seemed keen on raising such human rights issues, so let’s turn to realpolitik.

First comes Al-Jazeera’s reporting. The station is not independent: it is owned by the Emir and reflects Qatari foreign policy, for example in the criticism of Israel, the support of the government of Bahrain, the lack of criticism of anything that happens in Qatar at all–and a persistent anti-U.S. coloration. This was at its worst during the Iraq war, when Al-Jazeera’s biased coverage incited and rewarded violence. For example, a BBC report from 2003 stated that “UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed ‘horror’ at the broadcast of pictures believed to show two dead British soldiers. The Commander of the UK forces in the Gulf, Air Marshall Brian Burridge condemned al-Jazeera’s broadcasts as ‘deplorable’ and a ‘flagrant breach’ of the Geneva Convention. He also warned journalists not to become part of the ‘Iraqi propaganda machine.’ Al-Jazeera drew criticism from the US for broadcasting footage of killed and captured American soldiers.”

Water over the dam, perhaps, so let’s turn to more recent Qatari foreign policy.

Qatar’s cash for extremists and terrorists is the main problem. An article in the Economist noted “Al Jazeera’s breathless boosting of Qatari-backed rebel fighters in Libya and Syria, and of the Qatar-aligned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt….” Who is Qatar backing? In Syria, “the arms shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists,” said the New York Times late last year. The result: “The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” the Times quotes an American official.

Qatar supports the Muslim Brotherhood, including its terrorist Palestinian branch Hamas–and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal now lives in Doha. Qatar has never been generous to the Palestinian Authority; Hamas appears to be the horse it is riding. Last year, the Emir became the first head of state to visit Gaza since Hamas took it over in 2007–and while there promised $400 million in aid.

In January I noted in a post entitled “Qatar in Mali: Which Side Are They On?“ that the French weekly Le Canard Enchaine reported on Qatari support for the radical Tuareg rebels of the MNLA, Ansar Eddine, AQIM, and Mujao. A report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) states that “Since Qadhafi’s death, some Libyans and regional commentators have criticized what they view as selective Qatari support for militias and political forces, particularly Islamist groups affiliated with the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change.” This is no small problem because the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change is a new name for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

Qatar hosts, and Al-Jazeera broadcasts, Yusef al Qaradawi, a radical cleric whose views (quoting the CRS report) include “the conditional legitimacy of suicide bombing” and who works closely with an organization called “The Union of Good” that in 2008 was designated by the United States as a supporter of terrorism.

It all adds up to a foreign policy very largely at odds with U.S. interests, not only supporting  the Muslim Brotherhood but going well beyond that to support terrorist and extremist groups and justifications for terrorism. Whatever is said in public, that should be the real subject of the discussions with the Emir when he visits the White House tomorrow.