That's because of the Security Council and their Veto power.

As an outsider, I only need to say two things
a) US reputation has reached bottom zero when Bush Jr was in power. Obama brings credibility to the Europeans ( I believe there was a stat that verified how more influencial Obama was in Europe rather than in the US.)
b) Imagine if Sarah Palin was president mwahahahahah. the fact that you bring to the fore such personalities supports people's belief that USA is a country run by corporations, puppets and incapable of sound judgement.

The problem with the UN is not that everyone in it lacks guts, it is as Halt said because of the fact that nothing can happen in the security council unless both China and Russia approve it. Another related problem is that the only body of the UN that has any power is the Security council. If someone had decided to actually give the GA (general assembly) any sort of power then the problem of the UN never acting would not be as bad as it is. There are some other committees that decide how the UN will spend its money, so they do have some power, but not a lot.

There are many problems with the UN, too many to go into, and far too many to make it worthwhile. The body should be dissolved. It's a feckless boondoggle, conveniently funded by US taxpayers even though the body has contempt for the hand the feeds them. There's no way that the general assembly will be given any real power, and that's probably a good thing, given what they would do with it. These are the morons that put Libya and Iran on the human rights counsel. They'd probably nominate Sudan to serve as chair of a committee on human trafficking. Now, the security counsel while frustrating, is the only real power there, which begs the question of why France is on it, but I digress. But as it relates to Syria, Russia is going to use it's veto power to protect Syria. And THAT is where Obama is an idiot. The solution to Syria MUST include Russia. Syria is a Russian client state, and you cannot just wade in there lobbing cruise missiles and other dipshit sabre rattling like Obama has. If he had half a clue, he would had talks with Putin about how to deal with the situation. But Obama has his own insane agenda, and completely dismissed Putin as a possible solution UNTIL Putin stepped in and made him look like a corrupt community organizer from Chicago.

It's interesting the Cypeg suggests that the US reputation was zero. That may be to the 'outsider' or to the European socialists masses, who are mired in some dope influenced vision of peace, love, and understanding, but it was not an accurate assessment of the man, or how the world powers saw the USA. And while everyone's entitled to their opinion, I can guarantee you that Vladimir Putin's opinion of Bush vs. Obama is quite different than Cypeg's, and that he's not naïve enough to believe to nonsense spin that CNN and the BBC spill about Bush being a fool. Bush didn't get pushed around by anyone, whereas he can dance circles around Obama. It's all a question of whether you respect/fear strength or weakness. It's amusing to hear the coffee sipping Eurotrash types spout off about the type of man that keeps them safe and free to do so, while they praise the man that would take it all away if he could get his way. It's also amusing to hear a Greek lecture on the incapabilities of sound government, because Greece has it's shit so together, right?

Cypeg, how is Sarah Palin any less experienced than Barak Obama? She wasn't at all. While perhaps not a good choice for president, she was better equipped than Obama. For that matter she was less of a quack than Joe Biden, the guy holding the office she ran for. I guess it's difficult to perceive that when the press runs 24 hour character assassination hit pieces on her, and cover the tracks of Obama left and right.

First of, I agree with your assessement that Obama rushed into backing the anti-Assad movement and his threat seems like a bad poker to me.
about candidates.
I can only judge of what I read and hear on tv, speeches, press conferences, interviews, usually about foreign policy, and to a lesser extent national policy (education, health).
For people in Europe Obama scores high because he presents an image of a good politician, sound, perhaps the best talker for some time, and knowledgeable. Now I know this is the image he/they project, but damn, Obama projects the best image I have ever seen.
on the contrary when you hear Palin talk (interview, movie) i.e her famous explaining why Alaska's proximity to Russia gives her foreign policy experience, then you can guess why europeans favour democrats. Ofcourse that goes back to Kennedy however we are talking about average educated people.
Probably the truth lies in the middle that anyone is good for office since they are backed by armies of advisors and companies. So in the end is what they say and how they say it that wins votes.

I didn't see G-Man's comment until now, but after reading it I completely agree with him.

Just met this info, though this subject seems ton to be fashion anymore, I wanted to share this, I'm not so confident of the source, so you might want to verify the info:

Sirian women have the same rights to study, health and education than sirian men. They don't need to wear Burka.
Sharia (islamic law) is unconstitutional in Siria. Siria is the only arab country with secular constitution, it does not tolerate islamic extremism.
10% of the sirian population is christian (in other arab countries it's 1%, due to dissadventages christianity means), it's a country open to western society and culture, with an important religious tolerance. It's, for instance, the only country in the world which has admitted iraki refugees with no discrimination of any kind.
Before 2011, Siria was a pacific country with no war nor internal conflict (Bashar al Assad, might well have much more approval than big media make us believe).
It's the only arab country with no debt to IMF. Siria has a reserve of 2.500 millions of petroleum barrels, which belongs to the state, and the state doesn't want to privatize it.

On a related note, I recently found this words by Wesley Clark, which make me think more and more as time goes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqTGgrFwd1E

No Cool boy, everyone here is not a bunch of jingoists. The norm seem to be closer to a bunch of pacifist pussies who believe that the human race has evolved beyond war, and learned to love each other like the planet is one big Crosby Stills and Nash concert. It's not. The world is a harsh, mean, nasty evil place, populated by people that hat each other and have for thousands of years over causes that they no longer really understand. And you don't stay alive in such a place by being an idiot or a pussy. As unpopular as it may be with you college pukes and utopian dreamers that fact is that there are millions of mean evil people out there trying to kill you. And they don't understand diplomacy (much less Diplomacy). They understand strength and weakness. The respect and fear the former, and have nothing but contempt for the latter. The only language they pay a mind to is a foot up their ass. And in that way the world is very much like a Diplomacy game. You should know this very well by now, as a frequent recipient of the Thom Mcan enema.

And for the record your assessment of my understanding of Diplomacy is as naïve as it is on most things, most notably the effort hat you actually put into a game. But for argument's sake is there something wrong with playing to win? I guess you've grown up in the everyone get's a trophy generation, so it's not really your fault.

Millions of people, Ruffhaus. Since you didn't put tens or hundreds before it, I'll assume you meant single digits, so that's 1 or less percent of humanity. We can kill that 1% and the other 99 live in peace. Hurray.

@Ruffhaus, did I say something about you Diplomacy understanding? err, I vaguely remember to have made a joking comment about someone's Diplomacy understanding. Well, maybe I should apologize and stress that if I did say something, that was just a joke.

Caliburdeath, not as easy as it sounds, especially when some of those people are officials.
Equator, he was talking to general cool, hence the 'cool boy' reference. There was a comment way up in the forum by G. Cool

@Ruffhaus What makes you so certain that millions of people want to kill G. Cool? Why would they want to kill him specifically?

@Scordatura,
It is not just G.Cool it is anybody with Western ideology. It is like a line from Terminator, you cannot reason, negotiate, plead, beg with these extremists, they just want you dead and their ideology to prevail. There is only one thing you can do with these kinds of people, however, our liberal state of policy is not to do what it takes to make it safe for future gernerations. Our policy now is to appease and in some cases, like Egypt, help put in extremists like the Muslim Brotherhood into power. And what happened right away, Christians were targeted almost immediately.

So Ruffhaus is right, they want all of us dead and until you can understand their evil you will not understand what Ruffhaus is talking about, it is time to drop your latte and put your game face on.

@DEFIANT, we did not help to put extremist Muslims in power in Egypt, we helped to put a democracy in place.

What was the result Lord Skyblade, we knew who was going to take power in the general election, that was no secret. Either our Administration is extremely naive and stupid or incompetent if they didn't see this one coming. I think they knew exatly what was going to happen.
And the same think would happen if we hit Assad, as horrible as he his, the ones in the wings,waiting for power, are even less sympathic to our ideals.

Meh, Russia and US might be playing good cop bad cop. Komrade, give me the chemicals and I will keep the US from kicking you out.

Anyway, my thoughts on Syria are that if we don't do something, they'll hate us. If we do something, they'll hate us even more, and I'm ok with that.

Scordatura, your response pretty much above answers the questions you were asking me earlier. I appears that you already know the answer, so I'll assume that the questions were rhetorical. It doesn't matter which side we back, those left standing are going to hate us, but not more than they hate the Jews. First things first after all.

That's an interesting suggestion that Russia and the USA have been playing good cop bad cop with Assad, and if only that were true, it would be pretty impressive. That may in the end be what went down, but I don't think that Obama had anything to do with it. Obama wants Assad toppled, and has been at it for a couple of years now. Putin very much does not want this. This leads me to doubt that there was any real cooperation going on. I see it as diplomatic coup by Russia.

Acquiring the chemical weapons would be a huge step, but giving them to Putin could be a disaster. These things need to be destroyed along with the WMDs from Iraq that are in Syria somewhere. Could Putin be trusted to do this? Maybe, but he might just ship them right back to Syria after the dust clears. Or he might keep them for his own. That would certainly taint his recently blossoming image, but it's not like this guy is Winnie the Pooh. He's a ruthless killer.

In the end though Scuba Steve is on to something here. If the end result is that some variation of good cop bad cop gets the weapons destroyed - even one that was backed into by blundering Barry - then it's a great accomplishment, and doling out credit for it is secondary.

I agree with Ruffhaus that if we do get these chem. weapons destroyed it was worth it. However, that said, I don't think this was by design, Obama fell into it. He got schooled in diplomacy by Putin and is just happy to have it end where he doesn't look like the bumbling fool that he is.

I don't have much faith that those weapons will be destoyed, it is not due until mid next year, by then a thousand things will happen and this will be forgotton.

I also caught the statement of the weapons coming from Iraq and I agree, there were images of large semi's crossing the bordering from Iraq to Syria and I am sure they weren't carrying milk.

If Obama really wanted Assad toppled and was just using the chemical weapons as an excuse to do it he would have been doing a a lot more before now. There have been many opportunities for him to help the rebels more than he has done and he has not taken those opportunities.

What rebels, Lord Skyblade, the most powerful of the rebels is Al Queda linked, and the one "Syrian Freedom Brigade" who is supposed to more sympathetic to us just isn't big enough. This conflict was best if left alone, but not the dipshit Obama, you crossed that red line, then it wasn't his red line it was the international red line. What a clown.

Getting rid of the chemical weapons is not the goal, well it is NOW, now that Obama stuck his foot in his mouth and made this the new goal that he is stuck with. Siding with the rebels is now (assuming the chemical weapons are destroyed that is) out of the question, a punitive attack is now out of the question, simply doing nothing is all we can do now.
Not that I have a big problem with doing nothing, this is a civil war with two sides we do not care for, involvement is foolish! But to try and score this as any sort of win for Obama is nothing more than partisan politics, as others have already said ...He got Schooled!

Skyblade.... Obama has taken those opportunities. He's has been backing the rebel's attempt to overthrow of Assad for over a year now. The attacks in Benghazi were a result of a botched policy to sell arms to the opposition groups, but he miscalculated which groups had the real power, and four American lost their lives for it while he refused to help them because he was covering his tracks. His administration has been covertly helping the rebels, to little real effect, which is why he started sabre rattling to even less effect.

Tommy is right, ironically somehow we wound up doing nothing overt, which was the correct response. It's a civil war between a led by a totalitarian thug running a Russian client state and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. There are no good guys in this. There are innocent victims who will be slaughtered in the crossfire, but to pretend that the world cares about innocent victims is laughable. And short of a real revolution in Syria the only practical way to unseat Assad is to go in on the ground, which is simply not going to happen (thankfully).

Tommy is also right that "Getting rid of the chemical weapons is not the goal". While it *should* be, that's just the excuse being used to topple Assad, and play kingmaker in Syria. Besides if they actually get the chemical weapons they might wind up with some of the Iraqi WMDs and the whole narrative about how stupid George Bush was starts to fall apart....

The US playing kingmaker in the past seems to have worked out pretty well, but only when we had the populace completely under our thumb by using force.

No, it has not worked well Scodatura. And getting rid of chemical weapons is not an excuse to get rid of Assad, look at what happened, Assad is still in power, but his chemical weapons will hopefully be gone some time soon.

@equator....Syria is ruled by a dictatorial junta made up entirely of a semi-Shiite religious minority in a country which is overwhelmingly Sunni. Of course, they are going to have a "Constitution" which embraces "secularism". Saddam's Sunni minority regime probably had a "Constitution" which included word for word similarities with Syria's current on.

@cypeg....Just to offer you a little insight into American political dynamics, the corporations supported Obama in his election against McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. Corporations and the Ivy League technocrats that run them would be personally uncomfortable around someone like Sarah Palin for a variety of cultural reasons. The idea that Sarah Palin existing is a sign that corporations run America is a little humorous for its oddness. Sarah Palin's career as governor of Alaska was largely characterized by her very testy relationship with the Exxon Mobil corporation and her basically protectionist policies related to Natural Gas.

I would contend that Sarkozy replacing Chirac probably has more to do with the differing french behavior than Obama replacing Bush. Hollande seems to be following Sarkozy's precedent in foreign policy given his preoccupation with domestic issues. Let us also remember that the Saudis want the Ba'athists in Syria gone....far more than they wanted Saddam gone.

@Skyblade want some prime examples of the US playing kingmaker? Look at Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Dominican Republic, Israel, Germany... All results of wars that we ended up winning.

@Scodatura, I'm not sure what you mean by "worked out well". Because most of those "worked out well" in the sense that the people who the US wanted to be in control got to be in control. However, in most of those examples, it did not work out well in any other sense. Isreal, for example, caused many problems in the Middle East, cause the US to be hated many Muslim countries, and caused the Israeli-Palestinean conflict, which is extremely hard/impossible to fix. South Korea, well, we got South Korea to be democratic, but the war we started still hasn't technically ended, so I'm not sure how well that worked for the US. The Phillipeans and the Dominican Republic are probably worse off because of US kingmaking, so I would hesitate to use those as examples of US kingmaking working well. However, your examples of Germany and Japan are good examples of US kingmaking working well. So two out of 6... Also, US kingmaking in Iraq completely failed, US kingmaking in Vietnam was mostly a failure, though it did possibly stop the rest of Southeast Asia from turning communist, but you can't know for sure what would have happened to those countries if the US had stayed out of Vietnam.