… this is a pretty good list of folks to be condemned by:

Russia, Syria, Iran, the Arab League and Hezbollah condemned Israel for an alleged airstrike in Syria, calling it an act of aggression.

A day after Israel allegedly attacked a convoy in Syria allegedly carrying advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, Jerusalem refused to comment.

[…]

Citing sources, the Saudi al-Watan newspaper reported the Syrian regime has already transferred non-conventional weapons to Hezbollah. The report said President Bashar Assad’s regime has been transferring weapons to Hezbollah since the beginning of last year, including two tons of mustard gas and long-range missiles capable of carrying chemical warheads.

U.S. officials told The New York Times Jerusalem notified Washington about the attack, which Damascus called an act of “Israeli arrogance and aggression.” The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times quoted Western officials briefed on the raid as saying the truck convoy carried Russian-made-SA-17 missiles for the militia wing of Hezbollah.

[…]

Hezbollah called the attack “barbaric,” the The (Beirut) Daily Star said.

Samuel Moyn had a piece on human rights in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, in which he argued that the idea of human rights has lost the power it had when it was new (which, for Moyn, was the 1970s rather than the 1940s):

That human rights have come down to earth since the days of the glamorous dissidents doesn’t make them useless. But it does mean that the utopia they call to mind is now inseparable from the realities of the world as it exists — from states to international bodies to transnational movements.

In making his case, he compares the experiences of Russian dissidents Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng and his conclusion is that a rising China means that Chinese dissidents will have less leverage today than Russian dissidents had in the 1970s.

That’s all well and good, I suppose, but the real issue I have with Moyn’s piece is that he uses this argument about dissidents as a jumping off point for a much broader critique of the idea of human rights and states’ interests. Or at least I suspect that Moyn’s point is to make a broad critique. What he ends up arguing, I think, lacks any real force:

Human rights have succeeded in combating totalitarianism and preventing atrocities but have proved less able to promote the good life for people suffering less spectacular wrongs.

As a scholar of human rights, as well as an advocate of their general diffusion around the world, I’ll take this sort of criticism any day. What Moyn is saying is that the idea of human rights has succeeded in combating totalitarianism and preventing atrocities. He just thinks that the idea of human rights hasn’t done more than that. But this success, in itself, is pretty spectacular … especially if, like Moyn, you happen to believe that the idea of human rights really came into its own in the 1970s (in other words, well within the lifetimes of many people who will read this blog post).

Let’s also note that promotion of “the good life” is quite controversial. In other words, if the idea of human rights also managed to promote some version of the good life all over the world, some would certainly consider it a triumph but others would call it unbridled Western imperialism. It’s more difficult to level that charge — though many still do so — when the language of human rights is used to oppose totalitarian regimes and major atrocities.

In this sense, I’d argue that Moyn’s criticism is misguided. The idea of human rights has, by his own admission, done some pretty impressive work in a relatively short period of time. That it hasn’t yet done even more seems like saying, “This camera is pretty great at taking photographs, but the technology is limited if it can’t make phone calls.”

Cameras didn’t make phone calls twenty years ago, but some of them — like the one embedded in my iPhone — do exactly that today. The same might be true of the ability of human rights language to promote some vision of the good life for everyone. Or maybe not. We might decide, for a whole variety of reasons, that the main purpose of human rights language should be preventative of some bad things rather than promotional of some good things. That wouldn’t mean cameras that don’t make phone calls are bad cameras.

In a new effort to halt more than a year of bloodshed in Syria, President Obama will push for the departure of President Bashar al-Assad under a proposal modeled on the transition in another strife-torn Arab country, Yemen.

The plan calls for a negotiated political settlement that would satisfy Syrian opposition groups but that could leave remnants of Mr. Assad’s government in place.

[…]

The success of the plan hinges on Russia, one of Mr. Assad’s staunchest allies, which has strongly opposed his removal.

In the past year, Russia has blocked any tough United Nations Security Council action against Mr. Assad, arguing that it could lead to his forced ouster and the kind of fates suffered by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, who was killed, or Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who was imprisoned and put on trial. But Russia is facing intense international pressure to use its influence to bring about the removal of Mr. Assad as the killings in Syria continue unabated, including the massacre of more than 90 people in a village near Homs that was reported by United Nations officials on Saturday.

[…]

When Mr. Obama brought it up with Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia at the Group of 8 meeting at Camp David last weekend, Mr. Medvedev appeared receptive, American officials said, signaling that Russia would prefer that option to other transitions in the Arab upheaval. During the meeting, “Medvedev raised the example of Mubarak in a cage,” a senior official said, referring to Mr. Mubarak’s confinement at his trial. The official, who requested anonymity because of the delicacy of the discussions, said Mr. Obama had then “countered with Yemen, and the indication was, yes, this was something we could talk about.”

There are several fascinating lessons emerging from what I hope is the beginning of the end of the Assad regime in Syria:

1. Not even the most strident isolationist wants to talk about leaving people to solve problems with their government all by themselves in the wake of a massacre of children;
2. Russia is far more concerned about the fate of its client autocrats than about the fate of people in the client countries;
3. One of the bigger barriers to removing Assad, even as he commits the most monstrous crimes, seems to be the notion that he might somehow be held accountable for those crimes.

These lessons shouldn’t be all that surprising … but the third is especially disconcerting for those who think that transitional justice efforts might someday lessen impunity. Given the nature of the UN — and of the Security Council, in particular — one has to wonder whether the tough cases, the ones in which other states have more than just a passing interest, will always be stuck as Syria is today, between the Scylla of ending atrocity and the Charybdis of ending impunity.

Our hearts understandably thrill to the courage of those who stand up to power — from Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square and all the streets that now teem with the young and freedom-hungry. But there is another heroism, scarce and undervalued, that accrues to those who know how to stand down.

What Gorbachev and de Klerk did was not always pretty, and neither man is much celebrated in his own country these days. But each relinquished the power of an abusive elite without subjecting his country to a civil bloodbath. Afterward, they did not flee to the comfort of Swiss bank accounts. On the contrary, they managed a feat that is almost unthinkable in most of today’s erupting autocracies: after succumbing to democracy, they contributed to its legitimacy by becoming candidates for high office — and losing, fair and square. De Klerk, the last white president of a South Africa that oppressed blacks for centuries, actually pressed the flesh and pleaded for votes in black townships, professing a kind of civic kinship I think he genuinely felt. De Klerk and Gorbachev were triumphant partners in their own defeats, and thus in their countries’ victories.

As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, “At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.”

I’m not this kind of political scientist — you know, the kind that speaks authoritatively about climate change as though I had been trained in a hard science rather than a social science.

But maybe — just maybe — he was trained in spotting the effects of secret weapons? No, wait, we don’t do that in political science either.

Maybe we should…

On the plus side, at least someone trained the Russian political scientist in question to back away from his unsubstantiated claims when interviewed about them:

“First of all, I would like to say that what I wrote in that article, even the citations, does not in any way claim to a be final truth. It is, if you will, speculation, in other words, the definition of an hypothesis,” Areshev said.

Having said all of that, the single best line in the entire article has to be: “The Pentagon was not immediately reachable for comment.”