The Arab League Observer Mission is a Farce

I don't know much about "observing" a slaughter as it is happening.  I think I would at the very least like to have a pen and a clip board with me; perhaps a camera might come in handy to document what I saw.  And, as a supposed impartial arbiter of what is happening,  I would tell my government minders to fuck off so I can "observe" what is happening from the other side.  Serious observers would be on the ground with helmets an flack jackets not ridiculous orange vests like construction workers.  That latter detail is perhaps telling; the regime knows with certainty that no one will shoot at the observers.  This is not a war zone they are entering, it is a one-sided massacre implemented by a murderous regime.  The observers in the second video, including  the head of the mission, the Sudanese general Mohammad al-Dabi seem unaffected by the heart-breaking pleas of a local man asking them to come into their neighborhood.  The government minder brushes off the man's pleas without any objection from the observers.  There might be a reason why general al-Dabi seemed unfazed by what he saw. He knows a thing or two about waging war against your  own people and the utility of thugs like the Shabbiha to do your dirty work.  Or perhaps it is that the AL observers, while being entertained by the government in Damascus for two days before they managed to make it to Homs, have fully imbibed the regime's narrative and have already made up their minds. I thought the AL had finally made itself relevant by agreeing to send observers to Syria.  I was wrong, it is the same shamefully incompetent and irrelevant body.

Tomorrow, the tanks will be back in Homs and the observers will have moved on to Hama for another few hours of useless observation.  If the observers continues to willingly play the cat and mouse game of the regime, their mission will not only be useless, their inaction will be tantamount to complicity in the ongoing murder of innocent, unarmed civilians.