Syrian Peace Talks Open With Vitriol, as Official Rails at Rebels
By Michael R. Gordon and Anne Barnard, New York Times, Jan. 22/23, 2014

The sense that the talks were headed for trouble was compounded when the proceedings ended without any hint of progress toward imposing local cease-fires or opening humanitarian corridors.

[....] Putting the best face on the meeting, Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters on Wednesday night that it was significant that senior diplomats from 40 countries and organizations had gathered in the lakeside Swiss city of Montreux, to initiate the conference. Mr. Kerry insisted that he had always known that the talks would be “tough” and described the conference as a “process,” which he implied could last for months or even years [....]

More from Remnick @ New Yorker's News Desk, a piece on the outtakes from the article: The Obama Tapes, Jan. 23. Here is the part on foreign policy:

Obama spoke about the need to acknowledge the history of American foreign policy, its successes but also its misadventures and even disasters. Here is an even fuller version of the answer I quoted in the piece:

“My working premise, what I believe in my gut, is that America has been an enormous force for good in the world, and that if you look at the ledger and you say, What have we gotten right and what have we gotten wrong, on balance, we have helped to promote greater freedom and greater prosperity for more people, and been willing, as I think I said to you earlier, to advance causes even if they weren’t in our narrow self-interest in a way that you’ve never seen any dominant power do in the history of the world.

“And so, to apologize for certain historic events out of context, I think, wouldn’t be telling an accurate story. On the other hand, I do think that part of effective diplomacy, part of America maintaining its influence in a world in which we remain the one indispensable power, but in which you’ve got a much more multipolar environment, is for other people to know that we understand their stories as well, and that we can see how they have come to certain conclusions or understandings about their history, their economies, the conflicts they’ve suffered. Because, if they think we understand their frame of reference, then they’re more likely to listen to us and to work with us.

“So for me to acknowledge the fact that we were involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran is not to pick at an old scab or to do a bunch of Monday-morning quarterbacking. It’s to say to the Iranian people, We understand why you might have some suspicions about us; we’ve got some suspicions about you because you have held our folks hostage and murdered our people and threatened our allies. So, now that we understand each other, can we do business?

“That, I think, is useful and important precisely because we are far and away the most powerful country in the world. And, having lived overseas, the one thing I know is how much the world admires America, but also how much the world thinks America has no clue as to what’s going on outside our borders.”

Later, he added, “Now, if other countries don’t think we see them or know them or understand them, then they may grudgingly coöperate with us where they have to, because it’s in their self-interest, but, at the margins—where we need them to participate in Iran’s sanctions, or we need them to work with us around a non-proliferation agenda—a population that thinks we hear them, we understand their history, is more likely to support their leaders when they work with us. That’s part of exercising effective power in the world.”

I asked Obama if he would say he was the first President to acknowledge these historical events in the way that he does.

“I think, if you look at Kennedy’s best speeches, the notion that we are connected with folks around the world, and that we lead not simply by the force of arms but because of values and ideals, and that we have to uphold them, is part of what made Kennedy an inspiration not just in this country but around the world,” Obama said. “And he may not have spoken about certain specifics in the same way, but partly that’s because he lived in a more innocent time, in some ways.

“When I make a speech now, it is broadcast around the world in an instant, and there are entire blogs devoted to picking apart every factual assertion that is being made, and people expect a level of accuracy and understanding that wouldn’t have been the case in 1961 or ’62.”

Syria: some reasons why it's not a "best left alone to sort itself out" situation:

Syria’s Polio Epidemic: The Suppressed Truth
Annie Sparrow, New York Review of Books, Feb. 20 issue and online now:

One way to measure the horrific suffering of Syria’s increasingly violent war is through the experience of Syrian children. More than one million children are now refugees. At least 11,500 have been killed because of the armed conflict,¹ well over half of these because of the direct bombing of schools, homes, and health centers, and roughly 1,500 have been executed, shot by snipers or tortured to death. At least 128 were killed in the chemical massacre in August.

In the midst of all this violence, it is easy to miss the health catastrophe that has also struck Syrian children, who must cope with war trauma, malnutrition, and stunted growth alongside collapsing sanitation and living conditions. Syria has become a cauldron of once-rare infectious diseases, with hundreds of cases of measles each month and outbreaks of typhoid, hepatitis, and dysentery. Tuberculosis, diphtheria, and whooping cough are all on the rise. Upward of 100,000 children are stigmatized by leishmaniasis, a hideous parasitic skin disease that flourishes in war. Many of these diseases have already traveled beyond Syria’s borders, carried by millions of refugees. Five million more children have been forced out of their homes but are still living within Syria, increasingly vulnerable to early marriage, trafficking, and recruitment as child soldiers.

And now polio is back [....]

In Beijing, Secretary of State John Kerry said President Obama had asked aides to develop new policy options on Syria, but he did not say what options were under consideration or whether the president had established a deadline for delivering them. Diplomats here said the administration might consider stepping up an existing covert program to train and arm the moderate Syrian opposition or even weigh the threat of military force to compel the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The senior official declined to say whether a policy shift was underway, saying options were always being reviewed. But in impassioned language, Mr. Kerry noted that since October, when the Security Council issued a nonbinding request for all sides to facilitate aid delivery, the crisis has worsened sharply. The number of Syrians in need of assistance has risen by one-third to 9.3 million. The number displaced outside the country increased by nearly 20 percent to 2.5 million, and inside the country by 50 percent to 6.5 million.

“This is grotesque,” he said, “and the world needs to take note and figure out what the appropriate response is.”

From

Deadlock Remains and Aid Crisis Mounts as 2nd Round of Syria Talks Nears End
By Anne Barnard, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2014