Kofi Annan, the ever-willing Illusionist, aided and abetted by the permanent members of the U. N. Security Council, has offered us one more castle in the sky at the Geneva Summit on Syria, on June 30, 2012.  The Summit was attended by the Permanent Members of the Security Council plus Turkey, Qatar, Iraq, and Kuwait. Iran was absent due to vehement U.S. objections, and presumably Saudi Arabia was not invited to balance the scorecard with the Russians.

Oh, and neither Syrian government officials nor the Syrian opposition attended.

The Superintendent of U.N. Properties, Ban Ki-moon, graciously made the facilities of the United Nations in Geneva available for the meeting.

What was the outcome?

Unanimity!

Unanimity was achieved again, as if on the proposition that all points on a circle are equidistant from the center!

Not to quarrel, the question of whether Bashar Al-Assad must leave power as part of the transitional government arrangements originally envisaged by The Illusionist, was left up in the air.

And fittingly so, since all of the pieces of this most beautiful palace in the sky are present and floating and circling above the world, like a pile of bricks in a land where there are no bricklayers and there is no mortar.

In its inner chambers, the new palace contains all the elements of the previous ones, including each and every one of Kofi Annan’s six points, informally endorsed by the Security Council first in its Presidential Statement on March 21, 2012 (which had no legal force), formally adopted by the Security Council in Resolution 2042 on April 14, and then once again reiterated in Resolution 2043, with the further adornment of some 300 unarmed monitors to observe compliance with the cessation of hostilities and other components of the 6-point plan, on April 21.

Like Russian dolls, each of the previous palaces contains within it the palace built before, and the one before that, and so on.

With this marvelous design, unity has been preserved–which is perhaps the greatest achievement of the summit.

All are agreed: All points on the circle are indeed equidistant from the center!

Now that work on this  beautiful  edifice has been completed, The Illusionist, together with Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and others they or The Illusionist may choose, will soon begin work on a bigger and even better Palace in the Sky, which like its predecessors will contain all palaces that have preceded it, like Russian dolls.

Outside the Palais des Nations in Geneva, some observers reported that they saw Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, as he was leaving, flash a big smile to well-wishers representing the Russian military and The KGB Boys.  Others told reporters they weren’t sure about Sergei Lavrov’s smile. The Chinese representative said he thought it might have been an illusion.

The venue was stunningly appropriate, as the Versailles Treaty had been signed in the very same Hall of Mirrors, in 1919.

Of course, the League of Nations failed when Italy invaded Ethiopia, a member of the League, in October 1935, and its last symbol collapsed under the treads of German tanks, in 1940, quite literally as the Third Reich seized the premises of the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague.

Does this history have anything to do with the Palace in the Sky, and the future of the United Nations?

One associates to Katherine Anne Porter’s brilliant novel, Ship of Fools (1962)–made into a movie of the same name in 1965.  Like the protagonist in the final scene of the movie, a dwarf who puffed on his cigar as he smiled and spoke, we can only answer,

“Nah, nothing at all.”

In the movie, the dwarf then chuckled ironically, turned, and walked down the gangplank.

The Trenchant Observer

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