Dore Gold explains why Syria thinks it can get away with backing the insurgency in Iraq:

This is not just a story about Syria behaving as a rogue state; it is also a glaring example of the UN system failing. For UN Security Council membership from early 2002 through 2003 did not lead to more moderate Syrian behavior but rather to the exact opposite: a more defiant posture than was even witnessed during the years in which Hafiz al-Assad ruled Syria. And in December 2004, General George W. Casey, Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq, has disclosed that the Iraqi insurgency was being run by former Iraqi Baath Party officials from Syria, itself. The current Iraqi leadership in Baghdad has suggested the involvement of the Syrian security services in the insurgency, as well. Indeed, US troops uncovered photographs of senior Syrian officials when they stormed insurgent strongholds in Falujah last November. A captured insurgent in Najaf told the Iraqi security authorities that he had gone through training camps in Syria. In short, Syrian fingerprints are all over the insurgency.

This latest deterioration in Syrian international behavior should not come as a complete surprise. For during those critical years in 2002 and 2003, Syria was promoted to sit on the UN Security Council without any pre-conditions. True Syria had been on the U.S. Department of State’s terrorism list since its inception in the late 1970s. But from the standpoint of the UN, Syria could sit on its most august body without having to modify its behavior in the least. What message did the Syrians internalize from this promotion in their international status? If the UN, from the Syrian standpoint, was the “source of international legitimacy,” then Syrian behavior was viewed in the morally-skewed universe of the UN as legitimate.

Amidst all the talk about UN reform, including the expansion of the UN Security Council from fifteen to twenty-four members, the story of Syria and terrorism is a sharp reminder that for the UN to have any positive influence in the future, its changes cannot be structural alone. The UN must demand minimal standards of behavior of its member states; if not, it risks becoming an entirely bankrupt idea. The original UN of President Roosevelt was born in 1945 in a moment of moral clarity, at which time new members had to declare war on one of the Axis powers. Unless that clarity is restored, the UN will not promote world order, but will inevitably turn into an instrument for global chaos instead.