Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

SEOUL, South Korea — The pattern is distressingly familiar. Russia doesn’t want anyone to believe that its friends and allies are capable of wrongdoing.

Remember the Russian experts who examined the sinking of the Cheonan and came up with a report that was never quite released?

The reason Moscow held back was because the report would have damned Pyongyang and the Russians didn’t want to offend their old friend and ally. Never mind that Moscow stopped shipping oil into North Korea in return for vastly inflated North Korean won more than 20 years ago after the demise of the old Soviet Union and its Communist overlords.

The new Russia would still like to maintain decent relations with North Korea, its old Korean War ally, with which it shares 17 kilometers of a border along the Tumen River to the sea.

Now the Russians are playing the same hear-no-evil, see-no-evil game again. Sure, as was already totally obvious, sarin gas was responsible for the hideous deaths of more than 1,000 Syrians last month in the suburbs of Damascus. We didn’t need to wait for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to issue the report of his UN team to figure that out. The images on television were enough for the world to know.

It would have been nice, though, if the U.N. “inspectors” had been a little more specific as to who actually fired or sprayed or dropped the gas on its unsuspecting victims. From what they did say about the source of the shells containing the dreaded gas, you may be sure, if free to talk, that they would have held Assad accountable. But no, in the interests of amity and camaraderie and whatever else the U.N. likes to promote, they’re not talking.

Russian officials, meanwhile, seem all too anxious to believe Assad’s claims about rebel forces gassing their own people. President Putin says it’s quite uncertain who was responsible. The Russians, besides arming Syria, enable Assad to deny complicity in one of the worst war crimes in memory. He gets off without the slightest guilt while his glib foreign and information ministers go on giving interviews “absolutely” denying everything.

Basically, we’re back where we began when President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were first talking tough about the need to “punish” Assad for being such a bad boy. Now nobody’s going to “punish” anyone for anything while Putin apportions the blame, suggesting, who’s to tell, maybe the Syrian rebels did it, or maybe some strange foreign power did it. Might Israel have been responsible?

While Israel’s foes spread that kind of rumor, we hark back to all the rumors surrounding the sinking of the Cheonan. Some people are still saying, sure, it might have been blown up by an old mine.

Or maybe the U.S. planted a mine in order to sink the ship and blame the North Koreans as a plot to guarantee support for U.S. bases in Japan as well as Korea.

For the Russians, their success in heading off an American bombing campaign with a totally unenforceable deal for Syria to “give up” its arsenal of chemical weapons is a triumph of immense proportions. Syria will go on getting “conventional” arms from the Russians for the war against the rebels while hiding away its chemical inventory for another day, maybe another war.

The Russian success has disquieting implications for the Korean peninsula. Obama, visiting South Korea and receiving Korean presidents in Washington, has emitted all the right noises about defending the South against the North. Kerry, in Seoul in April, at the height of what much of the world believed was an impending Armageddon though South Koreans never believed it, was also a picture of firmness, of loyalty to an old ally, a forthright friend in need.

What’s disturbing is that’s how both Obama and Kerry appeared after seeing the images of writhing, distended chemical warfare victims on television.

No sooner were they done talking about the horror that awaited the Assad regime than Obama was saying, first he needed the okay of the fractious Congress. Then Kerry was saying, sure, if Assad gave up his chemical arsenal, there’d be no need to wipe it out.

On cue, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, jumped in, eager to promote the deal.

So how serious are Obama & Co. about defending South Korea? Might he, like the presidents who preceded him, fall for North Korean assurances that of course it’s giving up its nukes – and maybe its chemical and biological ones too?

The skill with which the Russians headed off U.S. threats against Assad, while bolstering his regime to the hilt, does not augur well for U.S. policy on North Korea.

  Ban Ki-Moon, Bashar Assad, Cheonan, How the Obama administration’s Syria reversal looks in Seoul, John Kerry, Sergey Lavrov, Tumen River