but planning a major assault on Benghazi in which "no mercy or pity" would be shown to perceived opponents, armed or otherwise -- his reference to "cockroaches" having a special resonance for those who remembered how Tutsis were being described before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda -- the Security Council followed up with Resolution 1973, also invoking R2P, which, by majority vote with no Russian or Chinese veto or other dissenting voices, explicitly authorized "all necessary measures", i.e. military intervention by member states,  "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack".  Acting under this authorization, NATO-led forces took immediate action, and the feared massacres did not eventuate. If the Security Council had acted equally decisively and robustly in the 1990s, the 8,000 murdered in Srebrenica and 800,000 in Rwanda might still be alive today. But with the apparent maturity of R2P also came a mid-life crisis. As the weeks and months wore on, as I will describe further in a moment, the Western-led intervention came under fierce attack by the BRICS countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- for exceeding its narrow civilian protection mandate, and being content with nothing less than regime change. For present purposes the most important result of this continuing dispute, and all the distrust it has engendered, has been its impact on the Security Council's response to Syria, where the one-sided violence by the regime was by mid-2011 manifestly worse even than that which had triggered the Libyan intervention.