Peter Goodspeed: Syria is walking all over the UN The massacre of the children of Houla and their families has deepened the sense of crisis in Syria, but the United Nations is unlikely to do anything about it. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan arrived in Damascus Monday for yet another round of emergency talks on his tattered and bullet-riddled six-week old UN peace plan. With only 271 of the 300 observers in place, the undersized, under-resourced and virtually impotent UN Mission in Syria has been unable to do much. The ceasefire at the heart of the plan never took hold: Syrian security forces continue to target and kill dissidents; rebel guerrillas remain active; and convoys carrying UN monitors have been attacked. The killings in Houla took place only 20 kilometres from a UN observer post in the blood-stained city of Homs. 'The Assad regime has imported Hezbollah militants to help crush the opposition' When Syrian troops began their nine-hour artillery and tank assault Friday, activists in Houla pleaded with the UN peacekeepers to go to the town, in the hope their presence might protect residents. But the UN observers only arrived Saturday, in time to count the bodies. That has infuriated rebel leaders, who say the Houla massacre carries the stench of Srebrenica in 1995, when UN peacekeepers looked on helplessly as more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered. Monday, Mr. Annan, who was in charge of UN peacekeeping operations during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, could do little more