Each time I see Anne-Marie Slaughter call for "safe corridors" or "safe zones" in and/or around Syria on Twitter, or now Sen. John Kerry calling for "safe zones" for Syrians, I wince.

It's ignorance.

They are doing this out of lack of familiarity with how the UN works, lack of understanding of what humanitarian organizations can and can't do, and forgetting history, if they knew it in the first place.

If that sounds harsh, I mean it to be, because I cannot believe these leaders are invoking this particular concept so glibly without any consideration of the past and its lessons.

And they are not in touch with humanitarian thinking right now, let alone history. Surely they must know this, and perhaps it's the triumph of hope over experience? But I especially never hear Anne-Marie Slaughter on Twitter concede the bitter lessons of the past in her idealistic proposals.

The reality is, no humanitarian organization, nor UN official, no agency like the ICRC, nor private NGO, like Doctors Without Borders, is ever going to endorse or participate in "safe zones" or "safe areas" or even "humanitarian corridors".

Every single one of them will have at least two words for you if you have the ignorance or naivite to suggest this to them (as American politicians keep doing): "Srebrenica" and "Goma".

If you read even the short Wikipedia entry on this topic you will realize that "safe areas" is a notion forever linked in the minds of anyone related to the UN with the Balkan wars and the Srebrenica massacre. They were established in 1993 and failed utterly:

In 1995 the situation in UN Safe Areas was deteriorating, and it led to a diplomatic crisis which culminated in the Srebrenica massacre; one of the worst atrocities in Europe since WWII. The UN Resolution 819 and 836 had designated Srebrenica a "safe area" to be protected using "all necessary means, including the use of force". Continued attacks on UN Safe Areas as well as the continued Siege of Sarajevo also ultimately resulted in NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina named Operation Deliberate Force.

By the end of the war every one of the Safe Areas had been attacked by the Serbs, and Srbrenica and Zepa were overrun.

"Safe areas" in fact led to all-out war.

This story is now 20 years old, so a new crop of idealists have sprung up who may have forgotten it, but certainly the institutional memory at the UN and the NGOs that cooperate closely with the UN isn't forgotten.

Go back 18 years to find the story of Goma and the hope to even avoid a "second Goma" with the Rwanda genocide. Genocide, remember? Read the entry on Goma under the sections on Rwanda and the First and Second Congo Wars.

Basically, these two awful chapters of 20-year-old history taught two lessons (or should have — those asking for safe zones again in our time must have forgotten or not learned them or think we can now do it differently because we have…Twitter…or something.)

The first lesson is that if you create a safe zone and advertise it to desperate refugees, it will be overrun, and the second lesson is that if you do not have a war-fighting concept of how to battle the hostile forces that will chase those refugees, they will be slaughtered like sitting ducks.

Then there's a third lesson nobody likes to talk about: if, out of humanitarian concern, you open up refugee camps, they will inevitably attract militants and then you are essentially providing R&R for rebels until they can regroup, especially with all the small arms sloshing around, and go out and fight again.

Here's what happened with Srebrenica:

The resolution was unclear about the procedure by which these safe areas were to be protected in a war zone like Bosnia and Herzegovina. The resolution created a difficult diplomatic situation because the member states that voted in favor of it were, for political reasons, not willing to take the necessary steps to ensure the security of the safe areas.

Why weren't they not willing to "take the necessary steps"? Well, the UN Security Council hardly ever authorizes war-fighting (the last time was in the Korean war when the Soviet Union walked out in protest, freeing the other members to coordinate a war-fighting operation on the Korean peninsula).  The UNSC creates peace-keeping missions with robust or less-than-robust Chapter 7 or Chapter 6 or Chapter 6-and-a-half type of mandates to resist violence if peace-keepers are attacked, but this seldom provides the robust "protection of civilians" that NGOs and some states increasingly clamour for.

There's a longer discussion to be had about the theory of "responsibility to protect" and the fictions created around RTP, of which I am critical, but to focus just on the safe areas, the operative thing that US politicians have to realize: no UN official or humanitarian group will go for this idea.

And their "not going for" this idea isn't a function of their weakness, indecision, bureaucracy or "surrender monkey" status, but their actual shrewd and keen awareness of all those features in states, including West European states and the US itself. As Kerry is quoted as saying in Foreign Policy:

"This ‘failing to lead' refrain is just a political refrain," he said. "The United States doesn't have to go off and do everything to be the leader. Actually, it's pretty smart to get somebody else to do some things for you. You save the American taxpayer a few dollars, you don't put American troops at risk, and you get the job done."

Kerry noted that the administration is planning for a range of contingencies, including safe zones. But the administration has been clear that it has no intention of providing lethal aid to the opposition or using U.S. or NATO assets to directly confront Assad's forces.

So the idea is to get "NATO" or other countries to do the heavy lifting and the placement in harm's way. Does Sen. Kerry haver any idea how this sounds to other countries, especially those who provide soldiers?

I think those calling for this have no idea how tattered the consensus has become at UNSC — BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are now all in the Security Council at once, as it happens, and not a single one of those countries, permanent or elected, are going to vote for any authorization of the use of force "to protect civilians" as they did for Libya. Libya soured them on this for a long time. NATO's killing of civilians in airstrikes is something Russia invokes endlessly to chafe the US, and it can count on every one of its BRICS allies to back it on this.

In theory, Turkey might invoke articles of the NATO charter and is already talking about this and invite NATO to take action on its border areas against Syria, but it seems likely that the huge resistance to this action not only by BRICS but by the US itself to getting its hands dirty in another war before the elections seems realistic brakes on the "safe areas" idea.

It would be better if the politicians converted their language from "safe areas" to "protection of civilians" but that phrase has become shop-worn due to Libya as well.

It's definitely a bad moment, as the Russian-backed slaughter of innocents in Syria continues apace, with Kofia Anna's mission failing, and the rest of the anti-US alliance have no interest in doing anything about this mass crime against humanity — just as they didn't in Sudan or Iran (it's always the same crew).

But…No one should be calling for safe zones unless they do the following:

o have a full and frank exchange with the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Kofi Annan (on whose watch the disasterous safe areas of the past occurred), OCHA, UNICEF and other UN agencies in the field, as well as leading humanitarian groups like MSF, Care, Save the Children, Oxfam, etc., about their recollections and "best practices" advice based on the past disastrous experiences and whether they think there is something "different" about the Syria/Turkey variant — plus Twitter.

o have a very clear idea what forces they are using to protect these "safe areas," which troop-supplying countries are involved, what their mandate is and where it will come from, and whether they can shoot to kill the forces of hostile governments — and rebels as well — who interfere with the civilian safe areas

o have a very clear idea and back-up plan about what to do with armed rebels or rebels on R&R in the camps — by combining the call for "safe areas" with the call for "arming the rebels," it looks like Sen. Kerry and others are conceding that these safe areas get to be just like the ones around the Rwanda genocide. Is everyone ok with that?

Everyone wants to do something about the massive suffering in Syria. Kerry wants some other foreign military force to do the defending:

"King Abdullah [of Jordan] made some very interesting suggestions about Jordanian possibilities with respect to that and the Turks also have some options," he said. "I'm talking about Gulf states and the Arab League engaging and leading on this with NATO perhaps as a support structure behind the scenes to back it up," he said.

The West has tried, as with Libya, to get the OIC to step up and then provide NATO as their cover. It hasn't been persuasive to BRICS, however.

Really, there are other very long-term things that need to be done like to get at the real reasons for Syria and the reluctance of BRICS:

o pass the Magnitsky Act, which is to end impunity for not only the death of Magnitsky in a Russian prison, but others including those killed by Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya. There is significant backing for the passage of the Magnitsky Act as Russia is transitioned from the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which no longer applies. Yet Sen. Kerry, after an initial semblance of backing the act, has now moved to postpone it from Senate agena, apparently until the newly-crowned Vladimir Putin can come and go from the G-8 meeting and other negotiations happen with Russia, such as on the missile systems they are threatening to attack pre-emptively in Europe — exactly the wrong thing to do, because human rights and arms control do have to be linked if progress is ever to be achieved on them.

If you can't confront Russia on a limited list of human rights violations by definite actors and end impunity just in this one area, how do you think you will ever restrain Russia from arming murderous regimes like Syria? These issues are all inextricably linked.

o agree to a proposal from Jordan and the other "small five" states advocating for change in the working methods of the Security Council, one of which chips away slightly at the long-established system of vetos for the permanent five members. A new proposal would require states that invoke their vetos to explain how they can justify them as upholding the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

Syria is a symptom of the failure of the international security system that starts with failure to contain Russia's arms sales, the largest in the world used for the killing of civilians in wars, as Amnesty International recently reported –  to the hysteria of all the sectarian tweeters from India, the UK and elsewhere who falsely believe the US is responsible for most war crimes in the world (the crimes of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq utterly dwarf the crimes of the US.)