Australia will commit a further $8 million to humanitarian aid in Syria, leading a charge while other global players lack urgency, Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr says. The plan aims to ensure medical care reaches an estimated 2.5 million Syrians in need of aid in the conflict-ravaged Arab nation where more than 30,000 have died.

Hoping her celebrity will bring attention to the widening Syrian refugee crisis, actress and U.N. envoy Angelina Jolie spoke of the horrors that children, many of them orphans, have witnessed in Syria..."The priority needs relate to health care, food aid, shelter, water and sanitation, and education..."

Yesterday, Al Jazeera English aired a segment discussing the use of “smart power” in the Middle East. Smart power is the combined application of hard and soft power resources to accomplish an objective. It recognizes that neither hard nor soft power strategies are effective on their own in certain situations, and that these elements must complement each other in an effort to achieve a goal.

The deteriorating political and security situation in Syria, viewed in the light of the failure by the Security Council to facilitate an inclusive political dialogue between President Bashar Al Assad and the rather fragmented opposition rebel forces, reinforces the impression that this most pre-eminent organ of the UN may have lost its most important ‘soft power’ resource: its moral authority.

Despite having reportedly provided training grounds for armed Syrian opposition forces... Turkey claims to have maintained its overall soft power policy vis-à-vis Syria. Throughout the 17-month uprising in Syria, Turkey provided humanitarian assistance to refugees, diplomatic support to the opposition and helped escalate pressures on the President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

President Obama's decision last year to call for the fall of the Assad regime, in which he was followed by Britain and other allies, was, it can be argued, a mistake. The reasons were understandable. First, the regime was behaving appallingly. Second, the US did not want to be behind the curve in another phase of the Arab spring, particularly as the Damascus government was, unlike the Mubarak government in Egypt, one which it had always disliked and which was tied to regional foes of America in the shape of Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

China’s ability to get what it wants through attraction and persuasion rests on a number of factors: its culture (witness the Confucius Institutes it promotes); its values (particularly a successful growth model); and its foreign policies (for example, the pledge not to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries).

The Qatar Foundation sponsors Barcelona football club, a reminder that in 10 years' time it will play host to the World Cup. Then there is the Doha-based al-Jazeera television, considered the most important Arab news TV channel, owned by Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation—which last week claimed that it had evidence that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned with polonium.