At a prestigious annual foreign policy meeting in Munich this weekend, top diplomats, including Germany's Guido Westerwelle and Hillary Clinton, expressed scorn over moves by Beijing and Moscow to veto a U.N. resolution condemning violence in Syria. One top U.S. senator accused China and Russia of being "on the wrong side of history".

Many of the world's most powerful people -- including heads of state, foreign and defense ministers, Nobel laureates and captains of industry -- had converged at Munich's Bayerischer Hof hotel at his invitation this weekend. On Sunday morning, though, Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference and a former German ambassador, looked a bit perplexed as he stood on the stage of the hotel's ballroom. "We were so close," he said. "We must go on."

By close, he meant close to creating a joint response to the veto against a United Nations resolution condemning the violence in Syria by Moscow and Beijing, a move taken Saturday that had been denounced by one speaker after the other in Munich -- whether it was German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, his American counterpart Hillary Clinton or Republican Senator John McCain -- as a scandal. Behind the scenes, in the hotel's rooms, the discussions continued.

High-ranking participants from around the world wrestled with sentences, haggled over formulations, but nothing came of those efforts, Ischinger announced as he took to the stage. Indeed, Russia and China delivered this weekend on their threat to block a United Nations resolution against the violence in Syria. Both countries applied their veto power in the U.N. Security Council and are continuing with their "nyet" strategy: "No" to sanctions against Syria, "no" to halting Russian weapons deliveries to Damascus and, in particular, "no" to any draft sanctions resolution that did not expressly rule out the deployment of foreign military force in the country.

In the end, the joint resolution drafted by the Arabs, Europeans and Americans failed, and the killing continued in Syria. In Homs, more than 400 people are believed to have been killed on Friday and Saturday, and far more than 1,000 people were injured. People on the ground reported that leader Bashar Assad's troops attacked a peaceful protest -- demonstrators who are demanding reforms in the country and for the president to step down.