One woman in a tight swimsuit playfully squirted a water gun, joking that she belonged to the pro-government militia, the Shabiha, meaning ghosts or thugs, which is believed to be responsible for a recent massacre of more than 100 people, many of them women and children. “The opposition wants to kill us—they even announced it on Facebook,” the woman said, and blithely went back to spraying herself with water.

The pool party at the Dama Rose Hotel in Damascus was just getting started.

“The evidence indicates that [the Turkish plane] was hit by a Russian-made Pantsir,” a Western diplomat with knowledge of the ongoing NATO investigation into the shooting told The Daily Beast. Russia supplied Syria with 36 mobile Pantsir-S1 surface-to-air missile launchers in 2007 at a cost of $900 million. “At a range of 13 nautical miles, it’s the only kit the Syrians have with the range, response time, and accuracy” to have downed the American-made F-4, the diplomat said.

Soviet-era weaponry—mostly RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades—has been used to down many U.S. helicopters in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years, and a U.S. F-117 stealth bomber was shot down over Yugoslavia in 1999 by a 1980s-era Soviet missile. But if confirmed, the downing of the F-4 by a Pantsir will be the first time an American jet has been shot down by modern Russian antiaircraft technology.

“It was my first operation, after joining the rebels about three months ago,” he writes, asking, like nearly all Syrians, not to be named for fear of reprisal. “He was an inspector in the security forces, a midlevel rank in military security. I watched his house, his car—or rather, his cars. And then I shot him.”

Suddenly he interrupts his story: “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!” he writes. “Wow, nice goal. Italy, 2. Germany, 0.”

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Parliament Tuesday that “we have passed to a new state after this incident; the rules of engagement have now changed,” and said that he was “warning the Syrian regime not to make the mistake of testing the military determination of Turkey.”

Erdogan promised angry parliamentarians that any Syrian vehicle or personnel approaching the border “will be treated as a military target and dealt with robustly.”

Already, tourism has collapsed in Damascus and much of the country’s economy has become stagnant. Nevertheless, Syria’s historical self-sufficiency, coupled with help from the likes of Russia and Venezuela to meet shortages, means that the economy is not in dire straits. What is clear, however, is that the violent instability facing the country (whatever its origins or aims) is exacerbating a shaky economy that was weak even before the crisis blew up last year. Today, money is coming into the country from many sources, including Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, among other nations who are supporting one or more of the various players. Yet such political inflows of funds have a tendency to eventually do more harm than good.

Some of those inflows, for instance, are funding propaganda, which serves to exaggerate Syria’s genuine problems—economic and otherwise—as part of a great spectacle to sway world opinion. This includes Saudi money coming into Syria via Lebanon to fund demonstrations, with people getting $30 a day to protest—in front of cameras and microphones, of course. That isn’t to say that there aren’t many genuine demonstrators with real grievances; at the same time, the government habitually stages its own propaganda shows, also inducing people to whoop it up for the media. Such stage-management, along with fake torture videos and a host of other propaganda stunts, provide false justification for or against outside meddling, with some Europeans and certain people in Washington pushing for various military options, and a broad group led by Russia and China, but also including many in the region, calling for diplomatic solutions to the crisis.

The Alaed, which was sitting off the West coast of Scotland, had obtained the helicopters—better known in NATO parlance as Hinds—from the Baltic port of Kaliningrad. The choppers, which had been sold to Syria by Russia in the early 1990s, had been undergoing a refit in Russia.

"We were made aware of the allegations that the Alaed was carrying munitions destined for Syria," the Standard Club said in a statement Tuesday. "We have already informed the ship owner that their insurance cover ceased automatically in view of the nature of the voyage."

The current situation is a diplomatic and military stalemate, albeit a bloody one. U.N. envoy Kofi Annan has had zero success in establishing a real cease-fire or moving Assad into negotiations with the opposition. The U.N. monitors sent into Syria have not even been able to visit sites of recent suspected massacres and are themselves now targets of attack. The armed rebellion has been unable so far to dislodge the regime, but neither has the regime’s violence crushed the rebellion. Russia is still blocking stronger action at the U.N. Security Council. But more direct action, such as working with those who are arming the Syrian opposition, creating safe-zones on the borders of Syria, or threatening military intervention by a U.S.-led coalition, are risky endeavors and not saleable to a war-weary U.S. public—or a war-weary U.S. president.

In the absence of good options, the administration is flailing away at Russian support for Assad, calculating that losing Russian support might make the Assad regime give up the fight and yield to a negotiated transition. Given the resolve that both Putin and Assad have shown so far, it’s a long shot at best. The real danger, though, is not that diplomacy will fail. The real danger is that during the time spent cajoling Russian officials in Moscow, Los Cabos, and New York, events in Homs, Daraa, and Damascus will drive the crisis over the abyss into an entrenched, sectarian conflict with spiraling regional consequences.

Syrians would be forgiven for regarding Hipolita somewhat differently. In late May, militias loyal to Damascus killed over 100 noncombatants, including 49 children, in the farming town of Houla, while the Syrian government allegedly looked the other way. Two days before the massacre, an oil tanker named for Bolivar’s favorite nanny arrived in the Syrian port of Banias with a shipment of 300,000 barrels of Venezuelan diesel. This time, La Negra Hipolita was nurturing Chávez’s new best friend, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Chávez may be ailing and his reelection prospects dimming, but the embattled Venezuelan strongman who is fighting cancer and a revitalized opposition, never forgets an amigo. He has lavished allies from Cuba to Argentina with cut-rate fuel or petrodollars, and stood up for a rogue’s gallery of autocrats who fall in disfavor with the “gringo empire” to the north.

"We do not support the Syrian government," Lavrov said Monday as British Foreign Secretary William Hague visited Moscow to persuade Russia to back tough international sanctions.

"What is important is ending the violence. We support the plan of [the United Nations–Arab League peace envoy] Kofi Annan."