Thanks for the posts, fellas. I read an article here and there but you two have been over there.
Printable View
Thanks for the posts, fellas. I read an article here and there but you two have been over there.
Your thoughts on the Russians are of note because the political conflicts in the Caucasus are unresolved -you could even argue that whilst the Soviet era put a lid on it, the disputes over Russian 'sovereignty' in that region date back to the 19th century if not before. The other argument would be the disapproval of the Russians at the way in which Qadhafi was overthrown, particularly the intervention which followed the success of the rebels in securing Benghazi. It is of course entirely ironic that a people's revolution is frowned upon in the successor to the USSR, even if it is heavily sponsored from outside. Mind you, the inheritors of 1776 weren't that keen on popular revolutions in Central America in the 1980s.Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
And yet, there may be a deeper anxiety here: in 1979, relations between Moscow and Baghdad cooled, again because of 'regime change', specifically Saddam Hussein's 'coup' against Hassan al-Bakr and the violent purge of the Ba'ath Party that took place- this alienated the Russians and brought Hafiz al-Asad closer to the USSR, but even more important is the simple fact that the USSR after vacating Azerbaijan province in in Iran in 1947 left behind a network of KGB agents who worked with the Tudeh party to undermine the Shah (particularly after 1954). It is argued that Soviet -then Russian- support for Iran has been retained through the Islamic Revolution as part of an anti-American, pro-Syrian/Iranian axis in the Middle East. Pavel Stroilov has claimed Gorbachev was the only head of state to receive a personal message from the Ayatollah Khomeini, even if it did suggest he give up communism and become a Muslim (!). It may therefore be part of a Russian fear that if it loses Syria, it will only have a delicate relationship with Iran to fall back on, with the assumption that 'losing Syria' weakens Iran, and therefore weakens Russia. In geo-strategic terms, the Russians have had their eye on the Persian Gulf for more than a century, they may still be smarting at the loss of the petroleum concession to the British in 1901.
The Russians are protecting their presence in the Middle East. How would the other powers doing it?
Not really sure about Stroilov but his book (Behind the Desert Storm) is here:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=B...addafi&f=false
Bill Clinton joins up with John McCain.
http://news.yahoo.com/bill-clinton-u...162055123.html
http://www.indynewsisrael.com/wp-con...ohn-McCain.jpgQuote:
Bill Clinton urges more forceful U.S. response on Syria: report
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/FZ...b5cec5193.jpegReuters – 1 hr 27 mins ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As the Obama administration considers whether to arm Syrian rebels, former President Bill Clinton increased pressure for a stronger U.S. role in Syria's civil war, short of sending in U.S. troops, according to a report.
"Nobody is asking for American soldiers in Syria," Clinton said, according to the report from the newspaper Politico published late Wednesday.
"The only question is: now that the Russians, the Iranians and the Hezbollah are in there head over heels ... should we try to do something to try to slow their gains and rebalance the power so that these rebel groups have a decent chance, if they're supported by a majority of the people, to prevail?"
Clinton made the remarks at a closed-press event earlier this week with Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the fiercest critics of President Barack Obama's unwillingness so far to provide direct military support to the rebels opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The conflict has left at least 93,000 dead in a two-year fight, the United Nations said on Thursday.
The situation on the ground has changed dramatically in recent weeks, with Assad winning the open support of fighters from Hezbollah, the Shi'ite militia from neighboring Lebanon. Assad also is backed by regional Shi'ite power Iran and Russia, which has used its veto to block U.N. Security Council action against him.
The comments from fellow Democrat Clinton increases pressure on Obama as his administration considers options on Syria at White House talks this week, including whether to arm the rebels.
Clinton said he agreed with McCain that the United States needed to intervene, according to the report by Politico, which said it obtained an audio recording from an attendee at the event for the McCain Institute for International Leadership held on Tuesday in New York.
"Sometimes it's just best to get caught trying, as long as you don't over-commit - like, as long as you don't make an improvident commitment," Clinton said, according to the report.
He said several times it would be "lame" to point to opposition in polls or among U.S. lawmakers as a reason not to intervene in a conflict, Politico said.
Obama has been reluctant to arm the rebels out of concern the weapons could fall into the wrong hands, and opinion polls back him, with some surveys showing as few as 10 percent of Americans in favor of intervention.
If the United States decides against arming the rebels, Arab and European states could step in.
Clinton's comments come just months after his wife Hillary left as U.S. secretary of state. The White House had no immediate comment on the Politico report.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Additional reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Alistair Bell and Vicki Allen)
The BBC last night broadcast the third and last programme about the Iraq war, which contained some depressing comments from all involved which makes one wonder how informed decision makers are before, as Tony Blair said in the first programme, they decide to 'remake the Middle East'. Curious how the same generation of politicians don't mount ground troops, spies, air power, cyber-power and all the rest of it to 're-make the Korean peninsula' and they seem indifferent to the misery that has been inflicted on the people of the 'Democratic Republic of the Congo' but dealing with all sorts of venal thieves, killers and rapists or 're-making Southern Africa' isn't on the agenda, however much profit is made from diamonds, cobalt and other minerals.
In the same programme last night, Cheney was insistent that there had to be a change in the leadership in Iraq in 2006 because the Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari was considered ineffective and because the USA was determined 'to win' and leave Iraq as 'a stable democracy'. The chilling thing is that Cheney believes his own rhetoric even as the shameless Jack Straw (and Condi Rice) went to Baghdad to tell al-Jaafari he was no longer going to be Prime Minister of Iraq which Straw cheerfully pointed out was an act of colonial intervention! What has anyone won in Iraq? Saddam Hussein is dead, the Kurds are signing oil contracts as if the North is already an independent state, the Shi'a have made it clear that Iraq is now under their control while the Sunna are now as marginalised and ostracised as the Shi'a were under Saddam. When the last elections returned a larger majority for the opposition Iraqiya party, Maliki annulled the elections and arrested the Iraqiya leadership!
As I said in an earlier post, the Ba'ath regime in Syria which used to be and attracted support in Syria as a Secular government, has now become identified as a Shi'a-oriented government, a process that will alienate the country's Christian and secular minorities -who now repesents the interests of these communities? The politics of dictatorship which has reared a generation for whom politics is limited to violence rather then democratic debate, has debased secularism and led the country into a futile war.
Clinton on this issue is a misguided fool playing domestic politics with no regard for the situation in Syria. Why should the USA intervene when it has signed multi-trillion arms contracts with Saudi Arabia over the last 50 years! Saudi Arabia has either spent trillions on weapons it doesn't know how to use, or is terrified that if it puts its own soldiers on the ground in Syria they will get nothing out of it. It is rather like the last days of the Serbian-Bosnian crisis when the military might of the European states sat on its ass and it was the Americans who intervened to end the worst of the violence.
The historical record shows that American intervention has at times been crucial to military success -the First and Second World Wars are obvious examples. With all due respect to Mr Clinton, the USA can't do everything all the time, you are not the world's policeman. The US already has special forces in Jordan, Syria, and probably in Iraq, isn't that enough?
The Middle East is in this turmoil because outsiders won't leave it alone. 100 years of meddling -what is the legacy?
Looks like we're trying to snake our way in there one way or the other.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...6pLid%3D329017
http://rt.com/files/news/1e/69/20/00/17.si.jpgQuote:
Syria's Assad Used Chemical Weapons Against Rebels, U.S. Officials Conclude
Posted: 06/13/2013 5:00 pm EDT | Updated: 06/13/2013 6:31 pm EDT
U.S. officials have concluded that the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against rebel fighters, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
Congressional sources told CNN that investigators concluded that Syria has used chemical weapons multiple times.
In a statement released on Thursday, the White House says U.S. intelligence concluded that the Assad regime used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent Sarin, against rebel fighters in the last year.
The statement continues:Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information. The intelligence community estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks in Syria to date; however, casualty data is likely incomplete. While the lethality of these attacks make up only a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria, which now stands at more than 90,000 deaths, the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses clear red lines that have existed within the international community for decades. We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.The White House reiterates that President Obama has designated the use of chemical weapons as a red line and that the U.S. will increase its assistance to the opposition.
"Our intelligence community now has a high confidence assessment that chemical weapons have been used on a small scale by the Assad regime in Syria. The President has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has," the statement says.
National Security Council deputy advisor Ben Rhodes said on Thursday that the President Obama reached a decision on what the new support for the Syrian opposition would look like. According to Buzzfeed, Rhodes said: “The president has made a decision ”about what kind of additional support will be provided to the rebels. It will be “direct support to the SMC [Supreme Military Command] that includes military support.” Rhodes added that no decision has been made on the institution of a no-fly zone.
More from the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has conclusive evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime has used chemical weapons against opposition forces seeking to overthrow the government, crossing what President Barack Obama has called a "red line" that would trigger greater American involvement in the crisis, the White House said Thursday. Officials said Obama was considering both political and military options, but it was unclear how quickly new actions would be taken and what they would involve.
"We've prepared for many contingencies in Syria," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser. "We are going to make decisions on further actions on our own timeline."
The White House said the Assad regime had used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale multiple times in the last year. Up to 150 people have been killed in those attacks, the White House said, constituting a small percentage of the 93,000 people killed in Syria over the last two years.
The Obama administration announced in April that it had "varying degrees of confidence" that sarin had been used in Syria. But they said at the time that they had not been able to determine who was responsible for deploying the gas.
The more conclusive findings announced Thursday were aided by evidence sent to the United States by France, which along with Britain, announced it had determined that Assad's government had used chemical weapons in the two-year conflict.
Obama has said repeatedly that the use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" and constitute a "game changer" for U.S. policy on Syria, which until now has focused entirely on providing the opposition with nonlethal assistance and humanitarian aid.
The White House said Congress has been notified of the new U.S. chemical weapons determination, as have international allies. Obama will discuss the assessments, along with broader problems in Syria, next week during the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland.
Obama is also expected to press Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad's most powerful backers, to drop his political and military support for the Syrian government.
"We believe that Russia and all members of the international community should be concerned about the use of chemical weapons," Rhodes said.
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-step-mil...233546868.html
http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/fS...706700bbb5.jpgQuote:
Obama to step up military support of Syrian rebels
http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/oXh...png_162613.pngBy MATTHEW LEE and JULIE PACE | Associated Press – 15 mins ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has authorized sending weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time, U.S. officials said Thursday, after the White House disclosed that the United States has conclusive evidence Syrian President Bashar Assad's government has used chemical weapons against opposition forces trying to overthrow him.
Obama has repeatedly said the use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" triggering greater American intervention in the two-year crisis.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the strongest proponents of U.S. military action in Syria, said he was told Thursday that Obama had decided to "arm the rebels", a decision confirmed by three U.S. officials. However, the officials cautioned that no decisions had been made on the specific type of weaponry or when it would reach the Syrian rebels, who are under increasing assault from Assad's forces.
"This is going to be different in both scope and scale in terms of what we are providing," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser.
The U.S. has so far provided the Syrian rebel army with rations and medical supplies.
Thursday's announcement followed a series of urgent meetings at the White House this week that revealed deep divisions within the administration over U.S. involvement in Syria's civil war. The proponents of more aggressive action — including Secretary of State John Kerry — appeared to have won out over those wary of sending weapons and ammunition into a war zone where Hezbollah and Iranian fighters are backing Assad's armed forces, and al-Qaida-linked extremists back the rebellion.
Obama still opposes putting American troops on the ground in Syria and the U.S. has made no decision on operating a no-fly zone over Syria, Rhodes said.
U.S. officials said the administration could provide the rebels with a range of weapons, including small arms, ammunition, assault rifles and a variety of anti-tank weaponry such as shoulder-fired remote-propelled grenades and other missiles. However, a final decision on the inventory has not been made, the officials said.
Most of those would be weapons the opposition forces could easily use and not require much additional training to operate. Obama's opposition to deploying American troops to Syria makes it difficult to provide much large-scale training. Other smaller- scale training can be done outside Syria's borders.
All of the officials insisted on anonymity in order to discuss internal administration discussions.
Word of the stepped up assistance followed new U.S. intelligence assessments showing that Assad has used chemical weapons, including sarin, on a small scale multiple times in the last year. Up to 150 people have been killed in those attacks, the White House said, constituting a small percentage of the 93,000 people killed in Syria over the last two years.
The White House said it believes Assad's regime still maintains control of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles and does not see any evidence that rebel forces have launched attacks using the deadly agents.
The Obama administration announced in April that it had "varying degrees of confidence" that sarin had been used in Syria. But they said at the time that they had not been able to determine who was responsible for deploying the gas.
The more conclusive findings announced Thursday were aided by evidence sent to the United States by France, which, along with Britain, announced it had determined that Assad's government had used chemical weapons in the two-year conflict.
Obama has said repeatedly that the use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" and constitute a "game changer" for U.S. policy on Syria, which until now has focused entirely on providing the opposition with nonlethal assistance and humanitarian aid.
The White House said it had notified Congress, the United Nations and key international allies about the new U.S. chemical weapons determination. Obama will discuss the assessments, along with broader problems in Syria, next week during the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland.
Among those in attendance will be Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad's most powerful backers. Obama and Putin will hold a one-on-one meeting on the sidelines of the summit, where the U.S. leader is expected to press his Russian counterpart to drop his political and military support for the Syrian government.
"We believe that Russia and all members of the international community should be concerned about the use of chemical weapons," Rhodes said.
Britain's U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said his country was "not surprised by the determination made by the U.S. government," given its own assessments, and was in consultation with the Americans about next steps.
The U.S. has so far provided the Syrian rebel army with rations and medical supplies. In April, Kerry announced that the administration had agreed in principle to expand its military support to the opposition to include defensive items like night vision goggles, body armor and armored vehicles.
The Syrian fighters have been clamoring for bolder Western intervention, particularly given the estimated 5,000 Hezbollah guerrillas propping up Assad's forces. Assad's stunning military success last week at Qusair, near the Lebanese border, and preparations for offensives against Homs and Aleppo have made the matter more urgent.
While McCain has pressed for a greater role for the U.S. military, other lawmakers have expressed reservations about American involvement in another conflict and fears that weapons sent to the rebels could fall into the hands of al-Qaida-linked groups.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condemned the Assad regime but expressed serious concerns about the United States being pulled into a proxy war.
"There are many actions that the United States can take to increase our humanitarian assistance to refugee populations and opposition groups short of injecting more weapons into the conflict," Murphy said. "I urge the president to exercise restraint and to consult closely with Congress before undertaking any course of action to commit American military resources to Syrian opposition forces."
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, also urged the White House to consult with Congress.
"It is long past time to bring the Assad regime's bloodshed in Syria to an end," he said through a spokesman, Brendan Buck. "As President Obama examines his options, it is our hope he will properly consult with Congress before taking any action."
___
Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Donna Cassata, Andrew Taylor in Washington and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
FILE - In this April 30, 2013, file photo, President Barack Obama answers questions during his new conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room
of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 30, 2013. U.S. officials said June 13, 2013, that the Obama administration has concluded that
Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime has used chemical weapons against the opposition seeking to overthrow him, crossing what Obama called a 'red line'.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
It remains to be seen exactly what sort of military aid is supplied to the rebels. And if it is hardware how it gets to the right rebels. John McCain meanwhile continues to bang the drum of even more direct intervention. Dangerous words.
The region is now teetering on the brink of what could become a major conflagration. If the US does arm the rebels or outs its own forces into play in some manner and Russia responds b, at the very least strengthing it's support for Assad, what might Israel do? What prospect for the conflict not really spilling over into Lebanon... and Jordan perhaps. What about Turkey? And of course Iran borders wealthy Sunni controlled Gulf states - mere miles from the UAE (with whom they are already in dispute over some islands - even though they are otherwise strong trading partners) Iran is already involved in covert supprt for the Shias in Bahrain and are likely to focus its ire (or worse) on Qatar which is the main funder of the rebels and have long been locked in a devil's embrace with Saudi Arabia. The picture looks ugly indeed. Today I read that Jihadists are moving towards the region from Pakistan and North Africa - together with Shia fighters. Does Obama really want to put US lives into the middle of this - and will Cameron and the UK Government get involved. It is entirely possible this could be a far wider conflict than the mere Middle East.
As we've discussed here before what on earth would victory be anyway. A nation in ruins. Millions dead. An al-queda aligned rebel victory. grim for the region and wider world.
I agree with most of what you say Prospero, except that I think that, as in Iraq, the long-term influence of 'al-Qaeda' in Syria is precarious, as the Salafist groups are as divided as the rest of the Syrian opposition and I doubt that the Syrian Sunna would tolerate the kind of behaviour that al-Qaeda in Iraq got up to -although it was touched on the Iraq War programme in fact they did not go deeper into the Awakening movement and the wide-ranging revolt amongst Sunni in Iraq against al-Qaeda. The programme prefered to use 'the surge' as the key to defeating the extremists. Just this last week Ayman al-Zawahri rejected the merger of the Jabhat al-Nusra with al-Qaeda in Iraq.
http://weaselzippers.us/2013/06/09/a...qaeda-in-iraq/
Earlier this week a report from Channel 4 suggested Qatar might be having second thoughts about its involvement in Syria, support it gave because of the 'clean break' with Qadhafi in Libya, which hasn't emerged in Syria. The concern is that if Qatar continues to support the rebels, it might be vulnerable to some action from Iran, as you also point out this could make Bahrain vulnerable too.
Not sure about Israel -it has already directly attacked targets in Syria, but I doubt Asad would retaliate without working out the further consequences, whereas some action by Hezbollah might make more strategic sense, but these would be skirmishes rather than extended warfare. I don't know if the new President in Iran, who will be selected rather than elected over the next 48 hours or so will change policy.
If Israel has used phosphorous bombs in the Gaza District, isn't this the illegal use of chemical weapons? Israel says it used them to illuminate areas at night and that this use is not illegal in international law, but there s evidence of the bombs injuring civilians...
http://electronicintifada.net/conten...over-gaza/7965
What doesn't seem to be happening is a significant push for negotiations, unless these commitments to arms are part of the bargaining process.
But Israel are always given the benefit of the doubt, aren't they.... re: the phosphorous
A well-argued piece in today's Independent on Sunday by Patrick Cockburn: if the 'red line' for the Obama administration was Syria's use of chemicals weapons, for which little evidence has been supplied, what is the position if the Rebels have access to the same weapons -where the evidence is clear from the 2kg cylinder of Sarin gas which members of the al-Nusra front had when arrested in Turkey...and as Cockburn argues, why would Asad or someone in the military use Sarin knowing that it is the 'red line' that would provoke US intervention? As he argues, the problems is the incoherent and poorly organised rebel opposition, and a bedrock of support for Asad, suggesting that external forces are needed to achieve what ground forces from Syria cannot -force Asad to leave or open talks on a transition. I note nobody, not even Cockburn suggests the armed forces of other Arab states take the initiative, his observations of Afghanistan suggest most of the time the Mujahideen are not very effective. But if an all-out war is the only solution, is it a solution that will actually work? With other reports today that Iran is/may be sending 4,000 ground troops into Syria is this going to make ground force action against Asad's government more or less likely? His final call for diplomacy to replace force rings true, but are the 'movers and shakers' listening?
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...t-8660482.html
Noam Chomsky on Ron Paul's 9/11 Theories: "What He Said Is Completely Uncontroversial"Quote:
Originally Posted by Dino Velvet
Noam Chomsky on Ron Paul's 9/11 Theories: "What He Said Is Completely Uncontroversial" - YouTube
Ben, this is a thread on the crisis in Syria today, not Noam Chomsky's reactions to the televised debate of Republican candidates that is a few years old.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
:iagree::iagree::iagree:Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Ben contain your passion for Ron Paul's philosophy to the right part of the forum old buddy
http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-putin...151615653.html
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/MQ...ROPTP_2_G8.JPGQuote:
Analysis: Putin basks in isolation over Syria as Obama's charm falls flat
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/FZ...b5cec5193.jpegBy Guy Faulconbridge and Timothy Heritage | Reuters – 1 hr 35 mins ago
By Guy Faulconbridge and Timothy Heritage
ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland/MOSCOW (Reuters) - At the end of a tense two-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama - slumped over and serious - tried to lighten the mood with a joke about their favorite sports.
"And finally, we compared notes on President Putin's expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball," the U.S. president told reporters at the G8 summit, after the two men gave formal statements emphasizing their common ground rather than their sharp differences on how to end the Syrian crisis.
"And we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover," Obama said.
Putin - who folded his hands and glowered through most of the exchange - was having none of it. He waited for the audience to finish laughing, smiled icily and stuck in his spear.
"The president wants to relax me with his statement of age," retorted Putin.
Few expected any diplomatic breakthroughs from the meeting in Northern Ireland, less than a week after Obama's administration announced it would provide military support to rebels fighting Moscow's ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
But Putin - who scowled, lectured and fidgeted while resisting the forced bonhomie of the two-day summit with the leaders of world's richest nations - seemed positively to relish his isolation.
It was a vintage display of Putin's world view forged since the Soviet Union's fall in 1991: the United States will inevitably overreach, and Moscow must always step forward to demonstrate the limits of U.S. power.
His position won the former KGB spy plaudits at home, where he is trying to reassert his authority after protests and in the face of a stuttering economy.
"I think he got all the bonuses domestically. He held his head high, stood tall and did what he pledged to do - to be very firm but not confrontational," said Dmitry Trenin, a political analysts at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.
Putin clearly calculated that he had nothing to gain by making concessions over Syria, and little to lose if Russia was further alienated in a rich nations' club where it has looked the odd-one out since it became a fully fledged member 15 years ago.
"RESET"
U.S. officials played down the rebuff, describing the Putin-Obama meeting as "businesslike" and emphasizing the common ground over a sectarian civil war in which the two presidents are now both committed to arming the opposing sides.
"We both want to see an end to the conflict. We both want to see stability. We don't want to see extremists gain a foothold," said Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser.
"I think both leaders went out of their way to underscore that they can work together on this issue," Rhodes said. "If they can project a message that they have a convergence of views as it relates to a political negotiation, that keeps the possibility, the prospect of that political track alive."
But even their one joint initiative faced a setback. One source at the summit confirmed that Syrian peace talks called last month by Moscow and Washington, initially meant to be held in June, then July - were now postponed until August at least.
The tense exchange between Putin and Obama marks full circle since the administration of the newly-elected Obama called for a "reset" in ties with Russia in 2009 after a row between the Cold War foes over Russia's 2008 war against U.S.-ally Georgia.
Obama has touted the Russia reset - in which his then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart with a big red "reset" button - as one of his signature foreign achievements. (Clinton's aides notoriously mistranslated the button and labeled it "overload" in Russian.)
WE ARE GOING TO DELIVER
Putin arrived the night before the summit and made his unrelenting position clear at a press conference with his host, Britain's David Cameron.
Putin hammered home his point that arming Syrian rebels was reckless by zeroing in on an incident from last month in which a rebel fighter was filmed biting on the entrails of an enemy.
"One does not really need to support people who not only kill their enemies but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the camera," he said as Cameron stood by.
From the outset, Putin was isolated at the summit.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused Putin of supporting "thugs" and said Syria would be discussed by the other seven powers, with Russia as a "plus one". Putin's foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov fired back, saying the Canadian's remarks came "from the position of an outside observer".
After the bilateral meeting with Obama, Putin went to a dinner in a lodge on the shore of Lough Erne where the leaders discussed Syria over a dinner of crab, fillet of beef, and whisky-laced custard.
Putin refused to accept any public declaration that could imply Assad would go. He won: the final communique on Syria did not even mention Assad's name.
He also defended Russia's arms shipments to Syria and suggested that more might be coming: "We are supplying weapons under legal contracts to the legal government. That is the government of President Assad. And if we are going to sign such contracts, we are going to deliver," he said.
Western officials still suggest that Moscow's alliance with Assad is not as strong as Putin's remarks imply. "Clearly Putin doesn't hold back with his views," said one Western official who tried to play down the disagreements.
"Don't expect Vladimir Putin to pick up the phone to Damascus and say 'the game's over'," he said. "The Russians have deliberately and utterly not tied themselves to him (Assad) as an individual and have always given themselves some wriggle room."
Western officials have suggested for months that Moscow might soon drop Assad, only to find Putin as staunch as ever, even when the war was going the rebels' way. Now, with Assad's forces having seized battlefield momentum in recent months, there seems less reason than ever for Moscow to ditch him.
Putin has another reason to want to look tough abroad, to consolidate support at home at a time when the faltering economy is hurting his standing.
"Despite the emotions, the summit was in many respects a success for Russian diplomacy," the business daily Vedomosti wrote, suggesting Russia had made no concessions and the West had shown it was not ready to act if Moscow was not on board.
Moskovsky Komsomolets, a popular daily with a reputation for catching the public mood, was more uneasy: "Putin is alone again," it wrote. "But do we need to be sorry about it?"
(Additional reporting by Andrew Osborn, Jeff Mason, Roberta Rampton and Alexei Anishchuk in Enniskillen; Editing by Peter Graff)
Russia's President Vladimir Putin gestures during a media conference
after a G8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland June 18, 2013.
REUTERS/Matt Dunham/Pool
And we try to involve ourselves in this? How do you manage this chaos? What does Syria have to do with our national security in America?
http://news.yahoo.com/iraqi-shiites-...160318017.html
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Dr...-MILITANTS.JPGQuote:
Iraqi Shi'ites flock to Assad's side as sectarian split widens
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/FZ...b5cec5193.jpegBy Suadad al-Salhy | Reuters – 58 mins ago
By Suadad al-Salhy
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Among the Iranian pilgrims, foreign executives and tourists in the departure lounge at Baghdad airport, a group of young Iraqis prepare to wage religious war in Syria - not for the rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad but against them.
Dressed in jeans, their hair cropped short, the 12 men awaiting their flight are Iraqi Shi'ites, among hundreds heading for what they see as a struggle to defend fellow Syrian Shi'ites and their holy sites from the mainly Sunni Muslim rebels.
Syria is splintering the Middle East along a divide between the two main denominations of Islam, becoming a battlefield in a proxy war between Assad's main regional ally, Shi'ite Iran, and his Sunni enemies in Turkey and the Gulf Arab states.
The conflict has already drawn in streams of Sunni Islamist fighters on the rebel side, while Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah is openly fighting for Assad.
Now the flow of Iraqi militiamen across the border is also casting doubt on the Shi'ite-led Baghdad government's official position of neutrality in the Syrian civil war that has killed 90,000 people in more than two years.
For Ali, 20, fighting for the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas militia brigade meant joining his father in Syria to protect a Shi'ite shrine near Damascus from the Sunni rebels.
"It is my legitimate duty to go there and fight to defend Sayyida Zeinab Shrine," Ali told Reuters just before he left Baghdad last week. "Should we accept seeing Zeinab, the grand daughter of Prophet Mohammad, being captured again?"
As the Syrian war grinds into its third year, sectarian killings are increasing, while hardline Sunni clerics are declaring Jihad or holy war on the Shi'ites of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. All this is inciting Shi'ite militants to fight back.
Reports abound that Sunni rebels have desecrated some of Syria's many Shi'ite shrines, including the Hojr Ibn Oday sanctuary, although these are often difficult to verify due to media restrictions in Syria and the general fog of war.
In the last few months, Iraqi Shi'ite militias have begun openly recognizing their formerly clandestine role in Syria, which has helped to double their recruitment, according to militia commanders.
However, this has also exposed schisms and infighting over the leadership of the Syrian and Iraqi militants who fight alongside Assad's troops.
Many Shi'ite fighters are young volunteers like Ali, but others are Iranian-trained militiamen who honed their skills against the U.S.-led forces which occupied Iraq until 2011.
Ali and other militants from around Iraq gathered recently at the Baghdad home of Abu Zeinab, a former senior leader from the Mehdi army militia, where they spent a few nights before travelling through the Baghdad airport to Syria.
Abu Zeinab said militant leaders took care of recruitment, equipment, flight booking and expenses, securing permits from the Syrian government and sometimes coordinating the different Shi'ite militant groups.
Militants say around 50 Iraqi Shi'ites fly to Damascus every week to fight, often alongside Assad's troops or to protect the Sayyida Zeinab shrine on the outskirts of Damascus, a particularly holy place for Shi'ites.
"The numbers of volunteers have significantly increased after Sunni rebel attacks which basically were targeting Shi'ites and the Shi'ite shrines in Syria," said Abu Zeinab. "We ask clerics whom we trust to register young men who they want to fight in Syria."
GOVERNMENT ROLE?
Iraq was dominated by its Sunni minority until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but now has a government led by members of the Shi'ite majority under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. For them, Syria's upheaval is a nightmare; they believe a collapse of Assad's government will bring to power a hostile Sunni regime that will inflame Iraq's own Sunni-Shi'ite tensions.
Already sectarian attacks are resurging as al Qaeda's local wing and other Islamist Sunni insurgents regain ground in the western desert bordering Syria. Nearly 2,000 people have died in violence since April, with bombings targeting Shi'ite and Sunni mosques and neighborhoods as well as the security forces.
Iraq says it has a policy of non-interference in Syria, and keeps channels open with Assad's government and the opposition. But Western countries accuse Baghdad of turning a blind eye to support for Assad, such as allowing Iranian aircraft to use its airspace for flying military equipment to Syria.
Baghdad dismisses those charges and denies it is allowing Shi'ite militants to travel freely to Syria or giving them any logistical support.
"There has been an exaggeration of Iraqi brigades or units fighting in Syria. Really there has been a limited number of volunteers," Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters in an interview. "These volunteers have gone there without any sanction or approval or support from the government or the Iraqi regime or the political leaders."
But Iraq's domestic politics are complex and some Shi'ite parties rely heavily on Iranian support, making them more sympathetic to Tehran's position on Syria.
Privately, Shi'ite politicians, officials and militant leaders acknowledge support is provided to Assad, and that means allowing Shi'ite fighters to flow into Syria.
"Shi'ite politicians believe the best way to keep Sunni extremist fighters out of Iraq is by keeping them busy in Syria," said a Maliki adviser, who talked in condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "All the Iraqi government has done so far, is to look the other way to the militant movements from Iraq to Syria," he said.
INFIGHTING
Militants usually fly in small groups of 10-15 from Baghdad and the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, sometimes disguised as pilgrims. Their small bags may include uniforms, military equipment and sometimes pistols, militia fighters say.
Militia commanders say they have used their influence and the sympathy of Shi'ite officials in escorting fighters with their equipment through security checkpoints in Baghdad.
Most of those fighting in Syria are former members of the Mehdi army of anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, or from the Badr Organization - the armed wing of ISCI political party - and the Asaib al-Haq and Kata'ib Hezbollah militias. Most are loyal to the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a religious authority, fighters and Iraqi politicians say.
Some Mehdi army fighters took refuge in Syria when Iraqi and U.S. forces crushed their group in 2007. There they formed the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas brigade in coordination with the Syrian government and Khamenei's office in Damascus to defend the Sayyida Zeinab Shrine, militant commanders say.
Even experienced Iraqi militants had to join that brigade and fight under the command of Syrian Shabiha loyalists, who are mostly from Assad's own Alawite clan, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. This was a condition for being permitted and equipped by the Syrian Government, Iraqi militant leaders said.
Now the rules of engagement have changed, and splits have emerged among Syrian and Iraqi Shi'ite fighters. The Iraqi Mehdi army, Asaib al-Haq and Kata'ib Hezbollah have begun fighting under the command of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which helped Assad troops to recapture the strategic town of Qusair this month.
Military discipline imposed by leaders of Asaib al-Haq and Kata'ib Hezbollah on the Iraqis has irritated the Shabiha, some Iraqi fighters say, because the Syrians had tried to take advantage of the chaos to profit financially from the fighting.
Those disagreements erupted into a gunbattle near the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab few weeks ago between Asaib, Kata'ib and some Iraqi Mehdi Army fighters on one side and Abu Ajil, the Syrian commander of the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas brigade, and his local followers on the other. Two Iraqi fighters and three Syrian Shabiha died in the clash, militants in Baghdad said.
A reconciliation meeting was held under orders of Khamenei's office, but divisions fester and Iraqi combatants have formed a new brigade, refusing to fight under Syrian command.
"I am not taking a salary from the Syrian government, no one has a right to treat me as a mercenary Shabiha," said Abu Sajad, a former Mehdi Armi fighter, and one of the Shi'ite leaders who established the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas brigade. "I won't ever fight again by the side of those who killed my brothers."
(Editing by Patrick Markey and David Stamp)
Iraqi mourners carry the coffin of Dhia Mutasharm, a Shi'ite militia fighter
killed in clashes with the Free Syrian Army, during a funeral in Basra, 420 km
(261 miles) southeast of Baghdad in this May 6, 2013 file photo.
REUTERS/Atef Hassan/Files
A powerful piece arguing against Western intervention... from a British monthly magazine called Prospect
The Syria trap
Is Britain’s plan to arm the rebels a dangerous miscalculation?
By James Harkin
Bedding down at a Syrian rebel barracks just behind the frontline in Aleppo city was never going to be easy, but it is the screaming which keeps me awake. Long choruses of anguished howls come from the other end of a narrow corridor, where the rebels I’ve eaten dinner with are setting on four unfortunates they had just detained in the street outside. Unable to sleep, I join some of the other men on the balcony outside, drinking endless pots of Arabic coffee and watching the hypnotic glow of mortar shells rising and then gently falling in the night sky.
The commander supervising the interrogation of the four men, accused of a scheme of looting and perhaps murder, tells me they’re being punched, but from the rhythm of the wailing it sounds as if they’re being pinned down and flayed. “Thieves, killers,” says one rebel. “They were pretending to be with our revolution,” sniffs another.
This is a battalion of the Free Syrian Army—the loose lattice of hundreds of tiny battalions and a few larger militias, which include the forces that Britain has decided to back in a bid to drive out the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. They are constantly changing names and personnel and, in the main, answer to no one but themselves. That this group routinely resorts to such brutal treatment of others is not surprising; almost everyone with access to a weapon in the city seems to do so, often in response to popular demand, if those people are accused of looting or working for the other side.
But western governments should think hard about whether they really understand their chosen allies before they send arms to opposition fighters, as they may do this summer. Many European countries and the United States have recognised the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the fractious and ineffectual body which claims to act as the political arm of the opposition in exile, as the “sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” But only Britain and France have argued that arming the rebels on the ground might now be a good idea. Britain, with France, successfully pushed for the European Union to lift its embargo on providing arms to the rebels from 31st May, in a bid to bring an end to the two-year conflict, which has claimed more than 80,000 lives, according to a UN estimate in May.
Their calculation is that arming these rebels—or even just threatening to do so—will pile pressure on the Assad regime. They also hope that it will freeze out other opposition fighters—above all, the Islamist militants of Jabhat al-Nusra, who recently pledged their allegiance to al Qaeda. Foreign Secretary William Hague has said: “Our priority is to get the regime in Damascus and the opposition to the negotiating table… a decision to deliver lethal weapons will depend on the course of these [talks].” Less cautiously, Laurent Fabius, his French counterpart, has talked of “a weapons imbalance because Mr Bashar al-Assad has planes, etcetera, and the resistance fighters don’t have the same means.” He added: “As much as we are working for a political solution, on the ground things have to be rebalanced.”
Adding urgency to this pitch, in the past few weeks France has said that it has evidence of the use of sarin nerve gas by the regime. To rebut one of the fiercest objections to arming the rebels from other European governments, Fabius has claimed that anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, if supplied, might be rendered useless by remote control if they fell into the “wrong hands.”
Yet any extensive encounter with rebel brigades themselves suggests these calculations are dangerously wrong. For a start, there is often little to divide the rebels Britain has chosen to back from their Islamic counterparts—and none of them have any fondness for the west. British ministers and officials have clearly spent much time in Istanbul talking to the National Coalition. The British and French notion is that they might give arms to this body, which would hand them out to the Free Syrian Army. But it is not clear they have answers to the elementary questions about whether they can control the outcome if they do indeed funnel more weapons into the Syrian warzone.
The armed rebellion—in northern and eastern Syria, particularly—is bound up with family and tribe. In July last year, in a town near the Turkish border, on the same day that the armed rebels moved their rebellion from the surrounding towns and villages into Aleppo city, a 52-year-old electrical engineer called Abdul Kareem brought me his two oldest sons to talk to. Both had started out by demonstrating against the regime, but had tired of the brutal response and thrown in their lot with a battalion of the Free Syrian Army.
They were just back from fighting to eject regime forces from Zitan, the family village just south of Aleppo. Ayham, the capable-looking battalion commander, was 25 years old; Molham was a reflective 24 year old who’d left behind an architecture degree at Aleppo University and couldn’t wait to put down his Kalashnikov and get back to his studies. Three weeks later, however, Ayham was shot dead in a regime counter-offensive in the heavily contested southern district of Salaheddine. Since the fighting broke out in Aleppo last year—(Syria’s largest city had previously seemed immune to the uprising convulsing many others)—eight members of Abdul Kareem’s extended family have been killed. All were fighting with the rebels except one—a five-year-old cousin called Khalil who’d gone missing and been found, a week later, with his throat cut.
Nearly a year later, Aleppo is caught in the same stalemate as the strategic city of Homs before it. The poor districts of the south and east are controlled by various rebel factions while regime forces are in charge of the rest; Salaheddine remains a battleground. Molham, I discovered when I met him again this year, has replaced his older brother as battalion commander. His 100 or so men occupy five different frontline positions; in between shifts they repair to impromptu barracks. One is a former school, which they have been using since September, although it is only several hundred metres away from regime forces. Shortly after I arrive, I emerge from a trip to the outside toilet to find that a sniper, seeing signs of movement, has just taken a lump out of the front door. The culprit, says Adbul Kareem, pointing in the direction from which the bullet came, is probably a fighter from Iran or the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias, which have played a big role in supporting regime forces.
For two years, the violence in Syria has advanced through these cycles of attack followed by revenge massacres and creeping foreign involvement. In a way that threatens to ignite the tensions in Iraq and the region more widely, much of the killing is justified with sectarian rhetoric: Sunni against Shia. Syria has a Sunni majority, but has been ruled by the Shia Alawite sect. The rebels I talk to are Sunni—most are from the same Al-Akidi clan as Abdul Kareem, from Zitan. All, with the exception of one 50 year old who acts as a spiritual guide, and his teenage son who runs errands, are between 20 and 24 years old. Quite a few, like Molham, were university students when the conflict broke out; others, like the men who originally gave rise to the idea of a Free Syrian Army, are defectors from the regular army.
They have been taking terrible losses. A few days before I arrive, another cousin from this barracks, a 22-year-old former student at Aleppo University, was ambushed by regime forces in Al-Izaa. Molham looks weary and haunted, still trying to come to terms with everything that he’s seen. He’s forgotten all about architecture, he says: it now seems like a different world. With his men I rib him about a Swedish female journalist we met last summer and whom he obviously liked. He enjoys the joke, but has no time for women: shortly after, he apologises and leaves to go and pray. Last year, when I’d asked Abdul Kareem about the threat from Islamic extremism and al Qaeda, he’d taken offence. “My sons don’t even pray,” he’d barked, both proud and mortified. But with death a daily event, everyone prays now.
In the evening we lie around on cushions in the large schoolroom where everyone sleeps. The generator keeps failing; as we talk, we are plunged for long spells into perfect darkness. The chatter ripples with mentions of the Islamic group Jabhat al-Nusra, with whom the men have a friendly although uneasy relationship—but not the antagonistic one that you might conclude from the British and French decision to back the Free Syrian Army and oppose the supposed “extremists” of Nusra.
I’d seen many Nusra fighters on the drive into Aleppo, sometimes manning joint checkpoints with battalions working within the Free Syrian Army. At one point Abdul Kareem, who’d driven me in, asked me to stop taking pictures; Nusra, he said, might not appreciate it. The hundreds of ramshackle battalions affiliated with the Free Syrian Army still vastly outnumber Nusra, but numbers are not the issue. Stepping into the vacuum of rebel expertise and organisation, Nusra has set itself up as the special forces of the Syrian rebellion, every bit as ruthless as the pro-regime, paramilitary Shabiha (Assad supporters) on the other side.
“Everyone wants to fight, and they don’t much care who they fight with as long as they’re good,” shrugs Molham. He does offer that “if the world gave us weapons we wouldn’t need any help from these people”—the argument that seems to underpin the British and French conclusion. But as it is, he talks to Nusra regularly. Like all the other rebels I meet, he respects their religiosity and their fighting prowess and has no wish to do battle with them. Most are Syrian and good people, he says, even if many of their leaders are fanatical and Iraqi; they’ve discussed working together on operations, but nothing has come of it yet. “Our battalion,” he says with some pride, “is the only one in this city that Nusra say they respect.”
But while the Free Syrian Army rebels might want western arms, that doesn’t mean they like the west. He blames the west for everything. If they’d helped with weaponry and communication devices as they kept promising, his forces wouldn’t have needed help from Nusra or anyone else. He’s come to the conclusion that the west is playing a double game. “They hate Bashar and they hate Nusra, and they just want both their enemies to fight each other.”
Syria’s rebels are now in a dangerous bind. Having stirred the full force of a brutal regime, they badly need the battlefield skills and valour of Jabhat al-Nusra to keep their insurgency moving and protect the many civilians who supported them in the first place. But the blind fury of the Islamists of Nusra, who regard the Syrian army as infidels and Shia (and Alawite) Muslims as apostates, is pushing many Syrians back towards a discredited regime. On the walls of the school there’s little iconography associated with the revolution or the Free Syrian Army, but a great deal of Islamist imagery. “There is no God but Allah,” read several black flags on two of the classroom walls.
During the night a helicopter buzzes overhead, setting off a rebel siren and leading to a moment of panic. After regular attacks from the air, the roof of the school has been cracked open and its upper floors are glass-spattered mess; everyone sleeps in the same room on the ground floor. The sky still belongs to the regime, and the weapons at the disposal of the rebels—Kalashnikovs, a few Browning pistols and grenades—look puny in comparison. During one of the blackouts Abdul Kareem wanders out of the darkness to show me a box-like, homemade pipe bomb the men have just assembled. He does his best to chip in and tap friends and extended family abroad but the money, he says, is fast running out. “Now, zero,” he complains. “It’s all gone.”
The following day Molham takes Abdul Kareem and me to the frontline in Salaheddine. While another group of rebels drive off in the direction of the government lines, Molham inspects a homemade grenade freshly prepared for his unit from a pharmacy which has been turned into an impromptu soldering works. “What do you think of Syrian grenades?” he smiles, staring at it for over a minute, turning it around in his hands and practising throwing it.
That the rebels badly need more and better weapons is obvious. Yet given the forces ranged against them, it is not clear that it would make much difference to their campaign. He shows me where the regime launched its first air strike on rebel positions in the city: once an Islamic school, now it is concrete and twisted metal. Much of the rest of the neighbourhood is the same; like many of the most visible symbols of Syria’s armed rebellion, from Baba Amr in Homs to the towns surrounding Damascus, Salaheddine has been reduced to rubble. As the regime has retrenched in the last six months it has resorted to hurling heavy surface-to-surface missiles at areas of the north it has little hope of winning back. The previous day I’d looked around some of the places the regime forces had hit. The effect was more like an earthquake than an explosion: whole streets reduced to tiny white bricks.
The regime has healthy stocks of ballistic missiles, both Russian and Iranian, and these ones appear to have been fired from nearly 300 kilometres away in bases close to Damascus. Some rebel activists have taken to reporting their departure when they see them launched.
For all the debate among governments internationally about whether there is firm evidence that the regime has used chemical weapons, it has more than enough conventional weaponry to kill its citizens many times over. Should it ever run out, it has access to more, through the support of Russia and Iran. By unfreezing the EU embargo on supplying the rebels Britain and France have reckoned that they can call Assad’s bluff. But they have to contend with the open unease of many EU governments—and in Britain, members of parliament, where David Cameron has offered a free vote after more than 80 Conservative backbenchers demanded an opportunity to block the supply of weapons.
And Syria’s shadowy security state works best when it’s in a corner. Dark rumours of foreign plots to destabilise the country brought its ruling clique to power half a century ago, and have done much to keep it there since. That is still the regime’s best card.
For their part, the vast majority of the rebels I have met in Syria are openly contemptuous of their putative political representation abroad, with its shifting coalitions, accusing it of being in thrall to shady foreign interests and too far removed from the real fighting on the ground. It is tolerated by the rebels because they think it might win them weapons and recognition from the international community. It is highly unlikely that equipping the latter with better weapons would bring them to the bargaining table. Instead, they would redouble their efforts to finish the job—and Molham admits that his rebellion no longer defines that task as the pursuit of freedom and democracy, but of honour and revenge. “Five or 10 years,” he says. “I won’t leave. I must stand.” When I suggest a political solution he scolds me for my naivety. “All the clever people have left Syria. And for us this is not a game of chess.”
I’d heard much the same last summer, when I asked the ostensible leader of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo (and another cousin of Abdul Kareem and Molham) about his international backers in the Gulf states and the west. “They don’t give us any support, and what support they do give us is corrupt or not worth having,” he’d growled. “And in return for this they want us to make a deal with this regime. It’s not going to happen.”
It is not surprising that the Syrian rebels don’t much like the west. From the beginning many of them saw al Qaeda and Nato as more or less indistinguishable; foreign interlopers who were not to be trusted but whose protection might prove handy. The first Free Syrian Army rebels I met, in a Damascus safe house in February last year, were ordinary soldiers from farming communities who had broken from the regular army as a result of the brutal military response to civilian demonstrations in their areas. Their mission was plainly defensive; they had no real strategy about how to oust the Assad regime and had come to the meeting only to ask for more weapons. Now, they feel betrayed. European countries and the US, by continually hinting that they are about get tough on the Assad regime, flirting with different opposition alliances and implying that the regime was on the point of collapse, may have given these young men false hope—encouraged them to go out and fight, even die, in the hope that governments would come to the rescue. Whatever the west does now will, in their eyes, seem too little and too late.
Meanwhile, the west is in danger of misreading the threat from Jabhat al-Nusra. That threat is certainly real and growing, but it is to Syrians and not the west. Even if many of its leaders are foreign, the bulk of its fighters seem to be Syrian and have no appetite for international terror. While there have been flashes of tension between Nusra and Sunni tribes over resources and their puritanical edicts, the Free Syrian Army rebels are not going to turn on them because the west wants them to; Nusra, after all, has done much more to help them.
And even if we did persuade one powerful brigade of rebels to clamp down on Nusra in return for weapons, the last thing Syria needs, in a powder keg of grudges and uneasy alliances, is yet another proxy militia pitting Syrian against Syrian. The likely effect would be to blow the armed rebellion apart, and it is far from clear that “our side” would win (or that they would stay on our side if they did). And what do we do if we give our chosen rebels everything they are asking for, including a no-fly zone, and the Syrian army, with one press of its ballistic button, blows them and our weapons to smithereens? There is no appetite at all in the EU or US for committing forces; rather, the opposite.
Hague and Fabius have spoken as if their own governments are convening the talks, but they are just two small players around a very big table. Unless they can win the support of America—unlikely, given President Barack Obama’s focus on getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and beyond that, on Iran’s nuclear programme—their rhetoric is not going to be matched by meaningful action on the ground. The real effect of any supply of arms from an EU country would be to trigger a kind of arms race, in which countries vie to pour weapons into the crucible. Turkey, Qatar and the other Gulf states might step up their own arms deliveries to their choice of opposition rebels as they jockey for regional championship of Sunni Islam. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah would very likely respond, with greater force and conviction, the Iranians determined to protect their fellow Shia. That would aggravate sectarian fault lines, pitting militant Islamist against militant Islamist in a way that, even now, few ordinary Syrians say they want.
On our way back from Aleppo to the Turkish border, Abdul Kareem and I are forced to take a different route because of heavy fighting around one of the last remaining regime holdouts, an air base called Menagh. I find out later that some rebels were ambushed by irregular fighters who came from a nearby Shia village; several were killed, including a young friend of Abdul Kareem and his sons. The situation is becoming increasingly bleak for the rebels. Not a single division of the Syrian army, not even those largely Sunni brigades the regime is allegedly keeping in reserve because of concerns about their loyalty, have left en masse to join the rebels. The minorities and many moderate Sunnis are scared of this anarchic rebellion, but are also painfully aware that this tired, brutal regime can’t protect them forever. Some have tried hard to disentangle their communities from the battles that are being fought in their name.
After Iraq, it was predictable that the implosion of the Assad regime, authoritarian and secular, like that of Saddam Hussein, would see many Syrians retreating to their religious and ethnic identities and a rogue’s gallery of opportunists arriving to set out their stalls. Those in think tanks like to float the break-up of the Syrian state as a potential solution, but I have yet to meet a Syrian who is enthusiastic about it, or who even thinks that it will happen. The borders of the Syrian state may have been drawn up in 1916 by the British-French Sykes-Picot agreement to suit the national interests of those two countries, but they have acquired a reality over the passing decades.
If Britain and other EU countries really want to help Syrians, they would be better advised to step up humanitarian aid to the millions of displaced Syrians who urgently need it. They might also grant visas to many, like the rest of Abdul Kareem’s young family, who are living in shocking conditions in refugee camps around the country’s borders and who cannot get a visa to go anywhere else.
But what Syria needs more than anything else are honest brokers inside the country who can reach out across military lines and encourage Syrians to talk to each other—as has been done recently by Syrian Kurds trying to broker peace between Shia and Sunni communities. It is much easier said than done, of course, but it remains the only way to separate the regime from its people. It is also the only course that can now bring Syria and the whole region back from the sectarian catastrophe towards which it is thundering, and squeeze out the extremists and proxies on both sides.
After so many tens of thousands of deaths, it would be even more cruel if a popular movement for self-determination should end with the country slipping beyond anyone’s control.
James Harkin's reportage, "War Against All: The Struggle for Northern Syria," is published as an e-book. He will take up a visiting fellowship at the Reuters Institute, Oxford University, in the autumn
And an equally powerful argument from an American magazine, the New York Review of Books
Stay Out of Syria!
JUNE 20, 2013
David Bromwich
After the troubling revelations of the May 8 Senate hearing on Benghazi, much remains unclear about the attack that killed four Americans last September. Were the killers aiming to prove the incompetence of American power? Or was the assault directed more specifically against CIA operations? How did the White House, the State Department, and the CIA all agree to say so early and wrongly that the attack could have been the spontaneous action of a crowd infuriated by an anti-Muslim video? Why did the administration delete from its talking points the mention of five similar attacks in Libya, and the fact that al-Qaeda-linked forces were known to be active in the vicinity?
One thing is clear. The Benghazi killings were an indirect but predictable consequence of the NATO intervention that overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. Disorder was a necessary condition of the attack. The “light footprint” of NATO was never going to be sufficient to contain the forces the war released. With the death of Qaddafi and the instability of NATO’s interim arrangements, his troops and weapons moved southward in Africa; and the evacuation of US State Department workers in Mali in January and the attack on international workers in Algeria are now widely understood to have been another fruit of the NATO action in Libya. For Americans, of course, Libya is almost forgotten, but for North Africa and the watching Arab world, it remains a vivid and disturbing memory: seven months of air attacks, with thousands of sorties, 7,700 bombs dropped or missiles launched, and uncounted civilian casualties.
The deepening violence of the Syrian civil war is also in some measure a consequence of Libya: Qaddafi’s disbanded army and unguarded weapons moved southward in Africa, but they also moved eastward to Asia. The state terror of the most “surgical” air war leaves in its wake many thousands of stateless terrorists. As Nancy Youssef pointed out in a penetrating survey on March 14 in the McClatchy newspapers (“Middle East in Turmoil 10 Years After Iraq Invasion”): “The most effective anti-Assad rebel military faction [in Syria], the Nusra Front,” is itself “a branch of al Qaida in Iraq, the same radical Islamist group that the US fought in that country and that the current Iraqi government also is battling.”
The recent past is still with us, if we take the time to look. This is the background against which one must assess the judgment of those persons—well placed in the media and the foreign policy elite—who have lately urged another violent intervention by the US in Arab lands. Three days before the Benghazi hearings, on May 5, Bill Keller published a double-length Op-Ed in The New York Times. His column was entitled “Syria Is Not Iraq,” and its moral was adequately conveyed in Keller’s final words: “Getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.”
Let us pause to remember Iraq before we follow Keller’s invitation to get over it. Almost 4,500 Americans died in Iraq, and 32,000 came home wounded. Of the numbers of Iraqi dead that would be living had the Americans not bombed, invaded, and occupied their country, reliable estimates are harder to come by, but in 2008 The New England Journal of Medicine estimated a total of 151,000 violent deaths by June 2006; and the seven years that followed have added many thousands more.
At the time of the Iraq invasion, Keller was an Op-Ed columnist and senior writer at the Times. In 2002–2003, when his newspaper’s slanted coverage of Iraq played a significant part in leading the country into war, Keller believed the Times stories based on forged or dubious evidence circulated by the Bush administration, and threw his considerable journalistic energy into support of the war. Looking back, in his May 5 Op-Ed, he speaks euphemistically of “our ill-fated adventure in Iraq”; his own part in it he calls “a humbling error of judgment” that for a time “left me gun-shy.”
But Syria is not Iraq, he says, and he now recommends the deployment of American military might against Syria. Keller’s pressing fear is that by inaction, the US may surrender its role as international leader: “Prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.” By means of violent intervention, he believes, the tragedy can be made smaller; and he deplores the reticence of President Obama as the evasion of “a president looking for excuses to stand pat.”
There follow, in Keller’s piece, a series of elaborate distinctions intended to show that Syria presents a more soluble problem than Iraq. “In Iraq our invasion unleashed a sectarian war” whereas “in Syria, [sectarian war] is already well under way.” We ought to intervene, then, because things are already bad. The underlying assumption is that American action could not make things worse. “This time,” Keller continues, “we have allies waiting for us to step up and lead.” We did have allies, and much the same allies, in Libya, but in the thirteen hundred words of this column the word “Libya” does not occur.
The evident self-assurance of Keller’s advice on Syria was dismaying in itself; but it also confirmed a tendency that emerged in a series of recent Times articles. These news articles by several hands all bore headlines of a consistent tendency, implying that American military intervention had now become the natural upshot of events in Syria.
On April 26, for example, a story by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt was entitled “White House Says Syria Has Used Chemical Arms.” The factual substance of the article was ambiguous, and its headline might more accurately have read: “Chemical Weapons Used in Syria. US Uncertain of Source.” Again, on May 7 the headline delivered a judgment: “White House Sticks to Cautious Path on Syria.” This would not, in most papers at most times, have qualified as a front-page story at all. That there has been no change of policy is hardly news unless a great many sensible persons are expecting a change. The headline implied that the common sense of the well-informed now favors armed intervention; yet the paper had carried the day before, in a corner of page 9, a Reuters dispatch of some significance. This was a report of a statement by a qualified investigator, Carla Del Ponte of the UN commission of inquiry on Syria, who flatly contradicted the rumors of the use of sarin by the Assad government: “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.” UN officials commented that there was “no conclusive proof” about the use of chemical weapons. Astonishingly the Reuters story was neither analyzed nor incorporated in the lead Times story of the day’s events.
In April and May, it must be said, the Times has been an extreme case. On May 7, when the Times played down the public contradiction of its own reports, a Wall Street Journal story by Naftali Bendavid confirmed the skeptical judgment about Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons by testimony from a second non-American source. The secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was said to acknowledge indications that chemical weapons may have been used but without any “confirmed, consolidated information as to who might have used [them].” On May 6, The Guardian reported that the UK defense secretary Philip Hammond “admitted that Western intelligence services would probably have to wait for a further chemical attack before gathering enough information to trace it back to the government.” A week later, on May 12, Robert Gates on Face the Nation offered a judgment of the wisdom of American intervention in Arab lands: “I thought it was a mistake in Libya,” said Gates. “And I think it is a mistake in Syria.” That verdict came with a certain authority from the person who, as defense secretary under Bush and Obama, spent much of 2007 keeping America out of war with Iran and much of Obama’s first term withdrawing American soldiers from Iraq.
Meanwhile, within Congress, the voices that led the march to war in 2003 have been clamoring against any hesitation by Obama to take military action. About John McCain, it is no satire but simple truth to say that he cannot have enough wars. On May 8, McCain published in Time a characteristic editorial, “Syria: Intervention Is in Our Interest,” which contained a list of practical suggestions. Since the column supplies answers without having asked questions, it may serve economy to list in brackets the questions that naturally occur to a mind less confident and rash:
We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces, as recommended last year by President Obama’s national-security team. [“Vetted” by whom and with what expertise?] We could strike Assad’s aircraft and Scud-missile launchers. [Inside Russian-built air defenses stronger than those in Libya?] We could destroy artillery and drive Assad’s forces from their posts. [All without ground forces?]
Yet much of the recent pressure for another American intervention is coming from liberals. Senator Carl Levin, for one, cosigned with McCain a letter to the president on March 21 which urged—among other “limited military options”—the launching of “precision airstrikes” against the Syrian air force, as well as “more robust assistance” to opposition fighters believed to be unconnected with al-Qaeda. One of the tricks of persuasion of the liberal section of the war party, from Iraq through Libya to Syria, has been to aestheticize war. The Iraqi advisers of the Bush administration—Ahmed Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, and others—frequently said that American forces occupying Iraq would be “greeted with sweets and flowers.” The optimism of Bill Keller departs from that pattern to some degree, and offers elevating comparisons to dance and music: “All of this [program of military intervention] must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by a symphony of diplomacy.”
A less sanguine prognosis was suggested by Dexter Filkins in the May 13 New Yorker. Looking for reasons to intervene—though, by the end of the article, he does not seem to have found them—Filkins interviewed Fouad Ajami, but quotes him without remarking that Ajami was, as indeed he remains, an enthusiastic endorser of the war in Iraq. The same article quotes Anne-Marie Slaughter without mentioning her close association with Hillary Clinton and the strong position she took in pressing Obama to execute “regime change” in Libya. Slaughter treated Filkins to the inverted aestheticism typical of much war propaganda when she imagined a result of a Syrian chemical attack: “Syrian civilians rolling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, dying by the thousands while the United States stands by.” That fantasy of the future was challenged within days by the assessments from Del Ponte, Rasmussen, and Hammond.
The Obama administration has been strangely tentative in justifying its choice not to arm Syrian rebels: a policy that would need little defense if the president could bring himself to speak it plainly. On the use of sarin, the White House statement told of an ambiguous “chain of custody” of the prohibited chemicals: a phrase that clarifies nothing for most readers. It would have been straighter and wiser to say: “Things are in such chaos in Syria that we can’t be sure whether the government or the rebels used sarin.” Filkins himself reflects the same tentativeness: he is drawn to the idea (dimly in the background) that there should be a military solution, and if so the US should be equipped to supply it. His article—and there have been others like it—exhibits a plenitude of military speculations but is void of political analysis. To judge by what he writes, Filkins did not consult Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Pape, or any other well-known authorities whose previous warnings have proved accurate. In fact, Brzezinski recently issued a sharp admonition in Time:
The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddly-winks intervention from around the edges of the conflict—no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth—would simply make the situation worse. None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the US. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario.
Filkins’s article closes by quoting a government official who gets away with saying unchallenged that Iraq was “a crisis…that was contained.”
Contained at what cost, and for how long? The day of the Boston Marathon bombings saw seventy-five killed in Iraq, and 356 wounded: just one story, which few Americans will have read, out of dozens about the aftermath of the American occupation. Our rehearsals of our own good intentions, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and now in Syria, have swollen to the shape of a rationalized addiction. What then should the US do? Nothing, until we can do something good. But the situation could not be less promising. At present, the main support of Syrian opposition forces comes from Saudis and Qataris. The US has offered help at two removes, but lacks the intelligence to perform much more without strengthening al-Qaeda as we did in Libya. Luis Lema, in a recent editorial in Le Temps of Geneva, rightly remarked that the war is becoming “not only less and less ‘legible,’ but more and more unpredictable.”
And each day adds a new reminder of the futility of allegedly pragmatic solutions. A Times report on May 15 by Anne Barnard and Hania Mourtada (“An Atrocity in Syria, with No Victim Too Small”) told of the sectarian “cleansing” by pro-government forces of Sunni enclaves, in the village of Bayda and the city of Baniyas, both located in a mainly Alawite and Christian province. Three hundred twenty-two corpses have been identified, many of them horribly mutilated. As a pledge of retaliation, a rebel commander filmed himself “cutting out an organ of a dead pro-government fighter, biting it and promising the same fate to Alawites.” It is a saccharine optimism that says the country has begun to fall apart and a more “proactive” US could hold it together.
Syria has already largely disintegrated. The government and its Alawite and Christian supporters have secured the west, the Kurds are in the northeast, and the Islamist rebels are in the east (where the al-Nusra Front has already begun to enforce sharia law). The grossness of the chatter about intervention is suggested by a recent debate between American advisers on Syria and the “moderate” rebel forces they are best satisfied with. The question in dispute, as Phil Sands revealed in a May 9 report in The National (“America’s Hidden Agenda in Syria’s War”), turned on whether the moderates should go into combat first against the Assad loyalists, or against the al-Nusra Front whom they will eventually have to kill.
But the untold story of Syria concerns something beyond the atrocities on both sides. It has also to do with the sinews of war—the financial motive and muscle that keeps it going. A Financial Times article by Roula Khalaf and Abigail Fielding-Smith on May 17, “How Qatar Seized Control of the Syrian Revolution,” quoted persons close to the Qatari government who estimate that $3 billion has thus far been spent bankrolling the rebel groups. Sources inside Syria had guessed only a third of that. But the money must keep coming, since Qatar is buying up the loyalty of networks of rebel forces as an investment in the divided Syria of the future. This is calculated for geopolitical and economic influence, without clear religious or ideological motivation: the rulers of Qatar have no apparent common ground with the Islamist sects they are subsidizing. Nor does their involvement bode a peaceful future order: the flow of money, according to Khalaf and Fielding-Smith, “has already created many enemies inside Syria, and not just among pro-regime supporters.”
Against Qatar and Saudi Arabia stand the Shia powers including Iran and its ally Hezbollah, along with numbers of Iraqi Shiites whom the war of 2003 displaced. All these groups support the Alawites—related to Shia Islam. All of them except the Alawites are outsiders to Syria who for religious, cultural, and political reasons do not believe that they are outsiders. The US, by contrast, is seen throughout the region as a perfect outsider. The violence has now taken almost 80,000 lives, yet it remains a reasonable fear that disorders sprung from another American war could lead to still more ferocious bloodlettings. Our ally Turkey, which has supported Syrian rebels, is troubled by the prospect of separationist energy driving the Kurds of Syria to form a state of their own; and the International Crisis Group report on Syria’s Kurds (issued on January 22) contains an entire section uneasily entitled: “From Arab Uprising to Kurdish Opportunity.”
Americans for a long time have tended to think (when we think of other countries at all) that the more new nations spring up, the better. This goes with our relaxed communitarianism but bears little relation to realities elsewhere. Our latest siege of optimism, which followed the collapse of the Soviet empire, has now been given a fair trial over a quarter of a century. It has not always worked out well. Not in the Balkans, not in the former Soviet republics, and not, it seems, in the Middle East.
The high-pressure bid for intervention in Syria may have come to a temporary halt. (The quickness of its start and stop recalls those weeks of March and April 2007 that witnessed an equally sudden press for war with Iran.) On May 7, John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced their plan for an international conference on Syria, possibly as early as the end of May. And barring the extreme possibilities—a White House panicked from other causes and desperate to prove its potency; another Israeli bombing of Syria that succeeds in dragging the US in—it might require a breakdown of negotiations to prompt Barack Obama to follow the militarized advice he is getting now from sources that do not include the US military.
An article on the Kerry–Lavrov meeting by Peter Beaumont in the May 5 Observer of London made clear, as no American publication yet has done, the extent of the damage to the US from the miscarriage of NATO actions in Libya. The powers outside NATO whom we must rely on—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—eventually realized that in Libya the three leading powers, France, Britain, and the US, were all bent on regime change rather than merely the enforcement of a no-fly zone. Those countries, as Beaumont pointed out, felt betrayed and they will be understandably harder to move on Syria.
The difficulty of uniting so distrustful a group will be matched, in any negotiations on Syria, by the disunity of the Arab League. They are divided between Shiite and Sunni loyalties and often further divided within. But theirs is the region that will bear the burden of the nearly one and a half million Syrians who are now refugees, most of them in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. Iranian involvement, qualified observers have said, will be necessary for a lasting peace agreement, given the role of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran in the hostilities; and by keeping Iran in the outer darkness, Obama’s lack of imagination may have served his cause as poorly as his insistence on saying again and again that “Assad must go.” A good result of negotiations would be a transitional governing body that offers Assad a slow exit, but the obstacles to such an outcome are formidable.
The refugees of the Iraq war were the great unspoken disaster of the bombing, invasion, and armed occupation of Iraq, during the first five years of our nine-year stay. Two and a half million fled that country, out of a population of 27 million. Thus far the US has admitted as immigrants 64,000: a little under 3 percent. The vast majority of those displaced lives have become the unasked responsibility of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab nations. And the scale of the crisis of the refugees from Syria is only beginning to be recognized. Of the nearly one and a half million refugees scattered by the civil war into foreign lands, 500,000 are in Jordan alone, more than half of them under the age of eighteen.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote about the millions of stateless and rightless persons cast up by the early wars of the twentieth century and the imperialist manufacture of new nations before and after World War I. A whole generation of the displaced were brought into the world so lacking in hope, so without access to elementary rights that, for them, to live within the law presented no advantage over crime and for that matter terrorism. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Arendt wrote, “but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.” The disasters of the twentieth century, as she judged them, had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.” An end no happier, if we do not take care, awaits us down the road of the “carefully choreographed” violence and the “symphony of diplomacy” conducted by the last of the great powers.
—May 23, 2013
There are errors in both reports, in the case of both (although Bromwich's article was written in May) there were reports a few weeks ago that Jabhat al-Nusra has split with one faction supporting the union with the Islamic State of Iraq and Shams, and the other faction rejecting it. Jabhat al-Nusrat is believed to have become the al-Qaeda franchise because it was so condemned by the USA which is an unreliable source; it seems to have become as riddled with factionalism and personality cults as other Syrian rebel grouplets.
In the case of Harkin he writes:
Those in think tanks like to float the break-up of the Syrian state as a potential solution, but I have yet to meet a Syrian who is enthusiastic about it, or who even thinks that it will happen. The borders of the Syrian state may have been drawn up in 1916 by the British-French Sykes-Picot agreement to suit the national interests of those two countries, but they have acquired a reality over the passing decades.
This is factually incorrect, as the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement envisaged the Vilayet of Mosul, which is now in Iraq, as being part of the French zone of influence. The French foreign minister, Berthelot, was so hung over at the San Remo conference he signed Mosul away to the British because he wanted to go back to bed, although the French had second thoughts about it anyway because of the size of the French zone of influence. Subsequently, at Lausanne in 1922-23 and after, the Turkish government attempted to 'reclaim' Mosul for Turkey and failed -taking their revenge on Britain and France with the illegal annexation of Alexandretta in 1938-39, a province still claimed by Syria. In the end (in 192-eight the French got into Iraq through the Compagnie Francaises des Petroles (f1924, better known these days as Total) when the shareholding of the Iraq Petroleum Company was forcibly re-structured by the British.
NB: THis post has been edited to remove ultra explicit images of death.
"Rebel" group Jabhat al-Nusra beheads a Catholic Priest.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013...n_3527372.html
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1220353/th...URAD-570.jpg?6Quote:
Francois Murad, Catholic Priest 'Beheaded By Jihadist Fighters In Syria'
Huffington Post UK | By Sara C Nelson Posted: 01/07/2013 09:25 BST | Updated: 01/07/2013 16:24 BST
A Catholic priest has been killed in Syria, it has been confirmed by the official Vatican news agency.
Franciscan Father Francois Murad died after fighters linked to the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra attacked the monastery he was staying at, local sources say.
It shows a man the channel understands is the priest, sitting cross-legged with his hands bound, alongside two other men while fighters surround them chanting “Allah Akbar” (God is great).
As the first man, believed to be Father Murad, is beheaded with what appears to be a kitchen knife, several observers are seen stepping close to his body to capture close-up photographs and video.
The site claims Father Murad had been accused of collaborating with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, though the accusations are unconfirmed.
The official report into Father Murad's death – submitted via the Fides news agency - states he died in Gassanieh, northern Syria. It claims the circumstances of his death “are not fully clear”, but confirms the monastery where he was living had been attacked by militants.
Fides states Father Murad had began the construction of a coenobitic monastery in Gassanieh, shortly after being ordained. At the start of the civil war, the structure was bombed and he moved to the convent of the Custody of the Holy Land for safety.
“Let us pray,” wrote the Custody of the Holy Land Pierbattista Pizzaballa OFM “so that this absurd and shameful war ends soon and that the people of Syria can go back to living a normal life.
"Unfortunately Syria has now become a battleground not only between Syrian forces, but also between Arab countries and the international community."
Speaking to Syria Report, he added: "The world must know that the support of gunmen by the west is helping extremists in killing Syrians. With such stances, not a single Christian will remain in the east."
In May David Cameron announced Britain is to double military support for Syrian rebels to help them withstand the "onslaught" from Assad's regime.
Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo, titular of the Syrian Catholic archeparchy in Hassaké-Nisibis told Fides: "The whole story of Christians in the Middle East is marked and made fruitful by the blood of the martyrs of many persecutions.
“Lately, father Murad sent me some messages that clearly showed how conscious he was of living in a dangerous situation, and offered his life for peace in Syria and around the world."
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1220176/th...IEST-570.jpg?6
The Western Media is lying big time about Syria. I travel frequently to Syria and all my friends are of a mixed group, Muslims, Christians, Alawis, Druze, Shi'i, Communists, Atheists, etc. They all support Bashar al-Assad, the only people against him are the Saudi funded Wahabi terrorists and the Western Hypocritical nations.
Pray for the safety of Syria!
Well that is one view idiotbaba... though I would encourage others to read widely and explore other ideas on this. There is considerable and immense opposition to Assad which started way before the involvement of Saudi Arabia or international Jihadists. Assad continued in his father's tradition of slaughtering his own people... after what were originally peaceful protests. It is a sectarian conflict now - with Hizbollah and iran- and indirectly - Russia which has its own islamist problems) funding and supporting Assad. This has the potential to be a regional war - and possibly a wider conflict than that.
Nothing, this is an internal matter, this is between two groups, both internally and externally. If you are a secular liberal , or secular humanist,this has nothing to do with you. All I see is two bigoted religious groups,and at there helm are cloaked psychopaths using them as cannon fodder for there own selfish ends. We should look to our own houses, we have enough problems within our own lands.
Lying About Syria, and the Lying Liars Who Lie About the Lying:
http://warisacrime.org/content/lying...ie-about-lying
But? The whole region is poised on the brink. We should stay out.
I agree, Its going that way though isn't it!
I think that the images of those babies lined out on the floor packed out with ice blocks will stay with me for the rest of my life! They could have been sleeping! All those beautiful and deserving lives ended so unforgivably
There really are some dirty barbaric people in this world!
(PS Yes its me... Non work related, just me, wanting to socialise and join in with the conversations)
xxx
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/27/politics/us-syria
It looks like there will be a military response. I'm not sure what the extent of the response will be, but I think it will probably be fairly significant. Hagel has said that U.S forces are ready for action. Then again, they could simply let the time pass, but after all this talk, it would be difficult not to act.
It does have the appearance that the region is locked in a constant state of war. Whether there's a bloody revolution and democratic elections or a military coup and no elections, one faction always seems unwilling to tolerate the status quo.
Peaceful protests lead to government crackdowns, but then again any sort of protests do look like a threat to the current order given what we've seen in Egypt, Syria, and Libya. Obviously in Syria we're well past the point of protests and into a bloody civil war. But regardless of the outcome of this fight, what next? I don't mean to be cynical, but what next...there seems to be a dynamic here that is not beyond our ability to describe, but well beyond our ability to resolve or even mitigate.
If we stay out people die, if we get involved people die, but we might temporarily assist in bringing about a regime change. But that wouldn't be the end of it.
I can’t begin to describe the emotions that are sweeping over me as we undoubtedly prepare for some kind of military strike on Syria. Like BellaAmore the vision of those poisoned bodies hovers over my retinas when I close my eyes. Now the dread of yet another decade of war in the MiddleEast looms just as we are about to draw a previous decade of horrible war (and the economic Earthquake it brought in its wake) to a simpering and tentative close. More soldiers with traumatic head wounds, more amputations, more lives lost and ruined, and more money down the dark sucking drain of grief and greed. I’m sick. I don’t want anything to do with it. But the moral-immoral pull of it is irresistible. We seem to be beyond the point of escape. I hate sand and fucking red-lines that men of power draw in it.
I had formed the impression that Obama and the JCS General Dempsey were both reluctant to get directly involved; but that Hagel and Kerry saw an opportunity for a 'surgical strike' that would 'send a message' to the Syrian Government, as well as the Russians and the Chinese, about the willingness of the USA to act -having said that, it was a mistake for Obama to make a speech declaring that there was a 'Red Line' because it invited someone to cross it -could have been Asad, his mad & angry brother Maher, another faction in the government/military, the 'rebels' -take your pick; as of this moment, we still don't even know what chemicals were used.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
I guess this is Obama's 'Clinton moment'; except Clinton did bomb Iraq with the support of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair; and yes, he did preside over the Ohio talks on the Serbian Nationalist war, and did sponsor the peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians...this is probably the best moment for the USA to seek a rapprochement with Iran, Rouhani and his new government are the most likely to respond positively. Saudi Arabia would of course object, and it wouldn't happen without a predetermined 'result', but at some point someone must choose between the long term difficulty of establishing a popularly elected and accountable form of politics in the region, or enabling an authoritarian, largely Islamic autocracy to take hold. The USA supported the rebels on the assumption that the Government would fall; it didn't fall, and now the USA, France and the UK are proposing to take military action that would be of some benefit, however small, to political groups whose entire ideology is premised on its objection to the presence of 'outsiders' existing in any form in the region.
The worst case scenario, that a domestic struggle for power would become an international conflict, is coming to pass; Qatar and Saudi Arabia are crucial to these developments, in Saudi Arabia's case, part of campaign against democracy that has been going on since Abdul Aziz ibn Saud tried to restore the Caliphate in the 1920s -this remains the core objective of the Saudi family.
I would not be surprised if both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been pushing the USA to intervene directly; both have been instrumental in developing the military capacity of the rebels, yet the consequence has been disarray and disunity while Iranian support enabled Hezbollah to defeat the rebels in Qusayr near the Lebanese border earlier this year.
Basically, Asad's government is still in power, and doesn't look like it is about to collapse. This isn't good enough for Saudi Arabia or Qatar -SA wants domination over the region to promote its narrowly-defined Islamic values against any form of popular democracy; Qatar wants a gas pipeline to the Mediterranean to capitalise on its colossal gas reserves as European demand increases relative to the decline of its own resources (fracking aside).
The USA has an unhappy history of intervention in Syria. When President Reagan sent troops to the Lebanon in 1982, the result was an unmitigated disaster -less well remembered are the air strikes on targets in Syria which led to more than one plane being shot down, and one pilot, Robert Goodman, being taken prisoner, until Presidential Candidate Jesse Jackson went on a mercy mission to Damascus to negotiate his release with Hafiz al-Asad.
Links below are to
1) the Goodman story
2) an analysis of Russian ideas about the Syrian conflict from this summer
3) FT article on Qatar's involvement, stressing its importance
4) FP article on Saudi Arabia's involvement, stressing its importance rather than Qatar's.
http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id407.htm
http://www.laender-analysen.de/russl...df/RAD-128.pdf
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f2d9bbc8-b...#axzz2dFbgD1yU
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...rabias_problem
Everywhere in the region now there is deepening anger against the West. A misjudged attack would unleash something appalling. I am travelling in the region now (presently in Mosul) and all the signs look very frightening.
I am not sure whether an attack is prudent or wise, but I do know that there have to be red lines. Unless the entire world is willing to cede that mass murder in any form can be exclusively an internal affair. And if that red line is not drawn at the use of chemical weapons, then where?
And yes, I realize that this conflict has the appearance of a proxy war between powerhouses in the Middle East for continued influence. And those who oppose Assad do hold an extremist ideology, but what about his supporters? It's not as though they are benign in their support of this man who is willing to kill thousands to maintain control.
Besides, I thought the West's tendency to impose its own values on the region was resented. What matters is the will of the people, not whether we think the opposition holds views compatible with ours. And if there are some who vehemently oppose Assad's regime, it cannot be based entirely on Saudi Arabian prodding.
One self-serving reason for not wanting the west to intervene in Syria is that it puts a lie to the tale that every cycle of violence in the Middle East is the result of the West's interference. Is there a course of action the West could take that would not inflame some sect or be exploited in some way by all of the corrupt players in this conflict? Even inaction has moral consequences.
If cooler heads prevail, then perhaps the administration will wait for all evidence to be gathered, present it to the security council and recommend an international response. This has to be better than a surgical strike as a retaliatory measure for mass killing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
I don't really see how altering the balance of power in a civil war (ie. aligning ourselves with the rebels) redresses the wrong allegedly committed by the use of chemical weapons. So I think the collection of evidence and its presentation to the international community has to be the first step, if the United States really wants to be neutral.
I suppose what I am curious about is how the West can go about adopting a policy of non-intervention in Middle Eastern affairs without our absence being seen as equally pernicious. I really see this as a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario.
"the long term difficulty of establishing a popularly elected and accountable form of politics in the region, or enabling an authoritarian, largely Islamic autocracy to take hold."
The latter does seem to be the more stable option. If democratic elections follow an uprising against an autocratic regime, there's a good chance some sect will not tolerate the outcome of the elections. I am not well versed in the politics of the region, but isn't an authoritarian regime more likely to be an equilibrium point insofar as they can better consolidate power and mobilize their forces against any possible dissent? I'm not saying it is a more just form of government, only a more stable one that can better stave off cycles of violence.
Even if the people's will is better expressed through an accountable and popularly elected democratic government, might this not be offset by the potential for instability?
I believe this goes to the root of the political issues that has generated the cycle of revolutions in the Middle East, and for that matter in history: autocracy cannot reform and survive, it must either be autocratic or be replaced -but what happens in dictatorships when civil society is eroded and the population have no freedom with which to live without the constant interference of the state, is that the opportunities for alternative modes of expression to co-exist in a market-place of ideas is replaced by monolithic opinions -it is hardly surprising that autocratic, or authoritarian regimes when overthrown are often replaced, immediately or some time after, by another authoritarian regime as the release of incoherent 'people power' may give rise to chaos, lawlessness and a nostalgia for the stability of terror.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
For this reason, apres-moi le deluge has been used by dictators who first smashed to pieces any semblance of alternative order in society, then warned their critics that if they were to go, chaos would surely follow. The whole point of the Ba'ath Party dictatorships in Syria and Iraq was to make opposition futile, and life without the Party a chaos of incoherent politics and violence so terrible that the majority would rather have order than freedom.
Moreover, politics in Syria before the consolidation of Ba'ath party rule in the 1970s was characterised by sectarian and fractious ideologies, but this is also part of the way in which Syria was created.
From the very beginning the population made their wishes known, and these were brushed aside -after a long and bitter struggle against Ottoman forces (mostly recruited from the Arabs of what is these days Syria, Lebanon and Jordan), the British Empire's Egyptian Expeditionary Force commanded by Allenby entered Damascus in October 1918 where they linked up with the Arab Army under the Hashemite, Feisal who had fought a guerilla campaign on the eastern flank.
Allenby divided up the conquered area into Occupied Enemy Territory Administrations -separating Beirut from Damascus as OET-North. Feisal in Damascus declared it the capital of an independent Arab kingdom and formed a government much to the annoyance of Churchill and the French; the next year Woodrow Wilson asked a Commission to report on Syria -the King-Crane Commission- who dutifully pointed out that the people wanted to be independent. Churchill dismissed the report, and through the post-Versailles conferences, the secret deals that had been made with the French during the War, were used to transfer authority over the newly emerging states as 'Mandated territories' of the League of Nations (Class A), so-called because these states were not considered mature enough to 'stand alone under the strenuous conditions of the modern world'...
On the ground, it was a calculated act of war that ended independent Syria- the French military under Henri Gouraud confronted Feisal at Maysalun in 1920 and sent him and democracy packing. Just to rub it in, it is alleged (there are several versions) that Gouraud marched into the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, rested his boot on the grave of the Kurdish warrior and Hero/Villain of the Crusades Salah ad-Din and shouted We're back!
The French claim on Syria was derived mostly from the commercial interests in silk and textiles developed in the Ottoman period by the merchants of Lyon, and French intentions to match the British Empire's land grab, and exploit as much as it needed for its shattered economy.
Modern Syria was formed from the barrel of a gun, it was not created and sustained by its population; they have never been given the decades of rule that it takes for democatic politics to establish itself as a fair, if imperfect alternative to dictatorship.
Throughout these histories, external powers found it easier to be indifferent to the operations of dictatorship, rather than promote the inherent messiness of democratic politics -this goes for the USA, the UK, France, Israel, Germany, Japan none of whom promoted and nurtured a domestic opposition in Syria in the same way that the US did in Iran and Iraq, and does not do in Saudi Arabia or the monarchies of the region. The UK broke off diplomatic relations with Syria over the Hindawi affair in the 1980s, but few people broke sweat to eject Syria from its violent interventions in Lebanese politics, when Syria was thrown out, it was thrown out by popular revolt, a popular -pre 'Arab Spring' uprising that Israel and the Bush Presidency did all it could to derail.
Even today Syrians feel they are not entirely part of the country they feel they ought to be part of: again, from the outset, 'Lebanon' was carved off as a separate, and at the time mostly Christian state; followed by the incoherence of international boundaries that left Kurds, and Druzes communities living on either side of the Syrian, Jordanian and Iraq boundaries; followed by an act of Grand Larceny which robbed Syria of the port city of Alexandretta (Iskenderun) and the surrounding countryside, annexed by Turkey in 1938; not to mention the distortion of political representation when less than 10% of the population -the Alawite- control 90% of the state and most of the officer class of the armed forces. And so on.
Do the majority of Syrians want to live in an Islamic state? I doubt it. Will they be given the opportunity to choose their own destiny? Not at the moment.
If order is better than chaos, would this justify a dictatorship in the USA?
I forgot to add that Syria's experience from 1948 onwards was disorderly, but so too was politics in France and Italy where one coalition government followed another until, in 1958 in France, De Gaulle was elected to create a more dirigiste Presidential system, something that did not happen in Italy. In Syria, barely ten years into independence, the charismatic leader Nasser persuaded Syria to join a 'United Arab Republic' which meant, in effect, taking orders from Cairo. This was no solution to internal bickering in Syria, and not long after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 left part of Syria under occupation; it was a national humiliation, and paved the way for the belief that western style politics had failed and that a ruthless centralised form of politics was the only hope.
What a read, and right on point for what I was asking. It was just a supposition on my part based on the fact that we've seen such appalling and unrelenting violence.
I don't believe that there's any place in the world where the people aren't ready for freedom or deserve or prefer autocracy.
But to your last question: If I saw people being killed every day, even for the sake of eventual freedom, civil rights, and their ability to express themselves politically I think I would be willing to give up quite a lot of my own freedom to make it stop. As your analysis suggests, this pressure is part of what helps an authoritarian regime maintain its authority.
If you'll indulge one more question (sorry). This is the last question. What is the place of an outside nation to help in this struggle? Is it their place to help tip the balance to those seeking greater freedoms? If a democratic government is being overthrown by reactionary forces, is it advisable to support the currently elected government against this coup? Or to do nothing because an externally applied force disrupts the internal forces that are in some way a greater reflection of the will of the people?