Why Kerry Wants to Strike Syria

June 19, 2013 by Jeffrey Goldberg

Yesterday, shortly after I posted a column on Secretary of State John Kerry’s push to have the White House approve U.S. strikes on Syrian airfields — and how Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey pushed back strongly against the idea — I heard from a number of people who support Kerry’s stance and think that the Pentagon is being unnecessarily timid.

(I myself am one of the approximately three columnists in the U.S. who don’t know exactly what President Barack Obama ought to do in Syria. On the one hand, the Syrian civil war represents a humanitarian nightmare and an acute strategic challenge; on the other, I don’t think the U.S. is capable of mediating a Sunni-Shiite civil war, and so shouldn’t try).

The Kerry camp’s argument breaks down as follows:

1. Rwanda. The administration can’t sit idly by as the civil war claims hundreds of victims a day. The official U.S. position is that we feel very bad about what happened in Rwanda in 1994, so we shouldn’t let this sort of thing happen again (Samantha Power, Obama’s nominee for United Nations ambassador, has popularized the idea that “Never Again,” in practice, has meant only that, “Never again we will allow the Germans to kill the Jews in the 1940s.”) It is true that while Syria civil war might not yet possess the characteristics of genocide, the humanitarian imperative here is profound.

2. For negotiations to work, the regime of Bashar al-Assad must feel that its existence is threatened. This might be the most important point, or at least the most immediately relevant one. Kerry wants upcoming peace talks in Geneva to work. In order for that to happen, he believes that the playing field in Syria must be leveled; in recent days, regime forces, which now include the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, have been swatting back the rebels with comparative ease. Airstrikes, and other U.S. measures, would provide the regime with the incentive to sit down and talk. There is no reason to talk compromise with the opposition when you are winning. This is true even for people who aren’t psychopathic mass murderers.

3. Whether we like it or not, we are in a conflict with Iran, and our credibility is on the line. Obama seems eager to exit the Middle East. Most foreign policy experts, up to and including the secretary of state, believe that there is no hiding from its problems. The U.S. must play a leadership role in the Mideast or the vacuum left by its departure will be filled by radicals, of both the Shiite and Sunni varieties. It is true, as Dempsey has argued, that there is no exit strategy for Syria (in part because there’s not much of an entrance strategy, either), but the U.S. will soon face even bigger problems in the region if it doesn’t intervene now. Kerry understands the price of intervention. This is the lesson of Iraq. But he has also argued that there is a price to be paid for nonintervention.

4. We made a promise. President Obama threatened unspecified, but dire-sounding, action against Assad if he deployed chemical weapons (or even if he shifted them around). Assad has both moved chemical weapons and used them. U.S. intelligence estimates are that 150 people have been killed by them so far. When Obama made his promise, no one thought that his reaction to the use of chemical weapons would be: Let’s send the rebels a bunch of rifles and ammunition. There was a general expectation of something more serious, and Kerry believes that the serious consequence of chemical weapons use should be airstrikes against regime airfields.

5. The Israelis did it, and so can we. Kerry himself, to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t made this argument to the generals — knowing, I assume, that it would, if nothing else, irritate them like nothing else. But others in the interventionist camp have raised the issue. Israel, has struck at Syrian targets three times recently, using standoff weapons fired from over the border. Israel thinks that it made its point: There will be consequences if Syria transfers weapons and delivery systems to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dempsey, in the White House situation room last week, argued that in order to launch an effective attack on regime targets, the U.S. would have to first suppress Syria’s air-defense system, which would require at least 700 sorties. Interventionists tend to believe that the Pentagon — and the White House — are using this an excuse for inaction.

6. The rebels aren’t the lunatics the Pentagon believes them to be. The State Department has been working for some time with the more moderate leaders among the fractured and disputatious rebel alliance. It believes not only that it can do business with many of these leaders, but also that by doing business with them it will strengthen them. Several months ago, when I ducked across the Jordan-Syria border and met with some of the rebels, I took note of their long beards, a sign of religious intensity. The rebels were quick to tell me that they only grew beards because the more radical Islamists among them had the best weapons, and would only supply these weapons to like-minded rebels. In other words, the beards were simply a marketing tool, not an expression of sincere radicalism. If the more moderate among the rebels suddenly began receiving heavier weapons from the Americans, they would be empowered, and the Islamists marginalized.

One through line you will notice in all of this: a belief, on the part of Kerry and others, that passivity has a price. The Pentagon and the president, however, believe that they are being prudent, not passive.

Obama refuses to specify US aid to Syrian rebels

June 19, 2013 by AFP

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday refused to specify the exact nature of new US military aid to Syrian rebels, after his officials let it be known they could expect shipments of small arms.

“I cannot and will not comment on specifics on our programs related to the Syrian opposition,” Obama said, at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Obama has refused to publicly specify exactly how Washington will increase aid to the Syrian opposition, after his government said it would offer military support for the first time after determining President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons.

Previously Obama had warned against pouring more weapons into the conflict and had kept US aid limited to humanitarian and non-lethal supplies.

The US president also said in Berlin that reports in the United States that escalating American support to the rebels meant the White House was now on a slippery slope to a new Middle East entanglement were mistaken.

He said reports were “overcranked” when suggesting the US was heading into a new Middle Eastern war.

“What we want to do is end a war,” he said, calling again for a political transition in Syria that does not include Assad.

Merkel said Berlin agreed that “Assad has lost his legitimacy” but reiterated the stance that “Germany has very clear legal rules that we do not send weapons into civil wars”, saying this was universal and “has nothing to do with the question of Syria specifically.”

But she added: “This doesn’t mean that we can’t play a constructive role, in the political process, humanitarian aid and the question about the right way” to help the moderate opposition and the people of Syria.

Source: now.mmedia.me

Pentagon Shoots Down Kerry’s Syria Airstrike Plan

June 18, 2013 by Jeffrey Goldberg

Twenty years ago, in a debate over the war in Bosnia, Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a challenge to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Albright wanted the U.S. to confront an aggressive Serbia; Powell and the Pentagon were hesitant. Albright grew frustrated: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Albright asked. Powell later said that he thought Albright was going to give him an aneurysm.

Flash-forward to this past Wednesday. At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.

It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.

Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome.

Military Wariness

Officials with knowledge of the meeting say that Kerry gave as good as he got, and that the discussion didn’t reach aneurysm-producing levels. But it was, in diplomatic parlance, a full and frank vetting of the profound differences between State and Defense on Syria. Dempsey was adamant: Without much of an entrance strategy, without anything resembling an exit strategy, and without even a clear-eyed understanding of the consequences of an American airstrike, the Pentagon would be extremely reluctant to get behind Kerry’s plan.

As we know now, the Pentagon’s position is in sync with the President Barack Obama’s. The outcome of the meeting last week was to formalize a decision made weeks ago to supply the more moderate elements of the Syrian opposition with small arms and ammunition. The assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies that Assad had used chemical weapons against small pockets of rebels — confirming those made several months earlier by the intelligence agencies of U.S. friends in Europe and the Middle East — forced the administration to make a gesture of support for the opposition.

Members of the White House national security team, who tend to be more hawkish than Obama or Dempsey (though not as quite as militant as Kerry), had been arguing that, in the words of Tony Blinken, the deputy national security adviser, that “superpowers don’t bluff.” Once Obama had drawn a red line around chemical weapons, the White House had no choice but to take some sort of action.

Blinken was clever to use the word “bluff” in his arguments to the president, implicitly linking his posture on Syria to his position on Iran’s nuclear program. Last year, in an interview with me on the subject of Iran, Obama said, “As president of the United States, I don’t bluff.” On Iran, he has lived up to his words, but he was in danger — and remains in danger — of being seen as a bluffer on Syria.

No Bluffing

What is so odd about Dempsey’s adamant opposition to Kerry’s aggressive proposals is that it hasn’t previously been made public. Obama told Charlie Rose this week that he is worried about sliding down the slippery slope toward greater intervention in Syria. Having Dempsey openly in his corner would be useful to him, but the administration hasn’t made hay over the Pentagon’s opposition to airstrikes. (When I asked the Pentagon for official comment, Dempsey’s spokesman would only say that he would not “discuss classified internal deliberations,” though he went on to say that the National Security Council principals “routinely debate a wide range of options to include how the military can and should support a comprehensive, regional approach to this conflict.”)

One senior administration official explained it this way: The White House doesn’t want Dempsey to make an enthusiastic case on “Meet the Press” against intervention, just in case Obama one day decides to follow Kerry’s advice and get more deeply involved. At that point, Dempsey arguments against greater involvement could come back to haunt the administration.

The decision to provide small arms to the Syrian opposition has made no one happy — not the rebels, who understand that these quite-possibly ineffective weapons will take many months to reach them; not Kerry, who, while arguing that these shipments may become a “force multiplier” in the conflict, thinks that only a show of American air power will convince Assad and his Hezbollah allies that the U.S. is making a serious attempt to level a playing field that has been tilting their way for some time; and not the Pentagon, which thinks that Obama, despite saying that he is wary of the slippery slope, might be pushed down that slope anyway, by interventionists on his team or by events on the ground.

It is possible, even for those of us who have been inclined toward intervention, to have a great deal of sympathy for Dempsey’s position. There are those in the Pentagon who think that the State Department has romanticized the Syrian opposition. What diplomats see as a civil war featuring bands of poorly armed moderates struggling to free themselves from the grip of an evil dictator, the generals see as a religious war between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Why would the U.S. risk taking sides in a battle between two loathed terror organizations? Memories of Iraq, too, are fresh in the minds of Dempsey and his colleagues.

On the other hand, a Kerry partisan told me, U.S. intervention in Syria would not necessarily have to look like U.S. intervention in Iraq. When I mentioned the Albright-Powell exchange of 20 years ago, he pointed out something obvious: President Bill Clinton eventually decided to use air power in the Balkans. And it brought the Serbian government to its knees.

Source: bloomberg.com

The new problem from hell

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Photo: AFP/Getty Images

June 11, 2013 by David Aaron Miller

Speaking from a refugee camp in Turkey last year, Middle East scholarFouad Ajami told CNN that, like Bill Clinton, who felt ashamed for not intervening to stop the Rwandan genocide, Barack Obama will look back with regret at his refusal to use American power in Syria.

By any standard, Syria is a disaster.

But it’s not Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsis were massacred within a period of eight months. Nor is it Obama’s disaster in the sense that he’s responsible for what has transpired there by not intervening.

Obama has avoided intervention not because he’s insensitive, incompetent, or even uninterested. He has done so because his options aren’t just bad, they’re terrible. Syria is already a disaster, but a ham-handed intervention could make matters worse, certainly for America.

The commentariat is looking for ways to press the administration to act. Their arguments are largely correct: Syria is indeed a moral, humanitarian, and strategic disaster. But their prescription for action is long on generalities and short on specifics, and even fuzzier on how the United States could stabilize the country and then extract itself from yet another entanglement in the Middle East. No analogy is all that relevant here — not Rwanda, not Libya, not Bosnia. The Syrian calamity is unique.

The American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq looms large over the Syrian conflict. The parallel that’s worth paying attention to isn’t boots on the ground — it’s the question of connecting means to ends. In the Syrian case, the central question is: How does militarizing the American role — through providing arms to the rebels, creating a no-fly zone, or even launching military strikes — pave the way for a successful outcome?

None of the incremental steps that have been proposed so far have answered the following questions: Can these actions degrade Syria’s military power so that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapses? Or, alternatively, can they produce a stalemate that would force the regime, the Russians, and Iran to accept a negotiated transition?

Even if Assad falls, why do we believe that the battle in Syria will end? In the wake of the regime’s collapse, the Syrian war may well expand — Alawite militias will continue the fight, opposition groups will struggle among themselves for control, and foreign powers will continue to meddle in the hopes of emerging on top of the new Syrian political order. If America wants to play in this war, so be it — but experience suggests it’s the kind of arena in which we can’t win.

It’s not that America can’t intervene militarily in Syria, or even that the options on the table are too risky. The problem is that the incremental steps being considered probably won’t work without a much more sustained and aggressive military intervention. And after America’s baby steps into the Syrian war don’t resolve it, Obama will face a choice: He can either stand down and reveal we don’t have the will to stand up, or he can escalate. On this front, I agree with my former colleague Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who argued that being heartless is better than being mindless.

Those are all good reasons to avoid intervening in Syria — but I doubt they will carry the day.By the end of the summer, more than 100,000 Syrians are likely to have died in a calamitous civil war that shows no signs of abating. As a result, the pressure to intervene will mount on the risk-averse Obama administration. Here’s why we are headed for a militarization of the U.S. role in Syria.

Time’s starting to run out

The Syrian crisis might go on, in one form or another, for years. But the Obama presidency won’t. The president’s awareness that the clock’s ticking — and that there’s no third term on the horizon — will increasingly weigh on his decision-making.

Yes, we’re only six months into Obama’s new term. But second-term presidents — not to mention their advisors — quickly start to focus on what’s important and what’s not, because they know time is now limited. How a president will be remembered becomes critically important.

History — an important commodity for presidents — is likely to judge Obama very unkindly for his passivity. From where we sit today, it is easier to reach the conclusion that Syria is a trap for America. But once Obama’s term concludes, there will be a different evaluation. People will forget the details and circumstances — they will only see the dead and the wounded, the refugees and the physical devastation. They will want to know why America wouldn’t or couldn’t do more. And that’s partly why the pressure to do something will grow. Obama knows that Syria is the key story line in the so-called Arab Spring and that his own legacy will suffer unless he moves to counteract the negative appraisals currently gathering force.So, does he want to share the legacy of the last Democratic president, who failed to intervene in Rwanda and almost in Bosnia, too?

No diplomatic track in sight

The arc of the Syrian civil war seems pretty well set. These kinds of conflicts end either when one side triumphs, or when a third party intercedes to impose its will.

From the beginning, the conventional wisdom has been that the regime could not survive. That logic was partly driven by the fact that no other autocrats survived the Arab Spring. But it was also driven by what seemed like simple arithmetic: The regime looked increasingly weakened (subtraction) and the opposition seemed to be gaining in strength (addition). At some point, situation would reach a tipping point, and Assad would be overthrown.

That hasn’t happened. We have a military stalemate — or perhaps even a situation where the regime is gaining strength, while the opposition is losing it. Still, it appears that there’s no military solution, and that only a political deal can end the conflict. Last year, the United Nations gave the diplomatic track a name: the “Geneva process.” It has now been reenergized by the active participation of the United States under the leadership of Secretary of State John Kerry.

Whether or not the United States thinks this can work is irrelevant. What’s important is that its strategy, at this point, is to get the Russians to force the regime and the rebels to the negotiating table. If Washington and Moscow can accomplish that, they just may be able to convince the warring parties to negotiate a political transition that eases Assad out, while bringing a coherent group of opposition elements to power. Such an accomplishment would go a long way to stopping the killing and preempting the need for U.S. military intervention.

But the odds that Geneva will succeed are long indeed. To paraphrase poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, let me count the ways it could fail: Will the Russians really pressure Assad to leave? Will the Syrian dictator agree, particularly at a time when his regime is scoring military gains? Can anyone really speak authoritatively for the rebels inside and outside Syria? Will they risk a situation that leaves Assad in place — at least for a time?

The paradox of Geneva 2.0 is that it could pave the way for the very situation the United States has tried to avoid. If (or when) diplomacy fails, it will be clear that there is only one remaining option to stop the bloodshed: military intervention. Pressure will grow on the Obama administration to shoot, not talk.

The tough ladies are back

Individuals do matter in forging the U.S. government’s response to an international crisis. And the ascension of Susan Rice as Obama’s national security advisor and Samantha Power as America’s envoy at the United Nations increases the odds of intervention in Syria.

Those two appointments have raised public expectations for the administration’s foreign policy. Even I was surprised to see last week’s Washington Post headlinefollowing the announcements: “Obama signals new approach on national security: A bigger U.S. role abroad.” The implication was clear: There’s a new sheriff in town.

I wouldn’t dismiss this line so quickly. Rice is smart, tough, disciplined, and reportedly risk-averse on Syria. But she has a new job, and expectations for new and bolder initiatives are mounting. Combined with her own determination to make a difference, one of the pieces of the puzzle for intervention may have just fallen into place: She is closer to the president than any other foreign policy adviser. Should she join the chorus of those in the last term who pressed for bolder action (Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus), Obama will now have counsel to act from someone he truly respects and trusts.  

It’s lonely at the top. Sometimes you need close company to make tough decisions. Obama may now have it.

The other tough lady, Samantha Power, wrote a book about the Balkans (and other mass slaughters) called “A Problem From Hell.” That of course describes Syria, too. This problem isn’t going away. Indeed, it will likely get worse — before it gets even worse.

Too much blood has flowed in Syria to imagine a quick, negotiated settlement. The longer the conflict continues, the greater the odds that some new kinetic element — an Israeli-Syrian confrontation, massive use of chemical weapons, or some atrocity that surpasses previous horrors — will occur.

The steady drumbeat of death in Syria will increase the pressure on the United States to do something, anything, to stop the violence — even if it’s out of good options for doing so. For better or worse, the Obama administration seems headed for military intervention in Syria, with all the risk and uncertainty that entails.

Source: foreignpolicy.com

Nasrallah says Hezbollah will not bow to sectarian threats

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Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivers a speech on recent developments on June 14, 2013. Photo: NOW

June 14, 2013

Hezbollah’s leader on Friday said that his party would continue its military role in Syria and warned against sectarian rhetoric amid the growing tension between Sunnis and Shiites following Hezbollah’s military intervention on the side of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

“We will be where we should be, and what we began we shall continue when it comes to taking up our responsibilities,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in an implicit reference to his party’s fighting in Syria.

“If anyone thinks that by using lies, killings, or threats we will change our stances, they are wrong,” he said in a televised address during a commemoration for Hezbollah’s injured fighters.

“Our position after Al-Qusayr is the same as before, nothing has changed.”

Nasrallah further defended his party’s role in Syria by warning that “those who want to bring down Syria, want to bring down Lebanon and the rest of the region and put it under the control of the Israeli-American-takfiri powers.”

Hezbollah-led troops defeated rebels in Al-Qusayr on June 5, weeks after Nasrallah promised his Shiite party would emerge victorious in its fighting alongside the Syrian regime. Following the conclusion of the battle, Gulf powers have acted to blacklist the Shiite party while Sunni clerics, including Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, have called on their Sunni brethren to take action against Hezbollah.

Nasrallah responded to these developments by warning that opponents of his party and the Assad regime were “trying to create a sectarian war in the region.”

“The crisis in Syria is not pitting two sects against each other, the battle in Syria is not sectarian, but those who consider it as such are those who are weak and those who are losing out.”

“The worst that has happened recently is sectarian rhetoric,” Nasrallah added.

The Hezbollah chief also addressed the looming threat of sectarian violence breaking out in Lebanon, saying that  security incidents in the Beqaa are worsening ties between Sunnis and Shiites.

“[Some] are working on creating problems between Sunnis and Shiites in the Beqaa.”

“We will find a solution to this problem,” he added.

Barrages of rocket fire originating from Syria in recent weeks have hit Shiite-populated areas of the Beqaa amid Syrian rebels’ threats to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon. Meanwhile, the Syrian regime on Wednesday bombed the center of the Sunni-populated town of Arsal for the first time since the Syria conflict erupted.

“I call on our supporters to exercise self-restraint,” Nasrallah also said, especially since “any dispute is being given a sectarian meaning nowadays.”

The Hezbollah chief further defended his party as an “integral” component of Lebanon.

“We are a constituent part of this country, this land and the Lebanese people,” he said, warning, “We were born here, we will be martyred and buried here, and no one will rout us out of here.”

Nasrallah also addressed critics who say his party aims to stifle dissenting voices within the Shiite sect itself, saying, “Let [Shiites] object and criticize us.”

Nasrallah’s comments come after the Shiite anti-Hezbollah Lebanon Option Gathering party was attacked during a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy on Sunday, which led to the death of one Hezbollah critic.

Source: now.mmedia.me

U.S. Seen Moving Closer to Move on Arming Syrian Rebels

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Syrian opposition fighters are seen in the northern city of Aleppo. Photo: Ricardo Garcia Vilanova/AFP/Getty Images

June 11. 2013 by Nicole Gaouette

The Obama administration is weighing more seriously whether to provide Syrian rebels with arms and ammunition as momentum in the conflict shifts toward the Assad regime, according to a former U.S. official.

“I believe there is now a sense of urgency in administration deliberations on whether or not to participate in the desperately needed resupply of rebels with arms and ammunition,” Fred Hof, a former State Department liaison to the Syrian opposition, said yesterday in an interview. “I would not be at all surprised were a decision arrived at very soon, and I would be surprised if the decision is negative. 

President Barack Obama’s administration is under pressure to provide lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, which has said it won’t participate in talks arranged by the U.S. and Russia to end the conflict until such deliveries begin. Domestic critics such as Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, have called the administration “delusional” to believe that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would be willing to negotiate while he has the military upper hand.

State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said yesterday that administration officials were concerned by what they heard in recent conversations with General Salim Idris, the head of the Syrian opposition’s military wing.

Secretary of State John Kerry postponed a trip to the Mideast this week and will instead attend White House meetings, some of which will be about Syria, according to Psaki, who described the sessions as “routine.”

Conditions Worsened

“As we’ve heard firsthand from General Idris over the weekend, conditions on the ground have worsened, and that is greatly concerning,” Psaki said. “The bloodshed, and the loss of innocent lives has grown worse. The increase of foreign fighters has led to a greater concern about sectarian violence. So we are taking a closer look at what we can continue to do, to help the opposition.”

Rebels lost the strategic city of al-Qusair last week. Government control of the town, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) southwest of Homs, secures the road from Damascus to Lebanon, cuts cross-border weapons supplies for the rebels and provides a staging ground for further offensives.

Obama has been reluctant to get the U.S. more deeply involved even though U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Assad’s regime has probably used small amounts of chemical weapons three times, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the administration’s deliberations.

At least until now, Obama has concluded that the potential benefits of a muscular intervention are outweighed by the negatives, beginning with the installation of a regime in Damascus that may no longer keep Syria’s cold peace with Israel.

Channeling Aid

The U.S. has let other countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, supply weapons to the rebels and recently began an effort to channel all lethal aid through Idris in an effort to ensure that fewer weapons get into the hands of extremists. At the same time, the administration has pushed a plan to hold negotiations between rebels and the regime about a negotiated political transition that would have Assad step down.

In a May press conference with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama acknowledged that his push with Russia for a peace conference — dubbed Geneva 2 — might not work.

“I’m not promising that it’s going to be successful,” the president said. “Frankly, sometimes once sort of the furies have been unleashed in a situation like we’re seeing in Syria, it’s very hard to put things back together.”

U.S.-Russia Meeting

Hof, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group, said that he would be “shocked if arms and ammunition, whether from U.S. stocks or elsewhere, were not ready to move instantly to and through Idris.”

Psaki said U.S. and Russian officials will meet on June 25 to discuss arrangements for the Geneva 2 talks, which are expected to be held in July. In the meantime, she said that the administration has had continuing talks about how to strengthen their position on the ground.

“The political process can’t happen in a vacuum, so we are taking a closer look at what we can do on the ground to help the opposition,” she said. “Many of these options have been discussed and they will continue to be.”

Source: bloomberg.com

AP sources: US close to OK on arming Syrian rebels

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FILE — In this June 5, 2013 file photo released, by the Syrian official news agency SANA, a damaged street is seen in Qusair, Syria. Syria’s civil war has morphed into a proxy fight in which Shiite Iran has strongly backed Assad, while Sunni Arab nations have backed rebels. Many Sunni hard-liners around the Mideast have taken Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria almost as a declaration of war by Shiites against Sunnis. Photo: SANA

Washington, June 9, 2012 by Bradley Klapper

Moved by the Assad regime’s rapid advance, the Obama administration could decide this week to approve lethal aid for the beleaguered Syrian rebels and will weigh the merits of a less likely move to send in U.S. airpower to enforce a no-fly zone over the civil war-wracked nation, officials said Sunday.

White House meetings are planned over the coming days, as Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government forces are apparently poised for an attack on the key city of Homs, which could cut off Syria’s armed opposition from the south of the country. As many as 5,000 Hezbollah fighters are now in Syria, officials believe, helping the regime press on with its campaign after capturing the town of Qusair near the Lebanese border last week.

Opposition leaders have warned Washington that their rebellion could face devastating and irreversible losses without greater support, and the warnings are prompting the United States to consider drastic action.

Secretary of State John Kerry postponed a planned trip Monday to Israel and three other Mideast countries to participate in White House discussions, said officials who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.

While nothing has been concretely decided, U.S. officials said President Barack Obama was leaning closer toward signing off on sending weapons to vetted, moderate rebel units. The U.S. has spoken of possibly arming the opposition in recent months but has been hesitant because it doesn’t want to al-Qaida-linked and other extremists fighting alongside the anti-Assad militias to end up with the weapons.

Obama already has ruled out any intervention that would require U.S. military boots on the ground. Other options such as deploying American air power to ground the regime’s jets, gunships and other aerial assets are now being more seriously debated, the officials said, while cautioning that a no-fly zone or any other action involving U.S. military deployments in Syria were far less likely right now.

The president also has declared chemical weapons use by the Assad regime a “red line” for more forceful U.S. action. American allies including France and Britain have say they’ve determined with near certitude that Syrian forces have used low levels of sarin in several attacks, but the administration is still studying the evidence. The U.S. officials said responses that will be mulled over in this week’s meetings concern the deteriorating situation on the ground in Syria, independent of final confirmation of possible chemical weapons use.

Any intervention could have wide-reaching ramifications for the United States and the region. It would bring the U.S. closer to a conflict that has killed almost 80,000 people since Assad cracked down on protesters inspired by the Arab Spring in March 2011 and sparked a war that has since been increasingly defined by sectarian clashes between the Sunni-led rebellion and Assad’s Alawite-dominated regime.

And it would essentially pit the United States alongside regional allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar in a proxy war against Iran, which is providing much of the materiel to the Syrian government’s counterinsurgency and, through Hezbollah, more and more of the manpower.

Syria’s precarious position in the heart of the Middle East makes the conflict extremely unpredictable. Lebanon, across the western border, suffered its own brutal civil war in the 1970s and the 1980s and is already experiencing increased interethnic tensions. Iraq, to Syria’s east, is mired in worsening violence. And Israel to the southwest has seen shots fired across the contested Golan Heights and has been forced to strike what it claimed were advanced weapons convoys heading to Hezbollah, with whom it went to war with in 2006.

Iran could wreak havoc in the region through its support of Shiite militant groups, and U.S. officials fear Iran may seek to retaliate for any stepped-up American involvement by targeting Israel or U.S. interests in the region. It’s also unclear what American action would mean for relations with Russia, which has provided Assad with military and diplomatic support even as it claims that it working with the United States to try to organize a Syrian peace conference.

At the same time, it’s unclear how Washington could fundamentally change the trajectory of a conflict that has increasingly tilted toward Assad in recent months without providing weapons to the opposition forces or getting involved itself.

The administration has been studying for months how to rebalance Syria’s war so that moderate, pro-democracy rebels defeat the regime or make life so difficult for Assad and his supporters that the government decides it must join a peace process that entails a transition away from the Assad family’s four-decade dictatorship.

But Assad’s military successes appear to have rendered peace efforts largely meaningless in the short term. While Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov have been trying to rally support for the planned conference in Geneva — first envisioned for May and since postponed until July at the earliest — even America’s allies in the Syrian opposition leadership have questioned the wisdom of sitting down for talks while they are ceding territory all over the country to Assad’s forces.

Beyond weapons support for the rebels, administration officials harbor deep reservations about other options.

They note that a no-fly zone, championed by hawks in Congress such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would require the U.S. to first neutralize Syrian air defense systems that have been reinforced with Russian technology and are far stronger than those that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi had before the U.S. and its Arab and European allies helped rebels overthrow him in 2011. And unlike with Libya, Washington has no clear international mandate for authorizing any strikes inside Syria, a point the Obama administration officials has harped on since late 2011 to explain its reticence about more forceful action.

Homs has one of the biggest Alawite communities in Syria and is widely seen as pro-Assad. The rebels control the city center, however, with regime forces besieging them on the outskirts.

Many towns north of Homs also are rebel-controlled, while to the south Hezbollah-backed government forces have been clearing rebels from villages and towns. Fierce fighting there over the past three weeks has killed dozens of rebels, troops and Hezbollah fighters and wounded hundreds.

Seizing control of Homs would clear a path for the regime from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast, and firm up its grip on much of the country.

Source: chron.com

Syria is bleeding to death and the west stands by

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A house in Homs after a rocket attack by Assad’s forces. Photograph: Emma Suleiman/ Demotix/Corbis

June 9, 2013, by Nick Cohen

Sceptics about humanitarian intervention in Syria hit you with what they regard as a killer question: “Where do you stop?” If the “international community”, such as it is, tries to halt the massacres in Syria, why doesn’t it intervene in North Korea or Somalia? If the political partialities of your inquisitor lean to the pseudo-left, the whataboutery does not stop there. Guantánamo, drones, the West Bank, or whatever else is troubling them that day mean that nothing can be done for the Syrians until the lands of the west have been cleansed of their sins.

The only proper response to “where do you stop?’ is “when do you start?” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is meant to protect against “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”. The conscience of mankind, however, has become remarkably forgiving of late.

What can outrage it? Not the 80,000 dead, according to the UN (a minimum of 94,000, says the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights). Not the 1.5 million the war has driven into exile in poverty-stricken camps, where families sell their daughters to dirty old men to pay for food. Not the United Nations, which last week talked of soldiers forcing children to watch the torture and murder of their parents and concluded that, while all sides were guilty of war crimes, rebel actions did not “reach the intensity and scale” of the massacres committed by government forces.

Few qualms have afflicted the conscience of dictatorial regimes. Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have practised illiberal intervention. But as for the conscience of the west, when it considers Syria at all, it finds liberal intervention unconscionable – nearly everywhere, that is, except in William Hague’s Foreign Office.

I accept that praising Hague (and by extension David Cameron) in the Observer is akin to praising the pope at an abortion rights rally. But no one reads this newspaper to have their prejudices confirmed (for what would be the point of that?). It is only from Hague’s Foreign Office and the Quai d’Orsay that you find a glimmer of an understanding of the moral and diplomatic questions the Syrian catastrophe raises.

We should never forget that the Syrian revolution began with peaceful demonstrators asking for democracy and a decent life. It was closer to the velvet revolutions of eastern Europe than the civil war in Libya. Assad’s forces responded by mowing down, raping and castrating the protesters. Syrian intellectuals warned me and many others that, if Nato did nothing, the war would spread to Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and maybe Jordan and southern Turkey, and they were right. Radical Islamists would fill the void, they continued, and again the only comfort they have today is that they were right about that too.

Hague is impressive because you do not need to tell him what he already knows. He accepts that the world failed Syria and gave Assad the time and space to brutalise the population. He at least is not surprised by reports of massacres. They are chronicles of deaths foretold.

Although you will never get British or French foreign ministers to say so in public, they also know that there has been a calamitous failure of American leadership. Russia, Iran and Assad have taken every opportunity available. The Nixonian Obama, as indifferent to abuses of human rights abroad as he is to abuses of civil liberties at home, has shrugged and looked the other way.

It is a sign of the parochial spirit of the age that the modest proposal by Britain and France to fill the vacuum by threatening to arm rebels has been greeted with fury on the right and left. I accept that it is hard after Iraq to talk of the national interest or of Nato or the EU’s interest. But the facts of grand strategy have not changed. Even if you can suppress all humanitarian impulses, it is not in the west’s interest to have an Assad regime more beholden to Iran than ever on the shores of the Mediterranean.

More to the point, without pressure, why would Assad come to the negotiating table and demand anything less than his opponents’ abject surrender? Why would rebels come to hear the terms of their capitulation? The threat of arming of rebels who profess democratic principles would tell Assad that he could not carry on regardless.

Labour, which is meant to represent the sensible wing of the British left, will not give Hague a fair hearing. During the Bosnian war, Douglas Hurd, the Tory foreign secretary in 1993, said he would not allow arms to reach the Bosnian Muslims for fear of creating “a level killing field”. Many on the liberal left condemned him. Hurd was ignoring the distinction between aggressor and victim, we said. He could not bring himself to say that the Serbs outgunned the Muslims and were taking full advantage of their superiority to ethnically cleanse the south-east Balkans.

Now the roles are reversed. A Conservative foreign secretary does not want to sit by as the bodies of the murdered pile up.

Meanwhile, another Douglas, Douglas Alexander this time, Labour’s “progressive” foreign affairs spokesman, breezily maintains that there is no need to help rebels because Syria is already “awash” with weapons. He then contradicts himself by maintaining that if Britain and France were to arm rebels – why would they need to if Syria were already “awash” with weapons? – the rebels would not come to the negotiating table.

If Cameron were saying he was going to send British troops into another war, I would have no argument with Alexander. But he is condemning any application of diplomatic pressure. Russia has used every gambit it can think of to delay peace talks. British diplomats have told the Russian foreign ministry it can hold talks in the Kremlin and call them the “Moscow talks” or the “Russian peace process”… anything to get the process started. To no avail. Putin wants to give Assad as much time as possible. Nothing will change unless the terms of trade change first.

There is an alternative future. Faint though it may seem, there remains the possibility that the rebels will win without western aid. If so, they will be more jihadist, sectarian, brutal and anti-western when they take Damascus.

The words of my Syrian friends will then sound prophetic: “We will never forget how you forgot us.”

Source:

Cameron faces serious Cabinet split over over arming Syrian rebels

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It could take 18 months of arming rebels to force the Syrian regime to the negotiating table. Photo: Getty Images

June 6, 2013 by Oliver Wright and Nigel Morris

David Cameron is facing a serious Cabinet split over his plans for Britain to take a leading role in supplying Syrian opposition forces with arms, The Independent has learnt.

At least five Cabinet ministers are understood to have raised “ serious reservations” about any significant move by the Government to increase Britain’s involvement in the conflict.

Their concerns have been echoed by a growing number of Conservative MPs who have warned Downing Street they may rebel against the Government in any Parliamentary vote on the issue.

Cabinet sources admit it could take 18 months of arming rebels to force the Syrian regime to the negotiating table – a bleak assessment which some fear may cause Britain to be sucked into a long military commitment with a highly uncertain outcome.

The ministers, who include the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, are said to have warned at a recent meeting of the National Security Council that supplying weapons to the Free Syrian Army might only escalate the conflict, killing many more people without any realistic prospect of decisive victory. They also believe it could be “next to impossible” to ensure that British arms do not fall into the hands of Islamist militants.

Others opponents include the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, the International Development Secretary Justine Greening, the Foreign Office Minister Baroness Warsi and the Cabinet Office minister Ken Clarke.

Senior Whitehall officials say that Mr Cameron has become convinced of the need for Britain to take a much more proactive stance in the Syrian conflict, with one describing it as a “one-man crusade”. Another senior Whitehall source said: “He is the one who is driving this. He thinks that it is the right thing to do and that the experience in Libya shows that intervention can work. The danger, as we saw with Tony Blair, is that not all conflicts are the same.”

The arguments of the interventionists were strengthened when Francois Hollande, the French President, said the growing evidence of the use of chemical weapons “obliges the international community to act”. He insisted, however, that such action would have to be “within the framework of international law”.

Cabinet supporters for arming the rebels include the Education Secretary Michael Gove and the Chancellor George Osborne. The Foreign Secretary William Hague is said be broadly supportive but concerned about practical difficulties. The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, has made it clear that there can be no significant role for British forces.

The greatest problem for Mr Cameron is the reservations of Mr Clegg, whose party has an effective veto on action because Labour has already indicated it will not support armed intervention.

A Whitehall source said Mr Clegg did not believe “there was a military-only solution to Syria” and would not back any attempt to arm the rebels without co-ordinated international support, including from the Americans.

In the Commons Mr Cameron stressed that, despite the end of the EU embargo on arms to rebel groups in Syria, no decision has been taken. Britain and France led moves last week for the embargo to be lifted, arguing that the move would help bring President Bashar al-Assad to talks. The PM also hinted he would be willing to give MPs a vote on the issue, recalling Parliament if necessary.

However, The Independent understands that Mr Cameron is facing entrenched opposition – and the threat of rebellion – from backbench MPs. Several signed a letter to him urging a full Commons debate before British-made weapons are supplied. It comes after Tory MPs, including the longest-serving Conservative, Sir Peter Tapsell, lined up in the Commons this week to condemn the Anglo-French position.

Julian Lewis, a former shadow Defence Minister, said: “I know a significant number of Conservative backbenchers agree with me that this is playing with fire. I think the Government would struggle to get endorsement in parliament.”

John Baron, Tory MP for Basildon and Billericay, said: “Putting more weapons into a civil war can only inflame the violence… on the Tory side, opinion is probably evenly split with growing momentum in our favour.”

Mark Field, the MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, said: “I’m concerned last week’s EU declaration appears to bring us nearer to aiding and arming people who would be subject to 24-hour surveillance if they lived in this country.”

Labour is threatening to force a Commons debate on Syria if Mr Cameron refuses to give MPs a chance to express their views. An early day motion tabled by the Conservative Andrew Bridgen condemning the moves was signed by more than 30 MPs of all parties.

Source: independent.co.uk

Syria: Hezbollah’s military intervention

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Photo: Anton Nossik

June 5, 2013 by Frederic C. Hof

The loss of the strategic town of Qusayr by Syrian rebels clearly demonstrates that the presence of Hezbollah fighters inside Syria is a life preserver of sorts for a regime badly in need of one. That Bashar al-Assad can use the help is beyond question. Yet the wisdom of this intervention is very much in question, as Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah may discover at his leisure. By sending young Lebanese men to fight and die in Syria for an incompetent, feudalistic family regime, Nasrallah may be inadvertently undermining the very basis of his heretofore unassailable position in Lebanon.

Although it may not be crystal clear to the Hezbollah rank-and-file or to the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who support the Party of God and respect its leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has one transcendent political mission in this life: to protect and perpetuate the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yes, Hezbollah is an important force in Lebanese politics. Yes, Hezbollah obliged Israel to quit Lebanon in 2000. And yes, Hezbollah fought Israel to a bloody standoff in 2006. Indeed, within Lebanon Nasrallah has gotten extraordinarily superb mileage out of the claim that he heads not an extralegal militia, but “the resistance.” Hezbollah has, to be sure, an impressive array of missiles and rockets it says exists to deter Israel. Yet that which is unstated by Nasrallah and his small leadership cadre is the central purpose of the deterrent: to prevent Israel from attacking Iran and to retaliate from Lebanese territory if it does so.

The Hezbollah secretary-general and his colleagues have worked hard over the years to burrow into Lebanese politics. They have declined to turn over their arms, strategic and otherwise, to the institution legally charged with the defense of Lebanon: the Lebanese Armed Forces. To do so would be to delete Iran from the deterrence and retaliation mission, unless of course Iran and Lebanon were to conclude a mutual defense treaty—an unlikely possibility, to say the least. Yet by successfully offering candidates for parliament and gaining ministers in government, Nasrallah has added a layer of protection to the autonomy of his arms and the non-Lebanese nature of their ultimate purpose. As he demonstrated in May 2008 by storming west Beirut with little or no resistance, Nasrallah’s first line of defense is force of arms. Yet the political insulation—facilitated by means of an alliance with the largely Christian Free Patriotic Movement—has added an aura of legitimacy to the undertaking.

By intervening in Syria’s civil conflict Nasrallah has put that insulation at risk. In nearly any other country the spectacle of a party in a ruling (if caretaker) coalition sending armed auxiliaries off to war in defiance of that government’s stated policy (“disassociation” from the Syrian conflict) would be considered stupendously unbelievable and absolutely unacceptable. Many Lebanese, even those who would define Nasrallah’s action as a hanging offense, have been conditioned to take this sort of outrage in stride and (except for those already predisposed to violence) roll with it. Yet Hezbollah’s armed intervention in Syria, announced openly by the organization’s secretary-general, may be beyond the pale even by Lebanon’s loose standards.

One would think, given Nasrallah’s reputation for careful calculation (leaving aside, of course, the decisions to kill Rafik Hariri in 2005 and provoke Israel to war in 2006), that he was prevailed upon by Iran to feed warm bodies into the Syrian meat grinder. Left to his own devices he might have preferred to provide other services to the Assad regime: the customary services, as it were. Yet for Iran, preserving the Assad regime is a top national security priority, and Tehran may well have succumbed to the regime’s pleas for trained, proficient manpower to supplement the efforts of its own exhausted ranks. Iran would have no objection, principled or otherwise, to Lebanese making the supreme sacrifice. And keeping Hezbollah fighters busy in Syria would detract not at all from Hezbollah’s missiles and rockets pointed at Israel from the south of Lebanon. Indeed, while Hezbollah infantry storms Qusayr and other Syrian places for the greater glory of the Assad family, southern Lebanon has been transformed into one of the quietest places on the planet. No wonder Hezbollah fighters in Syria have wondered out loud to journalists what Qusayr has to do with the defense of Lebanon or the liberation of Jerusalem. 

Although Nasrallah has sought to shore up his political base with the argument that takfiris (Muslims who deny the Islamic authenticity of other Muslims) must be fought in Syria to keep the fight away from Lebanon, the risk he is running is that he will inadvertently import Syria’s increasingly ugly sectarian conflict into Lebanon on a wholesale basis. Hezbollah in Lebanon would not be without resources should a Lebanese sectarian free-for-all be the result of Nasrallah saying “yes” once too often to some combination of Iran and the Assad regime, in this case persuading him to commit manpower. Indeed, within Lebanon Hezbollah would hold its own militarily, at least in the nearterm. Yet the resumption of anything resembling civil war in Lebanon has been something Nasrallah has assiduously avoided, both by burrowing into Lebanese politics and by demonstrating overwhelming power when he has deemed it necessary to do so, as in May 2008. Until now he has seen internal Lebanese stability very much in the context of preempting any threat to the autonomy of his arms. He probably still sees it that way. But why take the risk of massive blowback, particularly when reports—augmented by social media—of Assad regime atrocities inevitably leak out from areas where Hezbollah fighters are active? Is there actually an expectation on Nasrallah’s part that the commitment of Hezbollah fighters to Syria will prove decisive?

By all accounts all prominent Lebanese political leaders wish to keep the peace in Lebanon. But one of the characteristics of the fighting that began in 1975 and lasted until 1990 was the inability of some  traditional leaders to hold onto their followers. Prime Minister-designate Tammam Salam, now trying hard to form a government, will testify to the phenomenon as experienced by his father and others nearly 40 years ago. If the result of Nasrallah’s ongoing and upgraded secession from Lebanon is to unleash cycles of sectarian violence that leaders—or more precisely, former leaders—are unable to contain, who will be able to guarantee to the Supreme Leader in Tehran that the Lebanon-based missile and rocket deterrence and retaliatory capability is safe and sound? And what of Hezbollah’s Christian allies? Can General Michel Aoun, a man who fought effectively in defense of the Lebanese Republic as an air force brigade commander, abide Nasrallah’s decision to seize the prerogative of the Government of Lebanon by invading another country? Beyond Lebanon, can anyone in Western Europe or elsewhere still draw a distinction between the political and military wings of Hezbollah? It was a distinction without a difference in any event. Yet to maintain it now would be nothing short of obscene.

Risks notwithstanding and military capabilities aside, Nasrallah still has at least two important assets. First, to the extent there is a reasonably effective state in Lebanon, he is in charge of it. His constituents receive the kinds of services, including protection, that the Lebanese state-on-paper has never provided. Nasrallah’s actions in Syria may, over time, drain the reservoir of respect he has earned in areas he rules. Yet that reservoir is deep. Second, those who oppose the corruption, incompetence, and brutality of the Assad regime on sectarian grounds—whether they live in Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf region, or elsewhere—are the best friends Nasrallah and Assad can ever hope to have. Although sectarian reactions to the murderous strategy of a regime that has fallen back on its own sectarian roots are understandable and, given the weakness of human nature, inevitable, they are pure poison nonetheless. Where in the Arab Sunni Muslim world is there a full-throated condemnation of sectarianism and a definitive rejection of takfiri prejudice and hatred? Who will counter the call for a Sunni jihad in Syria against Shia coming from the lips of a Qatar-based theologian? Nasrallah provides social services against a backdrop of enemies howling like wolves. What could be better from his point of view? What could be more credible in terms of his ability to justify to his constituents a cruel sacrifice they have no business making?

Nasrallah’s decision to commit forces to Syria—whether the decision originated with him or with others—will do no one any good over time. Bashar al-Assad, even as he is borne aloft on the shoulders of Iran and Hezbollah, will find a way to squander whatever tactical victories can be bought with Lebanese blood. Many Lebanese parents will needlessly experience the ultimate nightmare: burying a child; a nightmare rendered all the more cruel by the political uselessness and stupidity of the sacrifice. Lebanon, the precarious republic in the best of times, will be rocked to its already fragile foundations. It is true that Iran and Hezbollah, with the backing of Russia, believe they can carry the hapless Assad across the goal line. Yet even if they could, what would they do for an encore? If Assad’s three key supporters were to devote ten percent of the time American planners do to “day after” scenarios, they would abandon this regime in a heartbeat. A beaten regime would be a real setback for all three. A victorious regime would be a burden none of them would or could begin to bear. 

Source: acus.org

Missiles to #Syria a deterrence against intervention, Russia says

Deliveries of sophisticated Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian regime are a “stabilizing factor” aimed at deterring any foreign intervention in the war-torn country, Moscow said Tuesday.

“We consider these supplies a stabilizing factor and believe such steps will deter some hotheads from considering scenarios that would turn the conflict international with the involvement of outside forces,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters.

He added that the delivery of the S-300 systems to Syria was related to a contract signed several years ago.

05/28/2013 - AFP

“All options on table” over #Syria, US official says

A senior US administration official said Thursday that “all options are on the table” if it can be confirmed that Syria has used chemical weapons against opposition forces.

The White House said earlier in the day that Syria had likely used chemical weapons against rebel fighters on a “small scale,” but emphasized that US intelligence agencies are still not 100 percent sure of the assessment.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington wants to be absolutely sure that Syria has used chemical weapons before concluding that Damascus has crossed a “red line,” triggering possible military action.

“What we will be doing is consulting closely with our friends and allies and the international community more broadly as well as the Syrian opposition to determine what the best course of action is,” he told reporters.

“I don’t want to go to hypotheticals at this juncture,” the official added.

“But suffice to say, all options are on the table, in terms of our response, and it could run a broad spectrum of activity across our various types of efforts in Syria.”

The official recalled that the United States is already engaged in “diplomatic initiatives [and] assistance to the opposition” in Syria, where the US says a grinding civil war has left more than 70,000 dead since March 2011.

“But again, at the president’s direction, there are additional options and contingencies that we prepare for, that we would have to consider as we make our determination about chemical weapon use.”

Speaking earlier Thursday, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said US intelligence services have assessed “with varying degrees of confidence” that Syria has used chemical weapons “on a small scale.”

The assessment, based in part on what Hayden called “physiological samples,” points to the possible use of sarin, a man-made nerve agent used in two attacks in Japan in the 1990s.

Hayden warned, however, the chain of custody of the weapons was “not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions.”

“Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our own recent experience, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient,” she said.

Mounting evidence of chemical weapons attacks on fighters battling Assad’s regime could increase the pressure on Obama — who has sought to avoid any US military role in the conflict — to intervene.

On Capitol Hill, members of Congress urged Obama to take action to “secure” Syria’s chemical weapons.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that a red line has been crossed,” Senator John McCain told reporters, adding that there is a danger of chemical weapons falling into the hands of extremists.

“We have to have operational capability to secure these chemical weapon stocks. We do not want them to fall into the wrong hands, and the wrong hands are a number of participants in the struggle that’s taking place in Syria.”

04/25/2013 - AFP

Syria opposition asks US for Patriot missile protection

Syrian opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib said Tuesday he has asked the United States to extend NATO’s Patriot missile system to protect rebel-held areas in the north of the war-torn country.

 

“I have asked [US Secretary of State] Mr. John Kerry during our meeting to provide Patriot [missile protection] that encompasses northern Syria, and he has promised to look into the matter,” said Khatib at an Arab summit in Doha, Qatar.

 

“We are still awaiting a decision from NATO on this matter.”

 

NATO’s sole involvement in Syria’s brutal civil war to date has been to position Patriot missile batteries along the Turkish border in order to prevent any air or missile launches from the Syrian side.

 

“The United States has a bigger role” which it could play beyond offering humanitarian aid worth “$350 million,” said Khatib.

 

Hours after Moaz al-Khatib, the head of the Syrian National Coalition, called on the United States to use Patriot missiles to protect rebel-held areas in Syria, the NATO military alliance said it isn’t getting involved: “NATO has no intention to intervene militarily in Syria,” an unnamed official told the Reuters news agency.

 

03/26/2013

Source: aje.com

Opposition chief urges world to act on #Syria

Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib

Syria’s opposition chief Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib on Saturday slammed world governments for failing to act to stop the bloodshed in Syria, nearly two years into a war that has left some 70,000 people dead.

Khatib made the remarks as he took part in Cairo in a demonstration which he described as “a message of protest to all governments of the world, Arab and non-Arab, that can see how the Syrian people are being killed, while they merely look on.”

“All the administrations of the world can see what is happening… We cannot visit any country until there is a clear decision on this savage, aggressive regime,” Khatib told the Dubai-based Al-Aan pan-Arab television in Cairo.

On Friday the opposition coalition said it will boycott an upcoming Friends of Syria meeting in Rome and cancelled planned visits to Washington and Moscow citing the “shameful” inaction of the international community.

The opposition wants world governments to turn into action their statements of support for the uprising against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and are also seeking military assistance for rebels fighting the regime.

The UN Security Council has been blocked from acting on Syria by Russian and Chinese vetoes, while Western powers have become more hesitant to help the armed opposition to Assad’s regime for fear of the rise of radical Islamist groups.

Earlier, National Coalition spokesman Walid al-Bunni told France 24’s Arabic-language channel that the United States must honor promises of support for democracy in Syria.

“Our visit to Washington is on hold until Washington takes a stance that is in accordance with US statements on its support for democracy,” Bunni said.

“The United States is a leading force in the world, as are France, Britain and the European Union. All these have been unable to stop a butcher from committing massacres against our people,” he said, referring to Assad.

“We cannot continue listening to statements that are not accompanied by action… The world has a responsibility to protect [the Syrian people] from a butcher who has been slaughtering them for two years,” Bunni added.

02/23/2013

Source: afp.com

#Syria Former Syrian VP says military intervention only solution

February 14/2013

Former Syrian Vice President Abed Al-Halim Khaddam said a foreign military intervention was the only solution to the danger that is being posed by the Syrian regime.

“I call for the establishment of an international military coalition, [one that will be responsible] for an intervention in Syria,’ Khaddam said in remarks published by Kuwaiti daily As-Seyassah on Thursday.

“This is the only solution that is capable of saving the region from the threat posed by the Syrian regime, [which is currently] enjoying military support from Iran and Hezbollah and political support from Russia.”

He added that the complexity of the Syrian crisis could not be addressed solely by way of politics.

Khaddam also cautioned that a spread of chaos in Syria could easily occur if the decision to intervene militarily was not taken.

“This chaos could spread to the rest of the region.”

Syria is witnessing a violent uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which has killed more than 60,000 people since its outbreak in March of last year, according to figures released by the United Nations.

Source: Now Media