Vladimir Putin has succeeded in getting the New York Times to publish a column detailing his views on the Syria situation. He took the opportunity to critique U.S. foreign policy more generally, but that isn’t particularly interesting. The only important part of his column is the following:
The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action.
Yes, let’s do that. But let’s also be mindful that we have begun delivering lethal aid to some of the rebels. We are ramping up a proxy war against the Assad regime. Russia, Iran, and Hizbollah are giving aid to the regime. But, if both sides are truthful, neither of us wants the Assad regime to completely collapse because we all recognize that religious minorities in Syria are facing the threat of a bloodbath. This is one of the reasons that the regime is so ruthless and it explains why they retain so much internal support.
Our policy is a very difficult one, because we can’t simply struggle for complete victory and we don’t want to keep the civil war going with more lethality. If there is a tolerable outcome, it is probably going to involve the regime shedding its leadership in exchange for protections against sectarian reprisals. We might want to take Syria out of Russia’s sphere of influence, but we’d probably be better off using Russia’s equities in Syria to force some kind of political settlement. The advantage of this strategy is that we can avoid taking more than co-ownership of the Syrian civil war. If we bring down the Alawite regime, we will be responsible for not only what happens to the Alawites, but also the Shiites, Christians, Druze, and even the Kurds. But if we allow Russia to remain as the protector of the regime, we may be able to compel the Sunni rebellion to make concessions in return for their share of power.
We have to recognize that although the Assad regime is loathsome and ruthless, they are protecting religious minorities and represent, to a degree, the pluralistic and ecumenical history of tolerance in Syria. While they oppress the majority, they protect everyone else. Their leadership has committed so many crimes against humanity that they cannot be allowed to continue in power, but their opponents must not be allowed to commit the same kinds of acts in reprisal.
If Russia follows through and helps disarm the regime of chemical weapons, that can serve as a model for some kind of coordinated strategy to bring the parties to the table for an agreement that involves something less than total victory for any side.
We must resist the desire to win outright because winning outright would make us the sole owners of Syria’s future and it would make us responsible for the ethnic and sectarian cleansing that would inevitably follow.
As a nation, we are not built to understand this kind of conflict.
As a nation, we are not built to understand this kind of conflict.
Which manifests itself in all the nonsense you saw on Twitter last night. I’m curious how many other world leaders have received space in the NYT op-ed page(s). If you’d have believed Twitter last night, they never do and the NYT should be sent to the Hague for allowing Putin’s op-ed.
As a nation, we are not built to understand this kind of conflict, but there are sects within this nation that understand it perfectly-well. Let’s say that the President was everything that his opponents initially accused him of being, that Rev. Wright was the kinder, gentler messenger of what Obama truly believed. Let’s say that with Obama’s ascension Blacks took over every mechanism of government and industry. Believe me, there would be no blithe comments saying, “While they oppress the majority, they protect everyone else…and represent, to a degree, the pluralistic and ecumenical history of tolerance in [America].” It would be all-out war, the likes of which Hobbes could not imagine.
The GOP gets that.
So do Blacks.
That said, your point stands – Syria a mess that we don’t want to own, and the Russian gambit is the best option available.
Really? It’s always been said that the Conservatives don’t want power in the hands of minorities because they are afraid that the minorities would treat white people the way we treated them. Liberals laugh at this idea, saying it’s paranoid and insulting to minorities. Are you saying they are right? If women suddenly controlled the world, I wouldn’t want to suppress men. Do you really think that black people seek revenge? Can our black friends speak to that, please?
I didn’t read it as his saying that blacks wanted revenge. There’s been plenty of evidence these last five years that certain sectors of the white population would not accept it as a legitimate government, to the extent that they’d take up arms against it regardless of what that government did or didn’t do.
I’m saying that Blacks can easily understand the nature of the fight in Syria, knowing full-well that if we controlled everything in America that a large number of Whites would yell, “Give me liberty or give me death!” I’m not willing to say that we would (or would not) necessarily suppress Whites, but if the situation in America was anywhere near the situation in Syria then there is absolutely no ambiguity as to what would happen over here – to the last plane, to the last man, to the last bullet…
OK, thanks for the clarification. I get that if any minority group in this nation was suddenly given total authority, there would never be a peaceful solution. That does give perspective to what happened over there.
“Suppress” is a relative term. Only yesterday we heard that the multibillionaires in New York are afraid Bill de Blasio will suppress their rights and are mobilizing to stop him. It’s almost as if, the more power you have, the less “suppression” you can tolerate. And this becomes a wider problem because many have-nots do identify with the existing power structure. Why they do that is a mystery that cost Karl Marx many sleepless nights.
Excellent point.
You assume that the US aim is peace. Yet, they are willing to have the chemical weapons destroyed but still continue with take sides in the conflict (actually siding with the forces that brought about 9/11 twelve years and one day ago). That is not consistent with peace. Once again Obama talks out of both sides of his mouth. So that no matter what happens, he can claim that he was right? Perhaps. Or perhaps the reason is more nefarious. There is nothing like a good little war to take people’s minds off of a bad economy.
Obama … the man that controls everything the US government does. Or maybe not.
I think the CIA just didn’t get the memo.
Ultimately, what’s fascinating about watching the Great Game circa 2013 is what Russia and Putin care about Syria and what Obama and the US establishment care about it. It’s safe to say the American public does not care one whit about who runs Syria or how. I suppose they could easily be made to care if the latest great Bogeyman al Qaeda (2.0) ran Syria, but you get my point. At least we can now move beyond the CW schtick and get to the heart of the matter, the endless US meddling in the affairs of too many countries of no real importance to us.
Aside from the usual humanitarian concerns of not wanting to see Muslim children blow to bits or nice old grandmas buying zuchinnis mown down by automatic weapons (which the whole world possesses, one assumes, including people of the region), Syria is not an interest of the US. As a world “player”, it’s a nation of trivial importance. As (successful) Great Power statesman Bismarck would have said, not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Yet here we are, putting every other (quite pressing) national agenda item on hold, including the national debt ceiling, over “influencing” the Syrian civil war, as though it is the highest item on the US priority list. Fairly crazy.
Russia has some long term interest in Syria apparently because of the communist tradition that Syria was one of “their” client states in the ME Cold War Game. And so Syria still is, apparently by force of tradition. We appear to claim a national interest in EVERY state in the ME because of Arab Gulf oil and our deeply damaging “ally” Israel (who has made a national goal of deeply alienating every country in the region and having exactly one “friend”). At least one can understand Iran having an actual national interest in Syria, seems almost quaint!
Oh, yes, we can trot out our great mission of Spreadin’ Democracy, but that seems to be something that we spread somewhat inconsistently in dribs and drabs, depending on whether our bidding is currently being done by the nation in question. Anyway, that’s about the best you can do in finding an actual US “interest” in Syria. Oil, oil, oil, Israel, Israel, Israel, Iran, Iran, Iran. Frankly, it’s gettin’ a little tiresome. And given that we as a nation are literally falling apart, a little, um, irritating. But it keeps John McFool and the MIC and our crackerjack foreign policy establishment running, I guess.
I have to wonder whether the days of the Ottoman Empire weren’t about 1000% superior to what’s going on today, at least from the perspective of the US. Incredibly, in those days, there could be entire wars all over the Balkans that no Murican would hear the slightest mention of, and that our state department would “follow” with supreme disinterest. The raft of ME religious minorities were largely protected by Constantinople (that’s how they’re still there in the first place) with the dominant confession of the region running the show, using local vassals accountable to the Sultan. Not a bad system in hindsight. Puts the ham-handed operations of our empire to shame, ha-ha.
If Syria was some desert island in the middle of some uncharted sea, I’d agree with you.
Syria is an interest to the US to the extent that it is an interest to Israel, Saudi Arbaia, Iran, and Russia. But since all these countries are of great interest to the US, so is Syria.
Well, it sounds like you’d never agree with me, because under that framework only desert isles in the middle of uncharted seas are not US national interests. Our “partner” Russia can pretend to have and assert dubious interests all over the globe.
As for us, it’s quite an expensive proposition and the perfect illustration of unending foreign entanglements—and who benefits from those, other than the MIC?
No, I think that’s an over-generalization. The only countries lying between Syria and Russia are Turkey and Georgia. Or if you just consider the Black Sea, then only Turkey. Syria is in their part of the world.
And by the way, I was speaking of interests, not implying that we have to deal with those interests by military interventions overt or covert. That is something we inherited, I think, from the British Empire.
And as for Iran and our great “allies” the Kingdom and Israel, well let those regional powers fight it out over the Assad family dictatorship. It shits up THEIR neighborhood, and then THEY can bear the brunt of the resulting anger and denunciation and inevitable blowback.
Which is as it should be.
That would be fine, except that just ain’t how it is.
This all works if one begins with the premise that “we” have any legal authority or right to dictate what the government of Syria needs to do. We don’t.
Russia, Iran and Hizbollah are allies of Syria that is under attack from US, KSA, and Qatar imports of weapons and mercenaries to topple the Syrian government. That’s considered a war of aggression.
Well, if that’s all we want and without a total regime change, we had a piss-poor game plan with all our R2P rhetoric and bombing threats. Not too different from Iraq that we helped forge ties with Iran.
OK, in the best of all possible worlds that would be an effective argument. But there is another thing, and this is the reason I think both Obama and Putin are dealing in good faith here.
This whole emphasis on foreign policy by counter-insurgency and covert action, a central pillar of US foreign policy since the Cold War, just doesn’t work. It inevitably has uncontrollable, unintended consequences and incurs great costs on the US in blood and treasure. Check out Col. Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency
Part of our intelligence and foreign service is continuing business as usual, and part of them is starting to understand that, after one disastrous fuckup after another. Obama gets it, but there’s a lot of resistance.
Something similar could be said for Putin. The Russians suppressed religious and cultural minorities for 150 years or more and now its payback time.
Both Obama and Putin would like things to calm down. It’s just a constant drain on both countries. The big banks and big oil feel otherwise. But Russia does not seem to be as troubled about oil as we are. And they are not so overextended as we are. But there is no point continuing the Cold War.
The spheres of influence are leftovers from the Cold War, indeed a considerable amount of it is a continuation of prewar rivalries between the British Empire, Germany and Russia. Anyway, the Cold War itself ended a while ago. On the other hand, both Israel and Saudi Arabia owe a lot of their present influence to the strategic roles they played in the Cold War scenario, so they try to keep it going in a new form which is in the interests of neither the US, Russia, or China.
Assume “good faith” among those movers and shakers in geopolitics that have repeatedly demonstrated the opposite leads to misinterpretations. That’s compounded by assuming an ability to mind-read the movers and shakers. Geopolitics is about the interests of the parties those movers and shakers represent.
It’s all working just fine for those “interests.” Oil prices in inflation adjusted dollars has increased from $19.13/barrel at the beginning of the Cold War to $87.52/barrel. The rich in the US are getting richer faster than at any other time.
Syria is some minor cog in the great big puzzle — and that’s in part because the US still has a bug up its ass about Iran tossing out the dictator we imposed on them in 1953.
Yes, it’s about interests. What I’m suggesting is that the interests of the US and Russia may actually coincide in this case.
Not because either we or they have suddenly got that warm and fuzzy feeling, but because the stars just happen to line up that way right now.
But even that is inconceivable to many people whose mind is frozen into a cold war posture that no longer has any rationale. (Remember, Cold War predicates that our interests cannot possibly coincide with the Russians, since we’re the leader of the “Free World” and they are the leader of the “Captive Nations”.)
Old habits are hard to break. Almost a hundred years old now — except for the few years we needed them to take on the larger role in crushing the Germany.
Not sure that US and Russian interests healthily coincide at this time. Too much religion in the mix and in the way. If the US and Russia could ever break the religion habit, things would be so much easier between our nations. As it is we’re ignoring the scourge of heroin addiction in Russia that our war in Afghanistan unleashed. And it’s coming to the USA. Neither of our economies are doing well — and neither seems to have leaders with economic vision.
Putin is the smarter of the two but Obama is taller.
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The rumors were picked-up yesterday on France24 Debate about Syria.
Cross-posted from my diary – Across the Globe, Praise for Putin ‖ Op-ed.
Time is going to become an important ingredient here.
The refugees that are dispursed in neighboring countries are putting enormous strain every day on the countries who have offered shelter. Those countries will begin to demand resolution.
Crops aren’t getting harvested, nor planted. What do the refugees have to come home to?
And the fighters. Will the myriad of factions and their all for me and me for me mindset end up fracturing the larger sponsorships of Hamas, of Iran. Does time fracture the relationship of Russia to Iran to Syria when the players are all takers?
The cough of the Rep’s trying to clear their throats these last few days and string together coherent thoughts has been a bit like watching my pup chase yellowjackets. She always loses and reverts to an ice pack on the couch.
Syria has devolved into the Muslim Shia vs Sunni war. The war they have been fighting since about the 8th century. You want peace?….look to Sudan. Partition.
I’m rather glad that the superpower of the day (hint: the empire on which the Sun never set) didn’t intervene on the part of the rebels during the U.S. Civil War. Yes, they flirted with the idea and provided some material support, but they never sent warships to bombard the Union nor engaged in pronouncements that “Lincoln must go.”
Indeed, excellently done. And there were plenty of humanitarian atrocities to go around. Nor was there a problem (even today!) finding folks who declared Lincoln a tyrant, dictator and thug. But somehow Britain formed no Coalition of the Willing, let alone a Coalition of the Coerced, to intervene in OUR unhappy, brutal and endless civil war, even though the Southern (Slave) Power provided British plutocrats with their essential commodity of the day, cotton.
Of course, in those days unnecessary wars of choice actually had to be paid for, ha-ha. So perhaps limited franchise Britain of the 1860s was closer to an actual democracy than the USA of today?
There was also the little matter of the UK Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Maybe they weren’t as adept at hypocrisy as the US that spouts freedom and democracy while ousting elected leaders in favor of the likes of the Shah and Pinochet. Although that model isn’t working so well in the 21st century.
Considering that Britain imported 40 percent of it’s wheat from the United States it is very unlikely that it would have ever seriously considered recognizing, much less, supporting the Confederacy.
The extent of British support for the Confederacy is a controversial subject. Of course they did not formally recognize the Confederacy, but southern cotton was very important to Britain and there was a lot of British support for that and various other reasons. In fact there was a fair amount of support for the Confederacy in the north, for similar reasons (See Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: the Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct Ameerica). .
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/books/review/book-review-a-world-on-fire-by-amanda-foreman.html?pa
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Syria is NOT hard.
We have no more business making demands on Syria than does Uruguay.
And no more reason to attack Syria.
Putin in the NYT is right.
Obama needs to fucking chill.
I agree.
But then, does Putin’s Russia have any more business backing and arming Syria than does Uruguay?
Yes. Coming to the aid of an ally under attack from foreign powers is allowed.
Are you just completely unaware of what the Assad regime did in 2011 to start this war? Anyone allied with them belongs in hell.
Not unaware. But was it different from what the regime in Bahrain did in that same period? Or Yemen? Difference is that we and KSA supported the regime in Bahrain and Saudi troops marched in to quell the protests. Syria got covert supplies to their “rebels” and covert calls for various Islamist fighters to join the fight. Why do you keep ignoring that part of the story?
Without defending the Bahraini government, they’ve killed about 80 people, not tens and tens of thousands of people. What’s going on Syria is more akin to what happened in Cambodia.
And get your blame straightened out, too, because one result of Obama keeping us out of the war there is that the Sunni powers in the region stepped in to fill the void. We haven’t directed that, and they haven’t even coordinated their efforts. From what I understand, we directed Saudi Arabia not to repurpose any of our heavy weapons sales to the rebels, but other than that we were not involved in arming anyone there until the past couple of weeks, although it was authorized in June.
The Assad regime is not a victim here. They made the decision to react to peaceful protests will absolute brutality on a scale that has no comparison in Bahrain or Yemen. It’s like what happened in Egypt last month, except it’s been ongoing for 3 years now. Two million people have fled the country. The country isn’t growing any food. And now they’ve just gassed their own capital. It’s horrifying. And you act like this is our fault? That we’re out of line for standing up for people who are resisting this regime?
What’s ridiculous is that anyone is sticking up for Assad. His people need some kind of protection, but that’s about it. The regime’s leaders belong in a dungeon.
Cambodia? And when does your timetable for that disaster begin?
Let me guess. After the US and ARVN forces bombed the country and facilitated “regime change.”
Are you aware of the protests in the US when Nixon’s secret war on Cambodia became public knowledge? Kent State. Jackson State. I do because I was out there. Next to Barbara Boxer on one of those days.
A bit disingenuous on your part to compare a two month unarmed (among protesters) uprising (that was thoroughly crushed with an overwhelming display of force) with a two and a half year long civil war with both parties well armed, and a county with 1/20th the population. The stories and casualty figures are unlikely to have been different if Assad had had at his command a commensurate level of forces as that deployed in Bahrain and weapons and foreign fighters did appear.
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The conflict started in the 1980s and Saudi influence in the Levant increased year by year. It’s often mentioned, the Sunni uprising was in the make ever since the Hama massacre in 1982.
○ Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth by Elie Elhadj
○ Saudi Wahhabi Sheikh Calls On Iraq’s Jihadists to Kill Shiites
Nice topic 🙂 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokoolapps.castlespalacespuzzles
Tyler Durden, Zerohedge: Stratfor Warns “It Is Not Ending, But Evolving” In Syria
Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) is a high-priced newsletter and strategic consulting firm, most famous for having its hacked emails posted on Wikileaks. It best represents the foreign policy conventional wisdom in DC. Use Tyler Durden’s subscription to see what they are saying.
That means there are no actual facts entering this discussion except as tactics, in Stratfor’s world.
And that is the bullshit that Stratfor is noted for but is the “sizzle” that makes the gullible with money shell out big bucks for their “cogent” analysis.
Because a new Cold War would mean reinvestment in defense contractors and strategic constulancies like Stratfor.
The US national security establishment is casting around for the next enemy to justify its huge budgets. China isn’t playing. Al Quaeda has become complicated. Back to good of faithful Russia, which has over 60 years of Cold War rhetorical distrust backing it.
And Dennis Rodman notwithstanding, Kim Jung Un’s regents have decided that September 11 is an oppportune time to restart their plutonium reactor (or look like they are doing it). You can never have two many WMD chips to negotiate away when the time comes to declare and dismantle.
Might be best not to look too closely at Stratfor. Barrett Brown. Jeremy Hammond. Michael Hastings may also have been looking into Strafor before his accident and death.
My Safari is acting up so I’ll keep it brief. “Natural gas pipelines.”
“Victory” is a pretty hollow word. We scored a “victory” in the Cold War according to most Americans. Yet, we are no closer to the peace and prosperity that was promised in 1992 at all. In fact we are led by even more foolish elites pushing for even more foolish short-term panaceas.
Maybe we better articulate our vision of what a political settlement that the American people can accept looks like if we are to pretend to have a national security interest in Syria.
For all the world, it looks like the conventional wisdom is Washington is deathly afraid that peace and cuts to defense expenditures might break out. That tells you a lot about what the business of the Village actually is.
That option was the one that Assad rejected two years ago. But of negotiated settlements, given what’s transpired over the past two years, that is as good as the Ba’athist regime is going to get.
That will require some institutional structure in which minority rights are guaranteed for all minorities in Syria. And getting the institutional structure right, as we have seen in Egypt, is not easy for a country to do.
There is no way that the United States can force that sort of institutional structure into being. Syrian conversations with Lebanon might be useful, but the political heavy lifting is something the Syrian people need to do.
The forum that might start this going is if the UN process ever looks at how to establish a ceasefire in order to remove the chemical weapons. (n/t Jim White at emptywheel)
Well, Russia absolutely rejected shedding the leadership, too and blocked UN actions intended to address the Syrian uprising, revolution, whatever you want to call it. There’s an argument to be made that Russia basically frustrated a popular movement to oust the Syrian family dictatorship. What exactly does Russia get out of being the ally of the Assad family? Does it score points with Iran? The old Eastern Med port crap? Hoo boy, that old chestnut, the Tsar’s Black Sea fleet…
Russia is deeply involved with maintaining the untenable Baathist status quo here, no matter what ME opprobrium it may generate. Very interesting, one would think this would have some serious costs to them. Have we no mechanisms to make Russia pay for this stunt diplomatically and in world opinion?
To the extent Syria has been a tolerant civil society run by an authoritarian minority regime, there may have been societal mechanisms in place to protect religious minorities which have existed there for centuries. That’s now all going to hell. The intransigence of Assad and the stubbornness of his foreign backers has turned this into a real catastrophe, with absolutely no good end which can be envisioned.
Nation building will ultimately be up to the Syrians, that’s for sure; they’ll be stuck living there amid the ruins. It’s a shame that the revolution in this small unimportant country just couldn’t have been left alone by all the “players”, regional and Great Power alike. Everyone and their greatly exaggerated “interests”.
It’s not Russia’s decision to make about who the Syrian Ba’athist Party has as its leadership. You have to be more specific about the actions that Russia blocked that were “intended to address the Syrian uprising” in order to figure out why Russia might have blocked them. No one rushed to the United Nations when Mubarak was suppressing his revolution. So the other question to ask was what were the motives of those seeking United Nations action.
The Tsar still has his Black Sea fleet. And it is well-equipped.
Until 2011 the US was deeply involved with maintaining the untenable Mubarak regime. As in Russia’s case with Syria, the US worried about the signal that undercutting Mubarak would send to other US allies–especially Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
Where does the animosity against Russia come from? Why do we need to make Russia pay “for this stunt diplomatically and in world opinion?” If it’s an insincere offer, they will pay diplomatically just at the US is paying for its past insincere offers.
Sorry, I can see I was unclear. I didn’t mean the recent CW proposal was a “diplomatic stunt”, I take that to be sincere, and hope it succeeds.
But it seems to me that over the past 3 years the Russians have been very deeply involved in protecting the status quo of the Syrian Family dictatorship; that Putin basically decided that this Arab Spring movement was somehow some huge coup for US interests and they absolutely weren’t going to allow “their” untenable family regime to fall when its time came. A lot of Syrians have died for Russian “interests”. And our decision to give up our untenable dictator Mubarak was one of the surprises and moral successes of the era, however it may turn out.
The US apparently decided that the Arab Spring movement in Bahrain was an Iranian plot to force them out of a naval base. A lot of Bahrainis have died for American interests.
I’m not sure that the US had so big a hand in the Egyptian Army giving up Mubarak. That seems to have been a Tantawi internal coup. Only the declassified records a generation hence can tell the story on that one.
Most likely (that’s called speculating) the peer-to-peer relationships with US general staff allowed the expression that the US did not want to see a bloodbath of repression, given the hope the US had of a future government that was inclusive. But that’s just my speculation.
That’s what we were told. It wasn’t. But first we had to kill a couple million Vietnamese, 50,000 US service members, turn parts of Vietnam into toxic waste dumps, incur debt to keep the war machine going, and divide this nation before acknowledging that it wasn’t our fight and wasn’t even much of a fight if we had never been there.
Maybe Vietnam wouldn’t have fared all that well under Ho Chi Mihn but difficult to think it would have been worse than what they experienced under US intervention. Herman Kahn thought they would have done well as he experienced a high level of intelligence, creativity, and innovation among native Vietnamese. Is there a more beautiful dress for women than the
áo dài? But we couldn’t tolerate a people that chose to gravitate towards socialism and atheism.
Syria isn’t hard. Just get the hell out of there and stop playing kissy face with the KSA with its ugly religion and ugly dress for women.
Dana Liebelson, Mother Jones: Who’s a Moderate Rebel in Syria? Check the Handwritten Receipts
It might not be the President. It might be the national security institutions. You send out the secret incompetents you have instead of the secret incompetents you want.
Can someone state what the vital US national interest in Syria is?
Is that a trick question?
It’s a tested of the quoted assertion.
In most discussions about foreign policy, “national interest” is an assertion meant to end discussion. Because it is never directly stated, there is no point at which one can debate whether the actions contemplated actually serve the national interest. And it also leads to the speculative controversy about what our national interest “really” is.
I agree with Sully in that if letting Putin dance all over Obama in the press is the price of him actually doing something positive about Syria it’s worth it and I think Obama would agree.
I will note that Assad has said he wants us to stop arming the rebels as a condition.
Agree but I doubt if Obama would. Obama is very vindictive. I truly believe that he feels his “face” is more important than anything else in the Universe.
One step forward. Syria is now a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention. That might also count as ratification, but we will see when the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons logs it. The next practical step is to deliver to the OPCW a declaration of the inventory of weapons and production facilities.
Hayes Brown, ThinkProgres: A 1991 U.S.-Russian Agreement Could Be The Model For Securing Syria’s Chemical Weapons
Under the Nunn-Lugar agreement. I mentioned this last week as a possible way out. Now they have to figure out how to stop the civil war so that the chemical weapons can be dealt with. Ceasefire assisted by the external countries that have been meddling might help.
Will the US pursue this avenue?
Time magazine’s Simon Shuster automatically dismisses it as preserving the Assad regime.
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Kerry and Lavrov have an excellent working relationship and are devoted to a political solution for the Syria crisis. Since the end of May, efforts of Kerry for diplomacy have been stymied from inside the White House. I suspect the NeoCon influence of National Security adviser Susan Rice as the culprit. Ms Rice has a close relationship with PBO and put sufficient doubt in his mind to take a tough stand on the Assad regime and threaten military action. Obama himself decided to step away from the brink of starting another prolonged war on a Muslim nation.
○ Kerry In Moscow – A Breath of Fresh Air May 7, 2013
○ Obama ahead of G8 – Syria Crossed Red Line June 15, 2013
○ John Kerry Again Rules Out Military Action in Syria June 26, 2013
○ Rice and Kerry: War Inside the White House Aug. 8, 2013
○ Barack Obama and an Act of War plus follow-up Aug. 26, 2013
If John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov illustrate their determination …
STEP 1 – Resolve CW issue on Syria
STEP 2 – Arms embargo and a political solution for Syria
STEP 3 – Resolve nuclear issue of Iran with president Rouhani
STEP 4 – Finalize a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine
Obama made a courageous decision stepping away from 35 years of biased US policy on the Middle East. Angry Arab states Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar plus Turkey and Israel. Praise from Russia, Iran and Iraq (Maliki).
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Came across this oldie …
Samantha Power, the Monster, and the Libyan Intervention by Frank Schnittger - Sept. 8, 2011