The United Nations and call for R2P military action is a substitute for regime change and military action to enforce western neoliberal economic on a foreign nation. Both Hillary Clinton and her State Department advisors Susan Rice and Samantha Power hold these views … so does former Oxfam executive Jo Cox, killed by a mentally ill person in her own constituency, a tranquil Birstall in West Yorkshire. [Update1] Thomas Mair was a Long Time neo-Nazi of National Alliance

I do commend the British politicians to stop their political campaign as soon as the news broke of the attack on MP Jo Cox. How different did the political leaders in the US react on the news of the Orlando massacre …

○ Trump: Obama Was Maybe Involved in the Orlando Shooting
○ McCain backtracks after blaming Obama for shooting in Orlando

British forces could help achieve an ethical solution in Syria | The Guardian – Opinion |
By Andrew Mitchell, Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield and Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen

Every decade, the world is tested with a conflict that breaks the mould, one that is so horrific and so inhumane that new thinking and bold leadership are required to address it. The response of politicians to the crisis becomes emblematic of their generation, their moral leadership or cowardice, their resolution or incompetence. It is how history judges us. Rwanda and Bosnia in the 90s, Kosovo and Sierra Leone at the millennium, Iraq and now Syria.

Syria is our generation’s test, our responsibility. A conflict so horrific that more than half of its people have been forced to flee their homes. Yet the international community’s response through the UN has been woefully inadequate.

For more than four years, the world has alternated between ignoring Syria, wringing its hands in despair and treating it as a pawn in cynical power play. It’s been awful to watch, but this crisis has been addressed much less through the prism of the Syrian people than – at various times – Ukraine, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia/US relations. It has even been caught up in UK parliamentary point scoring. It’s been about anything but the people it most affects.

The international community has failed, even on its own terms. This game of grand strategic chess hasn’t been grand or strategic, it’s been self-defeating and inept. The deadlock between Russia and the US and the wider diplomatic stalemate helped put Syria on the “too difficult” pile led to its complete neglect and helped create space for the cancer that is ISIS to take hold. [This is bs uttered by neoconservatives in the US to white-wash the role of George Bush invading Iraq in the first place – Oui]

To approach the crisis ethically: asking how we can best protect civilians. This ethical approach to Syria has three core elements to it, none of which is easy, but all of which are critical.

  • First – and most obviously – on the humanitarian front. The UK government has shown commendable leadership in the regional humanitarian response in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
  • Second, on the diplomatic front. A political solution will take time and much higher levels of investment from governments. We saw some positive signs of renewed high-level engagement at the UN last month. And the UK’s reopened embassy in Iran bodes well. Sadly, Russia’s latest intervention makes a political settlement – a necessary pre-condition for defeating Isis as well as ending the civil war – more complicated. But in response to this escalation we must step forward and not back, engaging all those who can bring President al-Assad to the negotiating table. Developing collaboration on humanitarian access could help build confidence and trust.
  • Third, on the military front. Some may think that a military component has no place in an ethical response to Syria. We completely disagree. It is not ethical to wish away the barrel bombs from the Syrian government when you have the capacity to stop them. The deaths and fear generated by these indiscriminate air attacks are the main drivers of the refugee crisis in Europe. Nor is it ethical to watch when villages are overrun by ISIS fighters who make sex slaves of children and slaughter their fellow Muslims, when we have the capability to hold them back.

    …
    The creation of safe havens inside Syria would eventually offer sanctuary from both the actions of Assad and Isis, as we cannot focus on Isis without an equal focus on Assad. They would save lives, reduce radicalisation and help to slow down the refugee exodus.

…
As two people from different parties, and from different generations and backgrounds, there is a lot we disagree on. But as two people who have both worked for many years at different ends of the humanitarian aid spectrum – as an [Oxfam] aid worker and as secretary of state for international development – we agree on one thing: there is nothing ethical about standing to one side when civilians are being murdered and maimed. There was no excuse in Bosnia, nor Rwanda and there isn’t now.

More than 50 Labour MPs to defy Jeremy Corbyn in vote on Syria  

More below the fold …

‘I’ve been in some horrific situations’ – MP Jo Cox

A working class Yorkshire MP said Cambridge University nearly broke her spirit, but realising `where you were born, matters’ has more than prepared her for her new life in Westminster.

Jo Cox, Labour’s MP for Batley and Spen, said she was a happy-go-lucky girl with a `lovely family and loads of mates’ until her university days, which `shook all her norms’.

The 41-year-old was elected to Parliament in May, having spent the previous decade working in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones as former head of policy and head of humanitarian campaigning for Oxfam.

While she abstained on the vote on air-strikes in Syria because she wanted action to also deal with President Assad, not just Isis, she strongly believes Britain should be leading diplomatically. Comments from many sides of the political debate that there is fatigue over Britain becoming involved once again as a global arbiter are unfounded, she said.

She said: “Actually if you talk to quite a lot of people around the world, whether it’s in an Internally Displaced Person camp or in an emergency disaster they often say the UK is a UN Security Council member, a leading member of the European Union, a leading member of NATO, you can make a massive difference and they want us to act.”

Dozens of U.S. Diplomats, in Memo, Urge Strikes Against Syria’s Assad | New York Times |

WASHINGTON — More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says American policy has been “overwhelmed” by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.”

Such a step would represent a radical shift in the administration’s approach to the civil war in Syria, and there is little evidence that President Obama has plans to change course. Mr. Obama has emphasized the military campaign against the Islamic State over efforts to dislodge Mr. Assad. Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, have all but collapsed.

But the memo, filed in the State Department’s “dissent channel,” underscores the deep rifts and lingering frustration within the administration over how to deal with a war that has killed more than 400,000 people.

The State Department set up the channel during the Vietnam War as a way for employees who had disagreements with policies to register their protest with the secretary of state and other top officials, without fear of reprisal. While dissent cables are not that unusual, the number of signatures on this document, 51, is extremely large, if not unprecedented.

The names on the memo are almost all midlevel officials — many of them career diplomats — who have been involved in the administration’s Syria policy over the last five years, at home or abroad. They range from a Syria desk officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to a former deputy to the American ambassador in Damascus.

While there are no widely recognized names, higher-level State Department officials are known to share their concerns. Mr. Kerry himself has pushed for stronger American action against Syria, in part to force a diplomatic solution on Mr. Assad. The president has resisted such pressure, and has been backed up by his military commanders, who have raised questions about what would happen in the event that Mr. Assad was forced from power — a scenario that the draft memo does not address.

○ Quite Depressing Really, Obama and the ISIS Crisis   by Oui @BooMan - August 2014

The State Department spokesman, John Kirby, declined to comment on the memo, which top officials had just received. But he said Mr. Kerry respected the process as a way for employees “to express policy views candidly and privately to senior leadership.”

Robert S. Ford, a former ambassador to Syria, said, “Many people working on Syria for the State Department have long urged a tougher policy with the Assad government as a means of facilitating arrival at a negotiated political deal to set up a new Syrian government.”

Mr. Ford, who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, resigned from the Foreign Service in 2014 out of frustration with the administration’s hands-off policy toward the conflict.

Advise and Dissent: The Diplomat as Protester [pdf]

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