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Syrian Gov't Agrees To Russian Chem-Weapon Turnover Plan
CNN reports that at least for now we may be able to set aside the question of whether and under what authority the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria, a question that's dominated the news for the last few weeks. From the report:
"Facing the threat of a U.S. military strike, the country's leaders Tuesday reportedly accepted a Russian proposal to turn over its chemical weapons. ... The development, reported by Syrian state television and Russia's Interfax news agency, came a day after the idea bubbled up in the wake of what appeared to be a gaffe by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. It quickly changed the debate in Washington from 'Should the U.S. attack?' to 'Is there a diplomatic way out of this mess?' Syrian Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said Tuesday his country had agreed to the Russian proposal after what Interfax quoted him as calling 'a very fruitful round of talks' with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday. Details of such a transfer have yet to be worked out, such as where the arms would go, who would safeguard them and how the world could be sure Syria had handed over its entire stockpile of chemical weapons."
I wonder what Assad will get in return. I suppose more tanks is better than continued nerve gas attacks.
First they protect a whistle-blower, then they work on getting chemical weapons out of Syria without causing hundreds of thousands of collateral casualties. Yet again Russia is working toward the moral high ground. If they just let up on homosexuals then my cold war anti-communism schooling will begin to unravel.
It's hard to see how this isn't a huge win for Putin. Russia gains even more influence in Syria for stopping a US attack. Obama looks weak and indecisive.
Of course the biggest winner is Syria, which doesn't get bombed. And odds are, they'll get their chem weapons back once the story dies down.
Nope, they admit to having them. They admit to having facilities to make them. They only deny having used them in this conflict.
You thought wrong.
Syria has chemical weapons, and has declined to sign the chemical weapons treaty, so they have every right to keep them. What they have denied (quite credibly) is having *used* them.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Have them agree to be bombed if they are found to have any remaining chemical weapons after the turn-over.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I think it's important to remember how Assad played Kofi Annan for a chump for weeks near the beginning of this conflict. The whole time, he kept everybody talking, dangling the bait of a peaceful solution- some compromise - while he was using tanks on protesters that were overwhelmingly peaceful, and at worst lightly armed and totally disorganized.
He may well be doing the same thing now. He has masterfully played the hand he was dealt with delays, and a gradual escalation of tactics and brutality, essentially boiling the frog of public opinion to avoid any one escalation that yields a response. Dictators for decades will study this. I watched the interview last night with Charlie Rose, and I'm pretty convinced that Putin is probably the only major world leader who'd have a chance against this guy in a poker game.
Oh John Kerry you really botched that one didn't you LOL!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUJTarxfZ6M
I want to high five the reporter that asked that question. Holy shit. A single question be a single reporter possibly changing the course of an entire war. Not every day you see that.
When considering a response to the use of poison gas in Syria, the U.S. has several choices available to it.
1. Do nothing. This is the least desirable option for most Americans, whether or not they believe we should bomb. A majority prefer some kind of response.
2. Assuming that gas was used on Assad's orders, punish him by dropping bombs on something important to him, but being careful not to hurt him so badly that his regime fails and Al Qaeda-backed forces assume power.
3. Resolve the situation diplomatically. Use third parties to pressure Assad to turn over his chemical weapons arsenal to international control.
A strong case can be made that options 1 and 2 are the least likely to achieve a desirable outcome. That leaves option 3, which as of last Monday has a real chance of happening. The most reasonable course of action appears to be laid out before us. The time is now for Obama to think out of the box, have the courage to reconsider his strategy and show the world that he really did deserve his Nobel Peace Prize.
A couple weeks ago, all the anti-U.S. people on Slashdot said that Syria had no chemical weapons
They said no such thing. The fact that Syria has chemical weapons was never in doubt.
I don't think anyone outside fruitcake-land (though God knows there are enough of them) seriously thought that Syria didn't have chemical weapons. What has been the subject of ferocious debate is whether Syria has used chemical weapons.
So far the evidence is unclear, IMO. There have been six alleged incidents. Five of them were relatively small and not very well documented and it would be very hard to say from the direct evidence presented who carried out the attacks, if they happened at all.
The sixth attack, in Ghouta, on 21 August, is rather a different matter. Video footage which can be fairly reliably linked to the attack shows a large scale rocket attack, hundreds of dead and injured people and the attack definitely happened in the course of a Syrian Army attack. So either someone sneaked into the Syrian Army lines with a rocket launcher (more likely a number of them) and fired a series of rockets into the same area the army was already bombarding, or the rockets were launched by the Syrian Army.
The first theory is not entirely incredible. The fighting seems to have been in urban areas with lots of civilians around, so it would perhaps be possible, with a bit of luck and a lot of planning, to get the necessary equipment to the right place for a rebel group to launch this sort of attack. The usual objection to this sort of 'false flag' attack is that it involves a group attacking their own people, but this is not necessarily the case in Syria - the rebels are very disparate and some groups probably hate each other as much as they hate the government. The motive could even be simple revenge on another rebel group, though if that were the case then it seems unlikely that they would try to make the army look responsible.
All in all, it seems pretty likely that the attack at Ghouta, at least, was real and was carried out by the Syrian Army. But how anyone can "know" the truth of that in this situation is beyond me.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
The idea behind the chemical weapon aversion AFAIK is that unlike bullets-- which are great on a battlefield-- chemical weapons have a tendency to be at least as damaging to the civilian populations as they are to the military, and often moreso.
That is why many countries agreed to stop using them; waging war isnt going to stop, but we can try to prevent them from being Pyrrhic in all situations.
Securing chemical weapons sites in a civil war zone where people shoot at UN inspectors.
Now, there's some interesting logistics.
Add to that the possibility that some has already been stolen and at least one of the sites is under regular rebel attack.
So, we have a "red line" comment that had unintended consequences. That's now followed by an offhand comment by the Secretary of State that had unintended consequences, and the two just might cancel the worst of each other's damage out.
Ike Eisenhower once said: "I'll take a lucky general over a smart general."
I think it goes double for national leaders and diplomats.
In a further development, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin said the Russian president had discussed the weapons handover plan with Obama at last week’s G-20 summit.
So according to Russia, at least, this didn't come out of nowhere. It's been planned for a little bit. The reporter may have even been a planted question, a trial balloon for the official announcement.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
What are you on about? Obama is an international hero for getting Putan to agree to the plan by having Kerry pretend he was going rogue. Obama's a super genius!
Bacon bombs? Sure you can drop a few on my house but I don't think the middle east would like them that much.
I don't think Assad actually did such suicidal step. He might be quite brutal dictator but he and his regime certainly have self preservation instinct. Otherwise he would be overthrown long time ago. My suspicion is that this horrible act was actually done by rebels^H^H^H^H^Hal-Quaeda as act of desperation. Assad regime that has strong motive to avoid such thing at all costs. It was clearly winning this war since taking over Qusair in June this year. Assad army was basically mopping up remaining rebel groups. Carla de Ponte, UN chief inspector digging through Syria CW issues said all things indicate rebels are behind August attack in Damascus, pretty much the same as in Aleppo case, April this year. But (surprise! surprise!) - since she said that, approx. two weeks ago, all mentions of UN Syria inspection magically disappeared from US mainstream media ! And even now, when Russians basically did 'check mate' to US administration, virtually everyone in the sane world is against intervention (except for Israel, Saudi Arabia and some EU politicians paying lip service to their US masters^H^H^H^H^Hcounterparts but passively resisting), Kerry and friends are still in warmongering binge, indicating his 'ultimatum' Syria accepted was "rhetorical". Overthrowing table after getting check-mate doesn't look good.
My take is this: United States is desperately trying to do a regime change in Syria, regardless of human costs. They basically don't give a crap about civilian casualties and if you don't believe, ask some Libyans how are they since being "liberated" (there are still full fledged atrocities and cleansings in Libya with thousands upon thousands civilian casualties, yet your lovely corporate media "forgot" reporting about this - which is expected, by the way). CW issue was a convenient pretext, yet as it just has fallen apart, your Noble Prize War Monger In Chief will invent another pretext soon. Expect more drastic provocations. Like, for example, rebels attacking targets in Israel, shooting sarin shells from Syria territory and Israel immediately bombing the hell out of Damascus before rest of the world gets aware what's going on (so no diplomacy will be possible to derail invasion plan).
Kickstart WWIII
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/is-cbs-reporter-margaret-brennan-responsible-for-current-proposal-on-syria/
Is CBS Reporter Margaret Brennan Responsible for Current Proposal on Syria?
by Andrew Kirell | 12:09 pm, September 10th, 2013 VIDEO
It was one of those moments for which every journalist strives. A simple question posed to a public figure led to a major shift in policy.
When CBS correspondent Margaret Brennan asked Secretary of State John Kerry if there is anything Bashar al-Assad‘s Syrian regime could do or offer that would stop a U.S. military strike, she likely did not expect for Kerry to respond with the “hypothetical” heard ’round the world.
“He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week,” Kerry responded, seemingly in jest. “Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”
Obviously it can’t be done and is not worth considering, right? After all, the State Department clarified that his statement was a “hypothetical.” Except, later that day, Kerry’s off-the-cuff remark became the foundation for a major Russian proposal: Assad hands over his chemical weapons stockpile to the international community and the U.S. military strikes.
Hours later, President Obama conceded to NBC News that this new Russian proposal-via-offhand-Kerry-remark could represent “a significant breakthrough,” signaling a shift in U.S. policy from trying to obtain congressional approval for military strikes to a U.N. Security Council resolution involving the overturning of chemical weapons.
While major questions remain as to whether Syria could realistically hand over chemical weapons stockpiles while in the midst of a bloody civil war; or whether this proposal represents a stalling by all sides until the next Assad “red line”-crossing; this much is clear: A single question from a tough-minded journalist provoked a bumbling remark from a major policy official — a remark that has, for the time being, significantly altered the course of this ongoing tension and effectively delayed the use of American military assets against the Syrian regime.
Take note, aspiring journalists.
Watch Brennan’s history-making exchange with Kerry below, as captured raw by CNBC:
Actually chemical weapons are much more damaging to civilians than they are to the military. A chemical weapons attack will degrade a military unit's effectiveness (although it tends to degrade both sides equally,) but beyond the odd slow or unlucky soldier, it is unlikely to cause more than a handful of casualties.
Civilian populations, OTOH, tend to lack the protective gear and training in using it necessary to exist in a chemical environment. Not having a gas mask during a chemical attack is a bad way to be.
That doesn't make sense either, if Obama wanted to attack Syria, he more excuse to do so than he did in Libya, because the war has bled over into our ally country of NATO (Turkey). There is no real good way to explain the actions of the Obama administration. Overall the actions of the administration seem misdirected and incompetent.
Which is the worst part of the entire situation. Even if you favor getting rid of Assad, do you really want an incompetent administration to go around flinging a giant weapon? It's like the Iraq war, I fully opposed the Iraq war, but even then, I'm willing to admit that if Bush 1 or Clinton had been engaging that war, it would have gone off a lot better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Interesting definition of full rights.
I saw an article today that suggests that this may have actually came up at the G20:
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/10/20416189-obama-agrees-to-un-discussion-of-russia-proposal-on-syria-chemical-weapons?lite
In a further development, a spokesman for Putin said the Russian president had discussed the weapons handover plan with Obama at last week’s G-20 summit.
What I don't get is that when rebels had momentum, they did not use chemical weapons. Now that the rebels are losing ground and the Asad military machine is winning and gaining grounds, they go ahead and use chemical agents.
Personally, it doesn't add up. IMO, the most to gain with this show was actually the rebels. Nonetheless, politics played by Putin and Asad turned this into an advantage, once they hand over the weapons, the regime can crush the rebellion in the most brutal way followed by negotiating a peace on their terms (we can hope can't we).
Personally, I would support the devil I know, i.e. the Asad regime. The other devil have significant extremist elements, aka al-qaeda.