Despite the staggering human cost of the war, however, the international community is very close to failing these refugees, warns Panos Moumtzis, UNHCR regional coordinator for Syrian refugees.

Panos Moumtzis, UNHCR regional coordinator for Syrian refugees. Photo courtesy of UNHCR.

All sides “appear to be committed only to military means for resolving the conflict”, Moumtzis told IPS, a decision that is leading to what he called “a massive exodus of people”.

Moumtzis has extensive experience in crisis management, having worked in Gaza, Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo, and other countries with humanitarian emergencies. He describes the Syrian crisis as one of the most acute crises he has ever seen.

IPS correspondent Apostolis Fotiadis spoke with Moumtzis about the situation in and surrounding Syria and the role of the international community in this crisis.

Q: What are the characteristics of the Syrian refugee population?

A: Most of the refugees are Sunni Muslim. Three quarters of those crossing the border are women and children. More than half are children. A large percentage of the men you see in Iraq are mainly Kurdish and wanted to escape conscription, which is a concern of many Syrians as well.

The father in one family I met told me, “In a few months my son will be 18, so we decided to take him out of school and leave the country, before it is too late and he is called to serve.”

Tens of thousands of soldiers have also left the Syrian army. A camp in Jordan, specially assigned for them, holds 20 to 30 thousand of them. But these are not refugees. Anyone who crosses the border with a gun needs to pass a period of six months without a gun or uniform before we accept him as a refugee.

Q: How many people have moved out of Syria so far, and what is the size of your regional operation?

A: Out of approximately 1.25 million refugees, 25 percent of them are in camps. This means another 75 percent is in cities and villages.

There are 17 camps in Turkey with 196,000 people, with three more being built now. Each of those is to host another 10 to 20,000. There, UNHCR advises the government, and we also try to monitor legal issues that occur for refugees and monitor registration in order to keep track of people’s special needs.

We also try to ensure that no recruitment of guerillas takes place in the camp or any kind of military activity happens there.

We run two camps in Iraq and another three in Jordan. Turkey provides things we are unable to offer in our camps, like hot water, three meals per day, and whoever gets married goes on a month holiday. It is very important that camps strictly maintain a civilian character.

Q: How fluid is population movement? Do people return to Syria while others escape the country?

A: We have had spontaneous returns in the last three months. Very often people want to go back and see their houses. Men bring the family out of Syria and then return to check on their property.

Q: If the situation in Syria calms down, how easy would be for refugees to return there?

A: We would suggest that people stay outside Syria for some time until we know an agreement or deal is implemented.

The ones close to the borders whose houses have not been destroyed would return first, whereas people living in Baba Amr at Homs would be the last to return, since the area is devastated.

We are interested in that returns are voluntary, that no one pressures people to return, and that people know what they will face when they return.

Still, in every conflict there are people that cannot return. If the regime changes, for instance, we would see Sunnis going back and ethnic minorities leaving the country.

Q: Has the international community stood up to the task of dealing with the humanitarian disaster in Syria?

A: U.N. agencies estimate that meeting these refugees’ needs requires 1 billion dollars for surrounding countries and another 500 million for those inside Syria. We now have 30 percent of this budget, so we must assess the most urgent needs.

One should also consider the failure of the international community to give a political solution to the Syrian civil war.

Q: Has the international community failed Syria because of the many different geopolitical interests involved in this crisis?

A: It is better to say that the international community has failed politically until now. Humanitarian assistance is an alternative, so we can say they are offering something for this failure.

But there are so many forces inside Syria right now that make the resolution of this conflict a very complicated task. The uprising against a family regime has turned into a war that increasingly resembles a fight between Sunni and Shia, a fight of Hezbollah and Iran against Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United States, as well as a war in which Al Qaeda has intervened.

Q: Many voices warn about a domino effect, with the war spreading into Lebanon. Are these warnings valid?

A: This is not a theoretical danger. It’s a real threat. Overall, Lebanon seems very unstable at the moment, and the bad economic situation in the country does not help. Many times we have to ask our personnel not to do certain things because of the uncertainty.

In Tripoli, people have been killed in armed incidents. A bomb was placed in Beirut three months ago. There is also tension at Sirte, in the south, due to the Hezbollah presence there and in the Beqaa valley as well.

A Congolese man transports charcoal on his bicycle outside Lubumbashi in the DRC. Credit: Miriam Mannak/IPS

With casualties in the long-running conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) now surpassing every conflict since World War II, U.S. policymakers and advocates are stepping up campaigns to raise awareness and push legislation aimed at encouraging new negotiations, assisting in government reforms, and pressuring the neighbouring countries that have propped up the DRC’s government.

Some advocates say the situation today could be better than at any time in recent years for a durable peace process.

The U.S. House of Representatives is currently preparing to consider a bipartisan bill, unanimously passed by a subcommittee Wednesday, aimed at supporting international efforts to forge a peace deal in the long-running crisis in Congo.

The bill is an “important step forward in raising awareness within the U.S. Congress and among all Americans of this horrific and tragic crisis in the DRC,” Representative Karen Bass, one of the bill’s lead authors, told IPS.

“To date, this legislation has the support of nearly 60 Democrats and Republicans in the House and efforts are currently underway to introduce a similar piece of legislation in the Senate. It has also received significant support from the NGO community.”

Supporters say they expect that number to increase.

Recent months have also seen a strengthening of advocacy on the part of the Congolese diaspora here in Washington, as well as from the rest of the country and Canada. Legislators say this support has been key in helping the House bill gain the legislative backing it has.

One element of the new bill would respond to a longstanding key demand, urging the creation of a special envoy from the president to the DRC and the surrounding Great Lakes region.

“This legislation calls for such an envoy, and Secretary [John] Kerry, in testimony before both the House and the Senate, has indicated his plan to make an appointment,” Bass said.

“I am pleased that this effort is making progress and urge the secretary to move swiftly to make his decision and develop a comprehensive strategy that relies on diplomacy and engagement to address the complex set of issues that stand as barriers to peace and stability in the DRC and the region.”

Conflict-free consumerism

The war in Congo has been running for almost two decades, taking the lives of nearly six million people as several peace processes have failed. Militias engaged in the war have often used rape and sexual violence as a tool of repression and intimidation.

The economics of the mineral trade have also defined this struggle, with armed groups having been able to control mines and trading routes to prop up their actions.

“DRC is potentially one of the world’s wealthiest nations, but has been unable to unlock the potential of the riches above and below the soil due to the ongoing conflict there,” Sasha Lezhnev, a senior policy analyst at the Enough Project, a Washington advocacy group that published a new report on the DRC today, told IPS.

“However, a couple of different policy windows have created the space for a peace process that today has a better chance of success than anytime in the last decade.”

Lezhnev refers to the recent emergence of international pressure on Congo’s neighbouring states – particularly Rwanda – for supporting armed groups within eastern Congo. The World Bank has now withheld 135 million dollars from Rwanda for this reason, and there has likewise been pressure on the Congo to enact greater transparency reforms.

In addition, U.N. Special Envoy to Africa Mary Robinson has been working to establish a more comprehensive and inclusive peace process that addresses the core drivers of violence in the DRC. In February, she and 11 African heads of state established a diplomatic framework to identify reforms that would enable Rwanda, Congo and Uganda to cooperate on the extraction and export of minerals.

“This is a first step, but we think this provides a good roadmap for where we think this peace process should go,” Lezhnev said.

“What needs to happen now is Mary Robinson needs to lead regional negotiations between Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo on economic, refugee and security issues so that all these interests can be put on the table and can be worked out in a transparent and legitimate way.”

Also helping to break the link between the armed groups and the minerals that have in part funded them is new U.S. legislation, enacted over the past year as part of comprehensive financial legislation known as the Dodd-Frank Act. A section of this law targets so-called “conflict minerals”, and is reported to have brought about a 65-percent drop in profits for armed groups from tin, tungsten and tantalum this year.

“The Dodd-Frank Act has resulted in armed groups and their supporters finding it significantly more difficult to profit from an illicit trade, and so there is an opportunity to take advantage of these changing incentives and create structures for legitimate cooperation,” Lezhnev says.

“This shows there is a growing global consumer movement against conflict minerals, and conflict-free products have created new momentum to say that enough is enough when it comes to buying untraceable minerals and turning a blind eye.”

Temporary window

A further sign of the weakening of the armed groups is the sight of one of the chief Rwandan warlords, Bosco “The Terminator” Ntaganda, sitting in The Hague at the International Criminal Court (ICC) after he turned himself in to law enforcement in Rwanda in March. Analysts say this turn of events has weakened his militia, known as the M23, and increased opportunities for peace.

Meanwhile, countries around the world have increasingly taken notice of the trade and investment opportunities throughout Africa, resulting in greater levels of engagement. However, groups like the Enough Project warn this policy window will not remain open indefinitely.

“We call on the Obama administration to deploy a high-level envoy and to work with Mary Robinson,” Lezhnev said.

“The administration needs to help shape this process, to incentivise the economic cooperation between the countries of the region by setting up a responsible investment initiative for working with the tech companies, metals companies and responsible investors to identify gaps and opportunities for investing in a conflict-free environment.”

Next week, World Bank President Jim Kim and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are slated to travel to Congo and the region.

Somali government forces march during an army day parade in Mogadishu, Somalia. The country’s armed forces are not strong enough to control the threat of the Islamism extremist group Al-Shabaab and are propped up by Ethiopian troops and African Union peace-keepers. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

Despite comments by Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn suggesting the pending withdrawal of his country’s troops from Somalia, many experts have voiced doubts that Ethiopia will pull out of Somalia before it is capable of handling its security without assistance.

“Ethiopia has a big interest in Somalia and will remain, keeping its eyes wide open there for some time,” Abel Abate, from the state-funded think tank the Ethiopian International Institute for Peace and Development, told IPS.

“One purpose is to avoid the threat posed by the Islamist Al-Shabaab group, which sees Ethiopia as an enemy. And secondly, to show the world that it has made a significant contribution to peace and stability in the region.”

Somalia is still recovering from nearly two decades of war, and large parts of the Horn of Africa nation have been under siege by the extremist Al-Shabaab. The Somali transitional federal government, which is propped up by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and regional troops, barely has control over the country’s capital Mogadishu.

While African countries have sent troops to Somalia under AMISOM, Ethiopia’s troops, which have been in the country since 2011, do not operate under the AU mission.

Last year, with the help of regional forces, the Somali government was able to recapture some key points in the country, including the port of Merca and the city of Jowhar, the biggest town under Al-Shabaab control, situated 70 km and 90 km from Mogadishu respectively.

However, in mid-March, Ethiopia pulled its troops from the southern town of Hudur without warning AMISOM. Following the withdrawal, Al-Shabaab immediately took control of the town in its first major military success since it retreated from Mogadishu in August 2011.

“Ethiopia pulled out from certain places in Somalia in order to send a signal to the international community that unless you support us, we will not shoulder all of Somalia’s problems,” Abate said.

“Ethiopia wanted to put pressure on the agencies and countries which have been supporting AMISOM but not Ethiopia, and to show the world that it is the maker or breaker of Somalia.”

Meanwhile, an Ethiopian government representative told IPS that the lack of international support for Somalia has made it difficult for this country to withdraw troops.

“Ever since we intervened in Somalia our initial plan was to hand it over to AMISOM and Somali forces,” Ethiopian government spokesperson Dina Mufti told IPS.

“However, we feel that international support has been lagging, not only for AMISOM, but for the whole Somali project, which has made it difficult for us to withdraw while these forces are too weak to take over.”

Dina hoped that a recent conference in London on May 7, where over 50 countries and organisations met to discuss how best to aid Somalia, might change this. However, he stopped short of saying it would be a game changer.

“One thing is for sure, we remain fully committed to supporting Somalia,” Dina said. But he could not say if Ethiopia would wait until AMISOM and the Somali army took over key strongholds before pulling out. “That I can’t say.”

Unlike AMISOM forces in Somalia, which are funded by the AU, Ethiopia pays for their operations themselves. This is believed to be one of the biggest contributing factors to Ethiopia’s frustration.

“Hailemariam has … tried to put pressure on the international community to put more resources into the issue, so Ethiopia can pull out gradually,” Kjetil Tronvoll from the Oslo-based International Law and Policy Institute told IPS.

“I do not think they will pull out prematurely, I think they might regroup some of their forces, but I don’t think they will just leave it open for Al-Shabaab to regroup and resurface and stay in that area currently controlled by Ethiopia.”

Tronvoll said he believed that Ethiopia would use its presence in Somalia as a bargaining chip for its agenda.

“If they feel as though they are losing influence in Mogadishu … or if they feel as though they are being pushed out, or not being consulted enough, they can use a withdrawal as a threat,” said Tronvoll. “They could say, we back you up on the ground, and if our concerns are not listened to in your policy development, then these are the repercussions you can expect.”

While it is seemingly unlikely that Ethiopia will immediately withdraw its troops, contradictory statements made last month by members of the Ethiopian government did result in confusion.

On Apr. 23, Hailemariam told parliament that AMISOM was taking too long to replace Ethiopian troops and that the main focus should be to accelerate their withdrawal.

However, the next day the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Ethiopia would not withdraw troops until AMISOM and the Somali army were ready to take over.

But it is uncertain how much longer this will take.

According to Hassan Rafiki, an expert consultant at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies working with the government of Somalia, AMISOM is not as aggressive as it was in the initial stages.

“The troops have now found room to breathe from Al-Shabaab and the mission is, therefore, not encouraged or enthusiastic to replace the Ethiopian troops,” Rafiki told IPS.

“Somalia is now becoming a money machine for troop-contributing countries in the region, who wish to train new recruits for their armed forces, instead of their initial intention to help the Somali government and people.”

Another concern is the lack of AMISOM resources. “In its current capacity of little over 17,000 (troops), AMISOM is over-stretched. It won’t be able to fill the vacuum left by Ethiopia unless its troop levels are increased,” Abdi Aynte, director of Mogadishu’s first think-tank the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS.

“Ethiopia must understand that it’s in its best interest to shift course and work with the Somali people and their government to reestablish strong state institutions,” said Aynte. “A stable, democratic Somalia is the best possible neighbour that Ethiopia could ask for in the world’s toughest region.”

Bashar Ja’afari, Permanent Representative of the Syrian Arab Republic to the UN, addresses the Assembly on May 15. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

When the 193-member General Assembly voted Wednesday to condemn the beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, there was an increase in the number of sceptics who neither supported nor opposed the tottering regime in Damascus.

The resolution, which is legally non-binding, was adopted by a vote of 107-12, compared with 133-12 last August.

As the number of supporters to the resolution declined, from 133 to 107, the abstentions increased significantly, from 31 to 59, including a mix of Asian, African and Latin American countries.

The abstentions included Algeria, Bangladesh, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, El Salvador, Eritrea, Fiji, Kenya, Lebanon, Myanmar, Singapore, Sudan, South Sudan and Uruguay.

Asked for a response, Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International’s U.N. representative in New York, told IPS, “I think the number of abstentions – and the divisions in the General Assembly – are the consequence of political considerations.”

He said some countries would have preferred to give space to a renewed push for negotiations in the wake of the recent agreement between Russia and the United States, including a proposed international conference on Syria.

“They abstained because to vote ‘no’ would have been to side openly with Assad and to ignore the appalling crimes taking place in Syria,” Diaz said.

“All in all,” he said, “I don’t think there’s much disagreement among the vast majority of the General Assembly members – not counting the Syrian government and its supporters, like Russia, China and North Korea – about what is needed in Syria.”

As expected, China and Russia voted against the resolution, as they did in the Security Council when they exercised their vetoes on three Western-sponsored resolutions condemning the Syrian regime and the killing of civilians.

Besides Syria, China and Russia, the countries voting against the resolution included Bolivia, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Ecuador, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

The resolution, drafted by Qatar and co-sponsored or backed by most of the Arab countries and Western powers, recognised the Syrian National Coalition as “effective representative interlocutors needed for a political transition” in Syria.

Unlike resolutions adopted by the Security Council, General Assembly resolutions are not legally enforceable.

Asked if the resolution will have any impact, Luis Diaz told IPS, “It probably won’t have an immediate impact, but one good thing would be if it builds pressure on the Security Council to take up the issue again and press for binding action.”

Lost in the highly political debate on the resolution text, he said, was the fact that it has the strongest language on accountability of any of the previous General Assembly resolutions on Syria.

Russia, which lobbied last week against the resolution, described it as “very harmful and destructive”.

Russia’s deputy permanent representative Ambassador Alexander Pankin said, “It’s particularly irresponsible and counterproductive to promote this when the United States and Russia reached a very important agreement … and need a unified approach.”

Early this week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met in Moscow and agreed on a proposed international conference on Syria.

U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo told delegates Tuesday that over the last 26 months “we have witnessed a brutal conflict in Syria”.

She said the Assad regime, drawing upon an arsenal of heavy weapons, aircraft, ballistic missiles, and potentially chemical weapons, has killed or injured untold numbers of civilians who for many months manifested their opposition purely through peaceful protest.

She said the sustained violence has created a severe humanitarian crisis with more than 1.4 million refugees and 4.25 million internally displaced persons within Syria.

“The consequences of this crisis are growing more dire not only within Syria, but across the region,” DiCarlo said.

She singled out the generosity of the governments and people of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and others who host large numbers of refugees “which has been extraordinary.”

“But these countries now face grave threats to their security and an overwhelming economic burden. It is clear that we need a Syrian-led peaceful political transition,” she added.

Syrian refugee children learn to survive at a camp in north Lebanon. Credit: Zak Brophy/IPS.

Humanitarian assistance groups in Washington are warning that the health care system has become a deliberate target in the increasingly brutal civil war in Syria, presenting major challenges to addressing the humanitarian and refugee crises spurred by the conflict.

In a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron stressed the centrality of the unfolding health crisis, emphasising the need in Syria to “care for trauma injuries, help torture victims to recover, [and get] Syrian families clean drinking water”.

Health aid is meeting significant obstacles, though, as the public health system in Syria reportedly has been largely dismantled after being targeted by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which has wiped out a third of the hospitals in the country.

“The systematisation of the attacks [in Syria]…certainly served its purpose,” Stephen Cornish, executive director at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Canada, said recently at a panel discussion in Washington. “It created a flight of many medical personnel and destroyed large numbers of hospitals and interrupted public healthcare in a significant way.”

According to the Violations Documentation Centre, a Syrian human rights organisation based in Damascus, 469 health workers are currently imprisoned in Syria. Tom Bollyky, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank, estimates that around 15,000 doctors have been driven out of the country.

Bollyky noted that these attacks are one conflict’s manifestation of a disturbing global trend in which medical facilities and personnel become more frequent combat targets in conflict zones. In a March report, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic accused the Assad regime and opposition groups of strategically targeting medical facilities and personnel.

“Attacking medical personnel is a way of terrorising a population and depriving them of the humanitarian support they need,” Bollyky told IPS.

He pointed to similar instances in the Middle East and Asia, particularly coordinated attacks by the Taliban on polio immunisation volunteers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Monday, the Taliban announced it was halting its years-long effort to sabotage the campaign to eradicate polio among children in these two countries.

Such attacks are specifically outlawed in the Geneva Conventions, which entitle hospitals and medical staff to protection from hostile fire.

“Medical personnel are absolutely protected under international law,” Bollyky noted. “There is no circumstance where it is okay to attack medical personnel or facilities, and it is certainly happening on both sides.”

Silent casualties

The targeting of the Syrian health care system has not only left those wounded by combat without urgently needed care but has also exacerbated a public health crisis brought on by the poor living conditions of refugee camps outside of Syria.

Refugees from the conflict currently number more than one million, and the United Nations is warning that figure could swell to 1.5 million by the end of this year. That number is dwarfed by the more than 4.2 million Syrians who are displaced within Syria.

In addition to the systematic targeting, Syrian medical facilities are reportedly being “cannibalised” to serve military ends.

Zahir Sahloul, a doctor with the Syrian American Medical Society, told an audience on Friday about the looting of the two main hospitals in Aleppo – an eye hospital and a children’s hospital – that now serve as bases of operations for military battalions.

“Besides the destruction of the public health system, there is no sewer system,” Sahloul said “[There is a] lack of hygiene because of lack of electricity and sometimes water…and lack of diesel fuel. And because of that, you have a resurgence of some of the epidemics that weren’t there before.”

Chronic illnesses that were relatively easily treatable before the outbreak of the conflict – diabetes, or high blood pressure, for example – are now deadlier than ever, leading to what MSF’s Cornish called “silent casualties”.

These patients can’t be referred outside of the country because they aren’t considered emergency cases. But they also can’t be treated inside Syria because the necessary facilities and healthcare providers simply don’t exist anymore.

“Folks who have cancer and had their chemotherapy interrupted, all they can have is palliative medicine,” Cornish said. “And slowly, day by day, they die.”

Health workers are increasingly ill-equipped to deal with these growing problems, expert say, as their capacities are being undercut by suspicions over loyalty.

“In Syria, if you are a physician who is…’treating people from the other side’, you put your life at risk,” Sahloul said.

As humanitarian groups try to find solutions to the challenges to health and humanitarian assistance, observers appear united in their calls to the international community to ramp up pressure on both sides to stop hospital and medical staff attacks and to have more respect for international humanitarian standards.

Geneva Call, a non-governmental organisation in Geneva that focuses on engaging non-state actors in international humanitarian law, released several short video spots promoting respect for international humanitarian standards. One of the videos’ titles was “Respect and Protect Medical Personnel and Objects”.

Tom Bollyky suggested that treating these violations with more seriousness in the International Criminal Court– and recognising the international community’s responsibilities in combating them – would be a step in the right direction.

“You have seen a surge in these attacks, but you have not seen a surge in the indictments being brought against the people behind them,” he said. “The international legal system is not known for being expeditious, but it would be a form of real condemnation.”

Critics argue that the silence of the Security Council constitutes an international green light to Israel to continue with its new policy and military aggression against Syria. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

Israel, which has launched three air strikes inside Syria since January this year, has escaped scrutiny or condemnation by a Security Council which remains sharply divided.

The continued air attacks have escalated tensions in the region and threatened a wider regional conflagration, according to reports from the Middle East.

Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of the Arab Studies Journal Jadaliyya, told IPS the Anglo-American reaction has been “the political equivalent of a standing ovation, though it remains unclear whether Washington and London’s public approval of Israeli aggression was in this case the result of a coordinated strategy or merely a Pavlovian response.”

He said the consequence has been – as it so often is in the Arab-Israel conflict – that the institutions charged with preserving international peace and security, first and foremost the U.N. Security Council, are once again caught with their pants down.

“And they have been prevented by Washington from formulating an effective response,” he added.

Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press, whose coverage of the United Nations includes a daily blow-by-blow account of Security Council activities, told IPS, “I’m not surprised they haven’t agreed on any statement.”

He said this happened after a car bombing by the opposition in Damascus, and when Russia proposed to condemn it, the U.S. (and other Western powers) wanted to add to the statement a condemnation of the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“That would surely happen on any statement about Israel’s air attacks,” he said.

But no one has even requested a meeting of the type the Arab Group requested, and got, during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense aka Pillar of Cloud.

“I’d say that’s because the Arab Group, with the exception of Algeria and Iraq and the ‘dis-association’ of Lebanon, is seeking the transfer of power away from Assad,” Lee said.

The Arab Group, currently dominated by Gulf majority Sunni – or Sunni-ruled, like Bahrain – countries, had to write to the Security Council to have done at least as much as the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) chaired by Iran.

“Actually, an Arab Group diplomat argued with me that while NAM only issued a statement, the Arab Group wrote to the Security Council and Ban Ki-moon: that’s the level of competition,” said Lee.

“But the Arab Group does not want a meeting in which Assad’s Syria would be portrayed as a victim,” he added.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have agreed to convene an international conference on Syria. But whether all of the warring parties would participate in such a meeting remains in doubt.

Rabbani told IPS the silence of the Security Council, for all practical purposes, constitutes an international green light to Israel to continue with its new policy and military aggression.

That Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, despite his unambiguous extremism, been less inclined to launch a major armed conflict than each of his predecessors, and is more susceptible to U.S. pressure, provides little solace, he added.

Having done this once and gotten away with it, his government and security establishment are almost certain to do so again, probably sooner rather than later, even while staring the potential Israeli disaster of war with Syria and/or Hezbollah – and perhaps a wider regional conflagration – straight in the face, said Rabbani, who is also a contributing editor to the Middle East Report.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco, told IPS he cannot recall of any precedent of the Security Council remaining silent on air attacks on a sovereign country.

“But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any,” he said, pointing out that, “It appears that the Syrian regime has become an even bigger international pariah than Israel.”

Rabbani told IPS the Israeli explanation for its recent bombings of Damascus is that these were launched solely to prevent the transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah in Lebanon and do not represent an Israeli intervention in the Syrian crisis. It is an explanation that is difficult to take seriously, he said.

Israel may indeed have acted to interdict weapons supplies to its foes in Lebanon. But more importantly, it acted to change its relationship with Syria and test the international response to this change of policy, he argued.

Specifically, said Rabbani, Israel was sending a clear message to the world’s capitals that henceforth it will act at will within Syria to promote its interests.

Resources and activities within sovereign Syrian territory previously considered immune from Israeli attack, such as military infrastructure and the transport of weapons systems to Lebanon, is no longer so.

In other words, Israel will henceforth retain the freedom to act, and act systematically, to degrade Syria’s military capabilities, Syrian support of guerrilla movements beyond its borders, and, further down the line, regimes and organisations within Syria it considers actively hostile, Rabbani said.

“It is a policy that bears numerous similarities to Israel’s approach to Lebanon, particularly southern Lebanon, during the late 1960s and 1970s,” he added.

More importantly, this new pattern of Israeli aggression is certain to make the Syrian crisis more difficult to resolve and even more catastrophic than it already is, Rabbani said. He added that Israel is determined to degrade Syria and keep it weak, and while internal Syrian matters may not have figured prominently or perhaps not even at all in its most recent actions, they eventually will.

And if this new policy is permitted to stand – perhaps even form an important motivation for Israeli policy, as was the case in Lebanon from the mid-1970s onwards.

The Shuafat refugee camp can be seen across the separation wall from the Israeli settlement Pisgat Ze'ev. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

Amidst a new U.S. effort to revive the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, healthy pluralities of both peoples want U.S. President Barack Obama to play a stronger role in resolving their conflict, according to a major new poll released here Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The survey, which also covered attitudes towards Israel and Palestine in 11 other countries, found that Israeli confidence in Obama has increased since his visit to the Jewish state in March, while Palestinians retain little confidence in the U.S. president despite their desire for his greater involvement in peace-making efforts.

And while half of Israelis believe a two-state solution can still be achieved peacefully through negotiations, Palestinians by a large margin believe that is a delusion.

Indeed, a plurality (45 percent) of Palestinian respondents said the best way to achieve statehood was through armed struggle, while only 15 percent said negotiations were the best course. Another 15 percent cited non-violent resistance, while 22 percent more said some combination of these tactics offered the greatest chance for success.

The new Pew survey, which interviewed nearly 15,000 people in 12 countries, as well as the Palestinian Territories (PT), also found strongly unfavourable opinions of Israel, particularly among its predominantly Muslim neighbours.

The United States was the only country where a majority (57 percent) expressed positive views of the Jewish state, although a plurality in Russia also registered more favourable (46 percent) opinions than unfavourable (38 percent).

Nearly two-thirds of respondents in France, Germany, and China, however, said they held unfavourable views of Israel, while in the predominantly Muslim countries covered by the poll – Egypt, Tunisia, PT, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon – negative views were overwhelming, ranging from 86 percent in Tunisia to 99 percent in Lebanon.

“This is consistent with other polling,” noted Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program of International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), who has designed multinational surveys for BBC and his own worldpublicopinion.org in which Israel has repeatedly placed among the world’s least popular nations, along with North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan.

The new survey as released as Secretary of State John Kerry visited the region, including Israel, this week in hopes of injecting renewed momentum into his efforts to reconvene peace talks between Israel and Palestinians.

In what was widely considered an important step in those efforts, Kerry persuaded Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al-Thani and Arab League officials to amend the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API), which offers full recognition of Israel by all League member states in exchange for its withdrawal to the 1967 Green Line, to include the possibility of “comparable and mutually agreed minor swaps of land” that would presumably permit Israel to absorb major Jewish settlement blocs on the West Bank in any final peace agreement.

While the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeted the statement as an “important concession” – and has quietly frozen, at Washington’s request, the issuance of new building permits for Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem through next month, most analysts believe the chances for serious progress on the peace front – or even the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian talks – remain quite low.

They point in particular to the persistent split on the Palestinian side between Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, which controls Gaza and has reportedly rejected, along with several other Palestinian factions, the Arab League’s amendment to the API.

As for Israel, the same analysts note that Israel’s leadership is unlikely to agree to the kind of far-reaching concessions necessary for a breakthrough, particularly given the continuing political turmoil in its neighbours – including the civil war in Syria, growing political tensions in Jordan, and the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government in Egypt.

And the fact that major figures in the settlement movement now head key ministries in Netanyahu’s new government also dims prospects for significant progress on the peace front, according to this view.

Nonetheless, Kerry, who said Thursday he plans to return to the region in less than two weeks reportedly in hopes of nailing down a June summit with Abbas and Netanyahu in Jordan, appears determined to overcome the reigning scepticism.

The new poll suggests that Israelis may be somewhat more open to his efforts than Palestinians, particularly following Obama’s visit, during which he spent far more time wooing Israeli public opinion, to the region in March.

Sixty-one percent of Israeli respondents said they had either “a lot” of “some” confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing in world affairs; that was up from just 49 percent two years ago. On the other hand, 82 percent of Palestinian respondents in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem said they either had “not too much” or “no confidence at all” in Obama.

Similarly, 47 percent of Israelis said U.S. policies in the Middle East were “fair”, while another 35 percent said they favoured Israel “too much”. Palestinian respondents, on the other hand, were virtually unanimous in asserting that Washington favoured Israel too much.

Nonetheless, pluralities of 49 percent of Israeli respondents (including 54 percent of Arab Israelis) and 41 percent of Palestinians said they favoured a “larger” role for Obama in resolving the conflict, according to the survey, which noted that there was considerably more support for a larger U.S. role among Palestinians in the West Bank (47 percent) than in Gaza (30 percent).

Fifty percent of Israeli respondents said they thought a two-state solution could be achieved, while only 14 percent of Palestinians agreed (although an additional 22 percent said “it depends).”

The more positive Israeli results contrasted with a survey taken last year by Shibley Telhami, an expert on Arab public opinion at the Brookings Institution and author of a forthcoming book, “The World Through Arab Eyes.”

In that poll a majority of Israelis said they believed a two-state solution could not be achieved. “This suggests that Israelis are somewhat more optimistic,” he told IPS. On the other hand, he added, the Palestinian results suggested increased pessimism on their part.

The poll found that respondents in France Germany and Britain were significantly more optimistic about a two-state solution than respondents in other countries and that publics in those countries, especially Britain, had become more sympathetic toward the Palestinians in recent years.

That could prompt European leaders to take a more active role in efforts to bring the two parties together, as recently recommended by the European Eminent Persons Group (EEPG).

In a recent letter to the foreign affairs chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, the group — consisting of seven former foreign ministers, four former prime ministers, and one former president, among others – called the current U.S. position “unproductive” even if Washington’s role in a peace process remained “indispensable.” Among other steps, it called for exerting more pressure on Israel, especially with regard to settlements and recognising the 1967 border as the basis for any solution.

In a report released Thursday, the European Council on Foreign Relations amplified that message, calling for the EU to pursue “a more independent policy in the region that would include encouraging reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, acquiescing in – rather than opposing – the PA’s recourse to the International Criminal Court, and ensuring that goods produced by Jewish settlements in the PT are denied trade preferences.

“A harder-nosed and more indpendent policy from Europe will strengthen Washington’s hand in Israel and improve the chances for a decisive U.S. peace initiative before Obama leaves office and before the occupation enters its fiftieth year,” according to the report.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Over two decades after they were forced to flee their homes in northern Sri Lanka, tens of thousands of Muslim IDPs still feel reluctant to return. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The camp should not have been difficult to find. We were told to drive straight on the road that leads north away from the town of Puttalam, 140 kilometres from Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, and we would come upon the settlement of internally displaced people.

What IPS found were not the typical temporary shelters of the war displaced – no tarpaulins stamped with the telltale insignia of donor agencies, no busy aid workers; only a cluster of small villages comprised of white-painted houses on the outskirts of Puttalam’s narrow traffic-clogged, sewer-lined streets.

But on close inspection it became clear that these were, indeed, the homes of the roughly 75,000 Muslims and their descendants who were forced to flee the northern provinces at the height of this country’s civil war in 1990.

IPS spoke with Ahamed Lebbe, a casual labourer in his fifties originally from the village of Pallai in the northern Jaffna Peninsula, who said his life changed forever on Oct. 29, 1990, when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – the rebel group that was then fighting the Sri Lankan government for a separate state for the island’s minority Tamil population – ordered all Muslims to evacuate the province within 24 hours.

The message that he would have to leave with nothing more than 300 rupees (about two dollars) in cash came to Lebbe by word of mouth, though there is some evidence the Tigers made a public announcement in Jaffna Town earlier that day.

The public rationale behind the order was that Muslims, along with their fledgling national political party, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, represented a threat to the Tigers’ ideal of ethnic hegemony in the North, which formed the basis of their demand for an independent Tamil state.

The command was taken dead seriously and on the night of Oct. 29 the exodus began, with one Muslim family after another leaving behind homes, valuables and businesses, carrying with them only the meagre monies allowed by the LTTE, fear, and memories.

“There were only four Muslim families in the village where we lived,” Lebbe told IPS. “But it was our home – I still speak in the Tamil dialect used in Jaffna.”

Twenty-three years later, Lebbe has still not regained a sense of belonging, even though he has lived half of his life in an exclusively Muslim village in Puttalam.

“There is always this sense that we don’t belong here, that we are not at home,” he said.

The number of IDPs living in these semi-permanent “camps” has now swelled to nearly 250,000, according to some researchers. The majority never left the northwestern coastal belt, where they arrived over two decades ago.

Locals’ initial welcome of the refugees quickly turned to resentment when it became clear that these visitors would not be leaving anytime soon, and would ultimately start clamouring for scarce government resources like jobs, schools and healthcare.

Employers here wasted no time identifying the displaced as a source of cheap labour, quickly hiring them to work in sectors like construction, fishing, and agriculture, and as causal labourers.

Today, the demand for government services in Puttalam is under enourmous stress. With a total population of 700,000 the province is one of the poorest in Sri Lanka. Ten to 11 percent of its residents live below the poverty line, compared to a national poverty rate of about eight percent.

Local authorities are also seriously concerned about the lack of safe water here, exacerbated of late by a long drought.

Mirak Raheem, former researcher with the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a national advocacy body, told IPS the infrastructure in Puttalam is in urgent need of an upgrade. He also stressed the importance of implementing development projects like road construction, which can create jobs for the displaced.

Few incentives to return home

Ever since the government wiped out the LTTE in May 2009, over 400,000 Tamils who were displaced during the 30 years of fighting have been resettled, but nothing of the sort has taken place for the Muslims.

The situation raises the question of whether or not the IDP settlements in Puttalam – built with generous support from international agencies like the World Bank, which funded the construction of over 4,400 housing units – will ever be empty of their current residents.

Mohamed Abdul, a rights advocate who works closely with the community, believes displaced Muslims will not return to the north unless they are presented with a solid plan of action for rebuilding their homes, or offered loans for start-up businesses.

So far, he told IPS, much has been promised but little delivered.

In mid-2010, IDPs wishing to return to their old neighbourhoods were instructed to register with the Sri Lankan authorities. Almost all of the 250,000 Muslims in Puttalam did so, but few ended up making the return journey. It later transpired that most registered only in order to receive the promised six months worth of government rations.

According to Farzana Haniffa an academic at the Colombo University, displaced Muslims were never given priority, even among international organisations, because theirs was not considered an “emergency” humanitarian situation.

“There was never (the threat) that they would starve,” Hanifa, editor of a report on Northern Muslims, told IPS. As a result, only a fraction of the millions of dollars of development aid that have flooded this country since the 1980s has found its way to Puttalam.

For people like Lebbe, the decision on whether or not to return to the north is a simple one.

The formerly war-torn province has little to offer: unemployment rates in the northern Vanni region are feared to be as high as 20 or 30 percent, according to Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, who heads the Jaffna-based Point Pedro Institute of Development, indicating that anyone who wishes to start life there faces, at best, an uncertain future.

“At least here we know for sure what to expect,” Lebbe said.

Kurdish militias in Syria have controlled the oil rich area of Rumelan since early March. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.

While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the violence and prevent its spread across borders, their right-wing colleagues, particularly neo-conservatives, see U.S. intervention as key to dealing Iran a strategic defeat in the region.

“…[T]he most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region,” according to Tuesday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

“The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short-term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel,” the editorial asserted. “The far greater risk to Middle East stability and U.S. interests is a victorious arc of Iranian terror from the Gulf to the Mediterranean backed by nuclear weapons.”

The immediate impetus for the reunion between the country’s two interventionist forces seems related primarily to charges that Syrian security forces have used chemical weapons in several attacks on insurgents and growing fears that the two-year-old civil war is spilling over into and destabilising neighbouring countries.

Those fears gained greater urgency this week when Israeli warplanes twice attacked targets close to Damascus and reports surfaced that Lebanon’s Hezbollah has sharply escalated its role in actively defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Both developments appear to have emboldened hawks here, particularly neo-conservatives who have sought for more than two decades to make the overthrow of the Assad dynasty in Damascus a major priority for U.S. Mideast policy and now see the conflict in Syria as a proxy war between Iran and Israel.

War-weariness and public disillusionment with U.S. interventions they championed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as President Barack Obama’s oft-expressed reservations about the wisdom of engaging in yet another war in a predominantly Muslim country, had kept the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks at bay.

But a combination of an ever-climbing death toll, Hezbollah’s increased involvement, the rise of radical Islamist groups within the insurgency, and the initial –albeit yet to be confirmed — estimates by U.S., Israeli, and Western European intelligence agencies that Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, as well as Obama’s apparently offhand public warnings during last year’s election campaign that such use would cross a “red line”, have propelled some prominent liberals – most recently, New York Times columnist Bill Keller and former senior Obama policy official Anne Marie Slaughter — into their camp.

Led by the Wall Street Journal and William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives remain the most aggressive among the hawks in their advice, just as they were in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Thus, providing weapons to selected rebel groups – an option which the administration is considered most likely to exercise if the evidence of chemical weapons use by government forces is confirmed – is no longer considered sufficient.

“At this stage, (a better outcome of the conflict), this would require more than arming some rebels,” according to the Journal editorial. “It probably means imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Assad’s forces.

“We would not rule out the use of American and other ground troops to secure the chemical weapons,” the editorial writer added in a notable deviation from assurances offered by the hawks’ two most prominent Congressional champions – Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham – who, in deference to public opinion, have said repeatedly that putting U.S. “boots on the ground” should be off the table.

This echoed Kristol’s own editorial in the Standard published on the weekend. Arming the rebels, he wrote, “could well be too little, too late. …It’s hard to see what a serious response would be short of direct American engagement – perhaps a combination of enforcement of a no-fly zone and aerial attacks. And no serious president would rule out a few boots on the ground…”

The Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-policy columnist, Bret Stephens, weighed in with even more specific advice Tuesday.

He called for Obama to “disable the runways of Syrian air bases, including the international airport in Damascus; …[u]se naval assets to impose a no-fly zone over western Syria; …[s]upply the Free Syrian Army with heavy military equipment, including armored personnel carriers and light tanks; [and b]e prepared to seize and remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, even if it means putting boots (temporarily) on the ground.”

Liberal hawks have been less precise about what needs to be done, but their sense of urgency in favour of escalating U.S. military intervention – beginning with supplying the rebels with weapons – appears no less intense.

Slaughter, who served for two years as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning chief and, as an influential Princeton University international-relations professor, urged U.S. intervention in both Iraq and Libya, published an op-ed in the Washington Post that warned that Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria brought forth the spectre of the Rwandan genocide.

“For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Obama must realize the tremendous damage he will do to the United States and to his legacy if he fails to act,” she wrote, without prescribing precisely what he should do.

Keller, who described himself as a “reluctant hawk” in an influential 1,500-word op-ed on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, provided somewhat more detailed advice in 1,300-word, very prominently placed op-ed entitled “Syria is Not Iraq” Wednesday in which he quoted Slaughter, among other liberal hawks.

“The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels – funnelling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiation an orderly transition to a non-sectarian Syria,” he wrote.

“We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.”

Keller, who several years after the Iraq invasion offered a somewhat muted apology for supporting that war, stressed that he did not “mean to make this sound easy,” but stressed that a disastrous outcome “is virtually inevitable if we stay out [of the conflict]. …Why wait for the next atrocity?” he asked.

“Iraq should not keep us from doing the right thing in Syria…,’’ according to the op-ed’s subhead.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Boys in Al Raqqa, Syria, Apr. 11, 2013. Credit: Beshroffline/cc by 2.0

Despite renewed pressure by hawks in Congress and the media, U.S. President Barack Obama appears determined to avoid sharply escalating U.S. involvement in the ongoing civil war in Syria.

While administration officials insist that all options for responding to the recent alleged use by the Syrian military of chemical weapons against anti-government strongholds remain on the table, insiders suggest that the likeliest choice will be, at most, to begin supplying selected groups of rebels with “lethal” defensive weapons, albeit nothing like the surface-to-air missiles and anti-tank rockets they have been calling for.

“They’re worried about more-sophisticated weaponry falling into the wrong hands,” said one well-connected Congressional staffer here this week, noting that reports that Islamist groups – at least one of which, the Al-Nusra Front, has declared fidelity to Al-Qaeda – now dominate the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency.

So far, Washington has provided rebels with only “non-lethal” assistance, including communications gear and food rations. Just before the chemical-weapons charges surfaced, the administration  had decided to add body armour and night-vision goggles.

Throughout the conflict, it has turned a blind eye to supplies of “lethal” equipment from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, even as it became increasingly concerned that the recipients of that aid are almost uniformly Sunni Islamists.

While the public might rally behind stronger action – for example, creating a “no-fly zone” over all or parts of the country, as hawks like Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham have repeatedly urged — the administration would have to mount a major “information” campaign to get that support, recent polls suggest.

Asked last week whether they would support the U.S. and its allies using force against Syrian forces if their use of chemical weapons is confirmed, a plurality of 45 percent of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey said they would, while 31 percent said they would oppose military action.

In a New York Times/CBS poll taken at the same time, however, 62 percent of respondents said they did not feel the U.S. “has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria…,” while only 24 percent disagreed.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon also appears highly reluctant to take military action.

“Whether the military effect would produce the kind of outcome I think that not only members of Congress, but all of us would desire – which is an end to the violence, some kind of political reconciliation among the parties and a stable Syria …It’s not clear to me that it would produce that outcome,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters earlier this week.

While he assured his audience that the Pentagon was constantly updating its contingency plans and could prevail – albeit not nearly as easily as in Libya – over Damascus’s Russian-built air-defence system to set up a no-fly zone, he also raised serious questions about the wisdom of such a strategy. Dempsey pointed out that Assad’s air force was responsible for only about 10 percent of rebel and civilian casualties.

“The other 90 percent are through direct fire or artillery. So the question then becomes: If you eliminate one capability of a potential adversary, will you be inclined to find yourself in a position to be asked to do more against the rest?” he asked.

Meanwhile, Pentagon sources, with the evident approval of their superiors, briefed the Wall Street Journal on just how formidable Syria’s air defences were, noting that Dempsey himself had told Obama it would be very difficult for U.S. aircraft to take out mobile and other systems that were installed after the Israeli attack on a suspected secret nuclear reactor in 2007.

Even many of McCain’s and Graham’s Republican colleagues have failed to rally behind their calls for direct military action, opting instead for arming “moderate”, secular rebel groups, which, according to a major New York Times account last month, scarcely exist in what has become a sectarian conflict similar in many respects to that which nearly tore Iraq apart in 2006-07.

Indeed, neo-conservatives and other Republican hawks have been so disappointed by the tepidness or indifference of their colleagues’ response to Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons that they have added it to a growing list of charges of creeping “isolationism” in the party.

Of course, most of their fire has been directed at Obama, not only for failing to intervene in the conflict earlier, when “moderate” groups may have been more of a force within the insurgency, but also and, more importantly, for damaging U.S. “credibility” by, first, warning Assad that his use of chemical weapons would be a “game-changer” and cross a “red line” that would provoke “enormous consequences” from Washington, and then by arguing, as he did last week, that he needs more evidence and a broader international consensus that the government did indeed deploy such weapons before taking any action.

Even some more-dovish voices who have long been sceptical about any escalation in U.S. involvement in Syria have argued that Obama has put U.S. credibility on the line and must follow through on his threat, lest Iran and North Korea, for example, draw the wrong conclusions.

“If you draw a line in the sand, especially in the turbulent and passionate Arab world, and dare someone not to cross it, you had better back up the threat when he does,” wrote former Under Secretary of State for Policy Nicholas Burns on GlobalPost this week, although he also defended Obama’s desire to gain confirmation of the chemical-weapons reports.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a liberal interventionist who served in a top policy post in Obama’s State Department, evoked the memory of Rwanda in appealing in a Washington Post op-ed for Obama to take action. “…(T)he White House must recognize that the game has already changed,” she wrote. “U.S. credibility is on the line.”

Still, other interventionists who had supported more-aggressive action by the U.S. early in the conflict now said they were now much more ambivalent, particularly in light of the reported dominance of more-radical Islamists among the rebel ranks.

“I lean now much more to caution,” said former Amb. Morton Abramowitz, who played a key role in persuading the Clinton White House to intervene in the Balkans in the 1990s and initially favoured a no-fly zone in Syria to protect the peaceful opposition.

That preference for caution – combined with the universal rejection of putting U.S. “boots on the ground” for anything but the most dire humanitarian emergencies (such as the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons against a civilian population or large stocks of chemical weapons falling into the hands of Hezbollah or Al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups) – will make it much easier for Obama to finesse his “red line” warning and avoid direct military intervention.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.