The UN has only limited access to Jebel Marra, the location in Sudan where Amnesty International alleges Sudanese government forces have used chemical weapons, UN Peacekeeping Chief Herve Ladsous said here Tuesday.

‘’We have not come across any evidence regarding the use of chemical weapons in Jebel Marra,’’ Ladsous told the UN Security Council, noting that UN mission’s consistently restricted access into Jebel Marra has hindered effective monitoring and reporting.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has also assessed that no conclusions regarding Amnesty’s conclusions can be made without further investigation.

In a report released on September 30, Amnesty pointed to the alleged use of chemical weapons by Sudanese government forces against civilians in Darfur, resulting in an estimated 200-250 deaths since January 2016.

Amnesty alleges that chemical weapons have been deliberately targeted towards civilians in the remote region of Jebel Marra in Darfur at least 30 times in the past eight months.

The Amnesty investigation was conducted remotely, from outside Jebel Marra, mostly due to access restrictions. It therefore relied upon satellite imagery, extensive interviews, and expert analyses of survivors’ injuries.

According to the report, interviewed survivors witnessed a ‘’poisonous black smoke that gradually changed colour and smelled putrid’’ during the attacks in their villages.

‘’It smells like someone burning plastic, mixed with the smell of rotten eggs…’’said Kobei, a senior armed opposition group commander, in an interview in the report.

Disturbing images from the investigation show injuries ranging from weeping blisters, bloody lesions and darkened skin peeling off. Other reported injuries include eye problems, severe respiratory problems, involuntary seizures, red urine, miscarriages, bloody vomiting and diarrhea.

The report mentioned that children were generally more affected than adults after the alleged exposure. Further, injured survivors have had ‘’no access to adequate medical care.”

Both chemical weapons experts who reviewed the evidence stated that the victims experienced a variety of symptoms that “strongly suggest an exposure to chemical weapon agents.”

Identifying the specific chemical agents requires collecting samples from those allegedly exposed, from the environment and from weapon remnants used during the attacks. Given the severe access restrictions into Jebel Marra, Amnesty have not been able to do this.

Sudan is currently a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention that bans the use of chemical weapons.

The Sudanese government has refuted the allegations of the use of chemical weapons in Jebel Marra and said that it will to cooperate with the OPCW investigation.

In a letter dated 27 September 2016, Sudan’s Minister of Justice, Awad Hassan Elnour, said that the evidence in the report is “unreliable, contradictory and unsubstantiated ’’ and alleged that ‘’the survivors and witnesses in the report were either members of the opposition or influenced under fear.”

Elnour questioned whether the satellite imaging relied on in the report showed government forces wearing protective suits and helmets against chemical weapons as they stood on the very ground supposed to be targeted with such weapons. She additionally questioned the alleged death toll of 200 people, considering no such information was available in any health centers in the country.

The report however alleges that the chemicals were released primarily through air bombs and rockets and that the victims had no access to medical treatment.

Peacekeepers from the UN-African Union force in Darfur have been denied access into Jebel Marra where the alleged chemical weapon attacks occurred, according to Ladsous, in his briefing to the UN Security Council on October 4.

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

In the following months, reports of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces multiplied. The most serious was an allegation that the Syrian army had used sarin gas on Mar. 19, 2013 at Khan al Assal, north of Aleppo, and in a suburb of Damascus against its opponents. This was followed by two more allegations of small attacks in April.

Prem Shankar Jha

Seymour Hersh has reported that in May 2013, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan visited Obama, accompanied by his intelligence chief, and pressed him to live up to his “red line” commitment to punish Syria if it used chemical weapons.

But by then U.S. intelligence knew, and had conveyed to Barack Obama,  that it was Turkey’s secret service, MIT, that had been working with the Nusra front to set up facilities to  manufacture sarin, and had obtained two kilograms of the deadly gas for it from Eastern Europe, with funds provided by Qatar. Obama therefore remained unmoved.

Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed.

On May 13, 2013, Republican Senator John McCain paid a surprise visit to Idlib on the Syria-Turkey border to meet whom he believed were moderate leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Photos and videos posted on the web after the visit and resurrected after the rise of the Islamic States (IS) showed that two of the five leaders whom he actually met were Mohammed Nour, the spokesman of ‘Northern Storm’ an offshoot of the brutal Jabhat Al Nusra, and Ammar al Dadhiki, aka Abu Ibrahim, a key member of the organisation. The third was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, known as the ‘Caliph of the Islamic State’.“Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed”

The visit had been organised by Salim Idris, self-styled Brigadier General of the FSA, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a U.S. not-for-profit organisation that is a passionate advocate for arming the ‘moderate’ FSA.

McCain probably did not know whom he was meeting , but the same could not be said of Idris and SETF, because when McCain met them, Nusra was already on the banned list  and Baghdadi was on the U.S. State Department’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, with a reward of 10 million dollars on his head. What is more, by then he had been the Emir of IS for the previous six weeks.

As for the SETF, investigations of its connections by journalists after the McCain videos went viral on the internet showed a deep connection to AIPAC.  Until these exposure made it ‘correct’ its web page, one of its email addresses was “syriantaskforce.torahacademybr.org”.

The “torahacademybr.org” URL belongs to the Torah Academy of Boca Raton, Florida, whose academic goals notably include “inspiring a love and commitment to Eretz Yisroel [Land of Israel] .” SETF’s director was also closely associated with AIPC’s think tank, the Washington Institute of Near East Policy (WINEP).

When Obama ‘postponed’ the attack on Syria on the grounds that he had to obtain the approval of Congress first, Israel’s response was blind fury.

Obama had informed Netanyahu of his decision on Aug. 30, four hours before he referred it to Congress and bound him to secrecy. But Netanyahu’s housing minister, Uri Ariel, gave full vent to it the next morning in a radio interview, saying: “You don’t have to wait until tens of thousands more children die before intervening in Syria.”

Ariel went on to say; “When you throw gas at the population, it means you know you’re going to murder thousands of women, children indiscriminately. [Syrian President Bashar Assad] is a murderous coward. Take him out.”

Netanyahu reprimanded Ariel because he did not want Israel to be seen to be pushing the United States into war, but by then there was no room left for doubt that this is exactly what he and his government had been trying to do.

For, on Aug. 27, alongside U.S. foreign minister John Kerry’s denunciation of the Ghouta sarin gas attack, the right-wing daily, Tims of Israel, had published three stories quoting defence officials, titled ‘Israeli intelligence seen as central to US case against Syria’; ‘IDF intercepted Syrian regime chatter on chemical attack’; and, significantly, ‘For Israel US response on Syria may be a harbinger for Iran’.

The hard “information” that had tilted the balance was contained in the second story: a retired Mossad agent who refused to be named, told another German magazine, Focus, that a squad specialising in wire-tapping within the IDF’s elite ‘8200 intelliogence unit’ had intercepted a conversation between high-ranking officials discussing the sue of chemical agents at the time of the attack.

The similarity of method between this and the earlier leak to Der Spiegel makes it likely that it too was part of an Israeli disinformation campaign designed to trigger a fatal assault on Assad.

Obama gave his first hint that he intended to reverse the [George W.] Bush doctrine while talking to reporters on a tour of Asia in April 2014: “Why is it,” he observed, “that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve gone through a decade of war at enormous cost to our troops and our budget?”

He unveiled the change in a graduation day speech at West Point on May 28, 2014. “Here’s my bottom line”, he said. ”America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.

“But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

“And because the costs associated with military action are so high, you should expect every civilian leader – and especially your Commander-in-Chief – to be clear about how that awesome power should be used.”

Obama’s choice of venue was not accidental, because it was here that Bush had announced the United States’ first strike security doctrine 12 years earlier.

Obama’s repudiation of the Bush doctrine sent a ripple of shock running through the U.S. political establishment. Republicans denounced him for revealing America’s weakness and emboldening its enemies. But a far more virulent denunciation came from Hilary Clinton, the front runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016.

“Great nations need strong organising principles”, she said in an interview with The Atlantic, “’Don’t do stupid stuff’ (Obama’s favourite phrase) is not an organising principle.”

Netanyahu got the message: he may have lost the U.S. president, but Israel’s, more specifically the Israeli right’s, constituency in the United States remained undented. No matter which party came to power in the next election, he could continue his tirade against Iran and be guaranteed a sympathetic hearing.

Since then he has barely bothered to hide his contempt for Obama and spared no effort to turn him, prematurely, into a lame duck President.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* The first part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s Nowroz greeting to the Iranian people earlier this year was the first clear indication to the world that the United States and Iran were very close to agreement on the contents of the nuclear agreement they had been working towards for the previous 16 months.

In contrast to two earlier messages which were barely veiled exhortations to Iranians to stand up to their obscurantist leaders, Obama urged “the peoples and the leaders of Iran” to avail themselves of “the best opportunity in decades to pursue a different relationship between our countries.”

Prem Shankar Jha

This moment, he warned, “may not come again soon (for) there are people in both our countries and beyond, who oppose a diplomatic solution.”

Barely a fortnight later that deal was done. Iran had agreed to a more than two-thirds reduction in the number of centrifuges it would keep, although a question mark still hung over the timing of the lifting of sanctions against it. The agreement came in the teeth of opposition from hardliners in both Iran and the United States.

Looking back at Obama’s unprecedented overtures to Iran, his direct phone call to President Hassan Rouhani – the first of its kind in 30 years – and his letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in November last year, it is clear in retrospect that they were products of  a rare meeting of minds between him and  Rouhani and their foreign ministers John Kerry and Muhammad Jawad Zarif that may have occurred as early as  their first meetings in September 2013.

The opposition to the deal within the United States proved a far harder obstacle for Obama to surmount. The reason is the dogged and increasingly naked opposition of Israel and the immense influence of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) on U.S. policymakers and public opinion.

Both of these were laid bare came when the Republican party created constitutional history by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address  a joint session of Congress  without informing the White House, listened raptly to his diatribe against Obama, and sent a deliberately insulting letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in a bid to scuttle the talks.

Obama has ploughed on in the teeth of this formidable, highly personalised, attack on him  because he has learnt from the bitter experience of the past four years what Harvard professors John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt had exposed in their path-breaking  book, ‘The Israel lobby and American Foreign Policy’ in 2006.“Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort”

This was the utter disregard for America’s national interest and security with which Israel had been manipulating American public opinion, the U.S. Congress and successive U.S. administrations, in pursuit of its own security, since the end of the Cold War.

By the end of 2012, two years into the so-called “Arab Spring”, Obama had also discovered how cynically Turkey and the Wahhabi-Sunni sheikhdoms had manipulated the United States into joining a sectarian vendetta against Syria, and created and armed a Jihadi army whose ultimate target was the West itself.

Nine months later, he found out how Israel had abused the trust the United States reposed in it, and come within a hairsbreadth of pushing it into an attack on Syria that was even less justifiable than then U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.  And then the murderous eruption of the Islamic State (ISIS) showed him that the Jihadis were out of control.

Somewhere along this trail of betrayal and disillusionment, Obama experienced the political equivalent of an epiphany.

Twelve years of a U.S. national security strategy that relied on the pre-emptive use of force had  yielded war without end, a string of strategic defeats, a  mauled and traumatised army, mounting international debt and a collapsing hegemony reflected in the impunity with which the so-called friends of the United States were using it to serve their ends.

Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort. His meeting and discussions with Rouhani and Iranian foreign minister Zarif gave him the opportunity to begin this epic change of direction.

Obama faced his first moment of truth on Nov. 28, 2012 when a Jabhat al Nusra unit north of Aleppo brought down a Syrian army helicopter with a Russian man-portable surface-to-air missile (SAM).

The White House tried to  pretend that that the missile was from a captured Syrian air base, but by then U.S. intelligence agencies were fed up with its suppression and distortion of their intelligence and  leaked it to the Washington Post that 40 SAM missile batteries with launchers, along with hundreds of tonnes of other heavy weapons had been bought from Libya, paid for by Qatar, and transported to the rebels in Syria  by Turkey through a ‘rat line’ that the CIA had helped it to establish, to funnel arms and mercenaries into Syria.

A day that Obama had been dreading had finally arrived: heavy weapons that the United States and the European Union had expressly proscribed, because they could bring down civilian aircraft anywhere in the world, had finally reached Al Qaeda’s hands

But when Obama promptly banned the Jabhat Al Nusra, he got his second shock. At the next ‘Friends of Syria’ meeting in Marrakesh three weeks later, not only the   ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels that the United States had grouped under a newly-formed Syrian Military Council three months earlier, but all of its Sunni Muslim allies condemned the ban, while Britain and France remained silent.

Obama’s third, and worst, moment of truth came nine months later when a relentless campaign by  his closest ‘allies‘, Turkey and Israel, brought him to the verge of launching an all-out aerial attack  on Syria in September 2013 to punish it for “using gas on rebels and civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus.”

Obama learned that Syria had done no such thing only two days before the attack was to commence, when the British informed him that soil samples collected from the site of the Ghouta attack and analysed at their CBW research laboratories at Porton Down, had shown that the sarin gas used in the attack could not possibly have been prepared by the Syrian army.

This was because the British had the complete list of suppliers from which Syria had received its precursor chemicals and these did not match the chemicals used in the sarin gas found in the Ghouta.

Had he gone through with the attack, it would have made Obama ten times worse than George Bush in history’s eyes.

Hindsight allows us to reconstruct how the conviction that Syria was using chemical weapons was implanted into policy-makers in the United States and the European Union.

On Sep. 17, 2012, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the highly-reputed German magazine Der Speigel, had learned, “quoting several eyewitnesses”, that Syria had tested delivery systems for chemical warheads   at a chemical weapons research centre near Aleppo in August, and that the tests had been overseen by Iranian experts.

Tanks and aircraft, Der Speigel reported, had fired “five or six empty shells capable of delivering poison gas.”

Since neither Der Speigel nor any other Western newspaper had, or still has, resident correspondents in Syria, it could only have obtained this report second or third-hand through a local stringer. This, and the wealth of detail in the report, suggests that the story of a test firing, while not necessarily untrue, was a plant by an intelligence agency. It therefore had to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

One person who not only chose to believe it instantly, but also to act on it was Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Dec. 3, 2012, Haaretz reported that he had sent emissaries to Amman twice, in October and November, to request Jordan’s permission to overfly its territory to bomb Syria’s chemical weapons facilities.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service.

* The second part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

Scientists and local communities are expressing serious concern about the ongoing destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal on board a vessel in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea.

“Neutralisation” of the chemicals, including mustard gas and the raw materials for sarin nerve gas, began earlier this week under Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) guidelines, on board the specially modified U.S. maritime vessel Cape Ray.

The operation, which is expected to be completed within 60 days, uses Deployable Hydrolysis Systems (FDHS), but the technique is being criticised.

According to Thodoris Tsimpidis, director of the Archipelagos Institute, a Greek non-profit organisation specialising in marine conservation, hydrolysis is not a safe method for neutralising chemicals on board.

“We were invited for a tour of the Cape Ray before the operation but we did not go because whenever we asked something important they replied that it was confidential. We do not understand why scientists are not allowed on board during the operation,” he told IPS.Syria agreed to surrender it chemical weapons to international control after a chemical attack with sarin gas on August 21 last year against rebels in disputed areas of the Markaz Rif Dimashq district around Damascus.

“The Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not responded to our concerns. Why is Greece sending a submarine to escort the operation and not its specialised maritime vessel that could monitor any sea contamination if this happens?”

Syria agreed to surrender it chemical weapons to international control after a chemical attack with sarin gas on August 21 last year against rebels in disputed areas of the Markaz Rif Dimashq district around Damascus. It is estimated that 281 died in the attack, with some reports raising numbers up to 1,729.

France accused the Assad regime, saying it had proof that it was the perpetrator of the attack but the Syrian regime blamed militants who had taken control of elements of its chemical weaponry.

France, the United Kingdom and the United States threatened the regime with military action but, after Russia’s intervention, Syria asked in September 2013 to join the OPCW and surrender its chemical arsenal for destruction.

Initially Belgium and Norway refused to host the neutralisation process on their territories, while Albania initially accepted, only to retract after public opposition rapidly invalidated plans.

U.S. authorities leading the operation then decided to attempt the destruction of chemicals on board, a process in which over 30 countries and the European Union have been actively involved.

The last consignment of chemicals left Syria on June 23 and was loaded aboard the Danish ship Ark Futura with destination the port of Gioia Tauro in southern Italy. There it was trans-loaded to the Cape Ray, which then sailed to the Mediterranean where the operation is now under way.

The operation has been cloaked in secrecy for fears of terrorist threats but others believe this is due to the precariousness of the operation itself.

On Thursday, members of political organisations and activists met in Chania, Crete, to coordinate protests against the operation. In an effort to break what they said was the “concealment” and “silence” of the big national media they plan to block a U.S. military base on the island for three days and attempt a symbolic sail against Cape Ray.

In an announcement on Wednesday, they said: “We warned them long before they started, by participating, together with thousands of people who reacted once they found out about their plans, in demonstrations and events throughout Greece. They decided, using concealment and silence by the mass media, to move on; we decided to meet them at sea. We are coming!”

Although the exact location of the neutralisation operation is unknown, it is thought to be taking place 100 km west of the island of Crete.

Secrecy about the process has disturbed the local community. “Monitoring by international observers and environmental organisations from the European Union and scientists of the countries directly concerned is necessary,” says professor Evaggelos Gidarakos, head of Laboratory of Toxic and Hazardous Waste Management at the University of Chania in Crete.

“None of those stakeholders have been given access in this case which has become an issue of the American military navy alone. The scientific community has been marginalised, so that even if something goes wrong we will never know.”

The presence of OCPW inspectors on board Cape Ray throughout the operation has not appeased critics. Tsimpidis said that OPCW “is not going to be held accountable” if anything goes wrong.

OCPW, a United Nations body, has continually repeated that all possible safety precautions have been taken for the operation, but it has also clarified that it “bears no responsibility” for any chemical accident and that is the U.S. Navy which will “assume all liabilities”.

IPS approached the OCPW for comments but only received an email answer directing it to the organisation’s FAQ page.

After the neutralization operation has been completed, the Cape Ray will sail to Germany and Finland to deliver the by-products of the operation for further processing

Meanwhile, the Ark Futura will continue on to the United Kingdom and then Finland to deliver chemicals to be destroyed at commercial facilities.

A second cargo ship, the Norwegian vessel Taiko, has already delivered a quantity of chemicals to Finland. The ship is now sailing to Port Arthur, Texas, in the United States, where the last cargo of chemicals will be destroyed at a commercial facility.

Ǻke Sellström (right), head of the UN technical mission to investigate the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria, briefs journalists on the work of the mission on Dec. 13, 2013. At his side is investigation team leader Maurizio Barbeschi from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Credit: UN Photo/Amanda Voisard

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, May 6 2014 (IPS)

The head of the U.N. team that investigated the Aug. 21, 2013 Sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, Ake Sellstrom, is doubtful about the number of victims of the attack reported immediately after the event.

Sellstrom has suggested that many people who claimed to have been seriously affected by Sarin merely imagined that they had suffered significant exposure to the chemical. Despite the paucity of the most fundamental indicator of exposure to Sarin, 31 of the 36 were found to have a trace of Sarin in their blood samples.

Underlying Sellstrom’s doubts are data on symptoms from a sample of people who said they were severely affected by the Sarin attack. The data, published in the September report, appear to belie the claims of Sarin intoxication by those in the sample, according to experts who have analysed them.

Sellstrom expressed his doubts in an interview with Gwyn Winfield, the editor of the CBRNe World Magazine, that was published in the February issue.

“If you take the figures from Tokyo, you can compare how many died versus those that were intoxicated,” said Sellstrom. But in the case of Syrian attack, he said, “[W]hile we could conclude that it was big, we couldn’t do the same for how many died or were affected.”

He expressed doubt that many of the alleged survivors of the attack had been exposed to Sarin. “You can get many symptoms from other items in a war,” Sellstrom said, “[P]hosphorous smoke, tear gas, many of those devices on the battlefield will affect the lungs, eyes and give you respiratory problems.”

Then Sellstrom added, “Also in any theater of war, people will claim they are intoxicated. We saw it in Palestine, Afghanistan and everywhere else.”

Now a project manager at the European CBRNE Centre in Umea, Sellstrom did not respond to e-mail requests from IPS for comment on this article by deadline.

However, his remarks to CBRNe were evidently influenced strongly by the team’s experience in gathering data on several dozen alleged victims who claimed to have been among the most heavily exposed to Sarin on Aug. 21.

Sellstrom explained to Winfield that the investigating team had sought the help of the opposition in the area where the attack took place to identify as many as 80 survivors of the Sarin attack.

“We thought that if they can gather 80 people who were affected but still surviving, that it [would be] clearly indicative that a major event had taken place,” he said.

Sellstrom revealed in the interview that the team had chosen 36 people from the original 80 identified as survivors by the opposition. Those 36 people described themselves as having had very serious exposure to Sarin.

Thirty of the 36 reported rocket strikes either on or near their homes. The remaining six said they had gone to a point of impact to help those suffering from the attack.

The U.N. report provided detailed statistics on the symptoms reported by the 36 individuals and concluded the data were “consistent with organophosphate intoxication”. But chemical weapons specialists have identified serious contradictions in the data that appear to indicate the contrary.

Twenty-eight of the 36 victims – nearly four-fifths of the sample – said they had experienced loss of consciousness, according to the Sep. 16 U.N. report. The second most frequent symptom was difficulty breathing, which was reported by 22 of the 36, followed by blurred vision, which was suffered by 15 of them. But only five of the 36 reported miosis, or constricted pupils.

That fact is an indication that the exposure to Sarin was actually minimal or nonexistent for 31 of the 36, or 86 percent of the sample. Miosis is the most basic and reliable indicator of nerve gas poisoning, according to chemical weapons literature and specialists who analysed the report.

As little as four mg of Sarin per cubic metre for just two minutes would have triggered that physiological response, according to an Apr. 17 email from UK-based American chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta in April. A 2002 article in the journal Critical Care Medicine put the minimum exposure necessary to cause miosis at one mg of Sarin per cubic metre for three minutes.

Yet miosis was the least prevalent symptom among those people claiming to have been very seriously exposed to Sarin in Syria.

Dr. Abbas Faroutan, an Iranian physician who treated Iranian victims of Iraqi nerve gas attacks, noted that the data were “not logical”.

Seven of the 36 people identified as victims told investigators they had lost a combined total of 39 members of their immediate families who were killed in buildings they said were either points of impact of the rockets or only 20 metres (64 feet) away. However, only one of the seven exhibited the constriction of pupils and only one reported nausea and vomiting.

Despite the paucity of the most fundamental indicator of exposure to Sarin, 31 of the 36 were found to have a trace of Sarin in their blood samples.

That seeming contradiction is explained by the fact that even exposure to an amount of Sarin too small to cause any symptoms would be detected in the blood using an extremely sensitive method called fluoride reactivation, according to Kaszeta.

The U.N. team found that six of the people who claimed serious exposure to Sarin had no trace of Sarin in their blood at all, indicating that they had in fact experienced no exposure to Sarin at all.

Kaszeta said he had concluded that the people interviewed and evaluated by the UN “didn’t have serious exposure” to nerve gas.

The indication that the overwhelming majority in the sample had very little or no exposure to Sarin was particularly significant, because those in the sample had been chosen by local opposition authorities as being among the most serious affected survivors. The data suggest that the Syrian opposition and its external supporters had vastly exaggerated the scope and severity of the attack.

In an apparent reference to the questionable data on symptoms collected on the 36 alleged survivors, Sellstrom told Winfield the investigators “need to be better at differential diagnostics on the intoxication, better medical markers.”

Selstrom also expressed doubt about the numbers of victims said to have been treated at local hospitals. The U.N. investigators visited two of the three hospitals in the Damascus suburbs that had treated victims of the attack and had provided figures for the numbers of victims they had treated.

“[T]he figures they provided of people who passed through them was just not possible,” said Sellstrom. “It is impossible that they could have turned over the amount of people they claim they did.”

Sellstrom did not refer to the total number of victims claimed by hospital administrators, but Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) issued a statement Aug. 24 that three hospitals near the area of the attack had reported to MSF that they “received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013”. MSF said 355 had died.

Sellstrom repeated his doubts about the total number of victims of Sarin intoxication and the numbers of patients said to have been treated in hospitals in a Mar. 11 interview with the website “Syria in Crisis” affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The head of the Syria investigation had also investigated the use of chemical weapons by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war for the U.N.  He had been Chief Inspector for UNSCOM, the U.N. Commission on Iraq’s compliance with the ban on weapons of mass destruction, and head of its successor, UNMOVIC.

He has apparently questioned the larger narrative of Syrian government culpability for the attack as well. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after the release of the December U.N. investigation report, Sellstrom said he believes both sides in the Syrian conflict had the “opportunity” and the “capability” to “carry out chemical weapons attacks.”

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, was published Feb. 14.

“Does Israel have chemical weapons too?” is the question posed by the U.S. publication Foreign Policy, citing a newly uncovered CIA document from 1983 which alleged that Israel is likely to have developed such weapons. Written ten years after the 1973 war in which Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, the CIA document revealed in Foreign Policy alleged that “Israel undertook a programme of chemical warfare preparations in both offensive and protective areas.” True or not, the report underpins Israel’s doctrine to deter frontline Arab states from attacking it by tilting the balance of power in its favour, Prof. Shlomo Aronson, Israeli weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) scholar at the Hebrew University Jlem tells IPS. “Since the Arab states started to produce chemical weapons, it would be quite natural that Israel has something similar. They have chemical weapons. We must have them as well.” “Syria produced chemical weapons to balance the threat of Israeli nuclear weapons,” Ziad Abu Zayyad, former head of the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace talks on Arms Control and Regional Security (1991-1996) tells IPS.“Since the Arab states started to produce chemical weapons, it would be quite natural that Israel has something similar."
“While we cannot confirm whether the Israelis possess lethal chemical agents,” the CIA report said, “several indicators lead us to believe that they have available to them at least persistent and non-persistent nerve agents, a mustard agent, and several riot-control agents, marched with suitable delivery systems.” It’s been known since the early 1970s that chemical tests are conducted at the secretive Israel Institute for Biological Research located in the town of Ness Ziona, 20 km south of Tel Aviv. The secret Intel file identified “a probable chemical weapons nerve agent production facility and a storage facility at the Dimona Sensitive Storage area in the Negev desert,” – that is, in the vicinity of the nuclear research centre where it’s widely assumed that nuclear warheads have been manufactured. Whether Israel retains the alleged chemical stockpile is unknown. Officially, it neither confirms nor denies the existence of a chemical weapons programme – let alone of a nuclear weapons programme – and intentionally shrouds in ambiguity its suspected weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme, only exhibiting chemical warfare protection drills and gas mask kits distribution centres. Aronson deciphers the Israeli WMD doctrine – “not to admit the existence of WMDs before peace prevails; not taking the Arab people hostage to the behaviour of their leaders; not committing publicly to any red line in the realm of unconventional weapons.” Israel signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (September 1993) which prohibits the production, stockpiling and use of such arms, but never ratified it. If implemented, the convention would endow chemical weapons inspectors with intrusive powers, notes Aronson. “The treaty could allow inspectors in Israel’s facilities, including the nuclear facility.” Abu Zayyad believes that after Syria, Israel should disarm from its chemical weapons. “There should be a linkage,” he tells IPS. “We’re aiming at a WMDs-free Middle East.” Israel rejects any demand to link Syria’s chemical disarmament with a ratification of the Convention that would lead to the dismantlement of the arsenal it reportedly has. “The big difference is Syria, not Israel, uses chemical weapons,” Aronson points out. “Conventional Israel was never accepted. Unconventional Israel was, and is, accepted. Our very survival rests on unconventional weapons.” “Peace is the sole solution to Israel’s security predicament,” counters Abu Zayyad. Israel declines to answer queries by foreign journalists, opting instead for more discreet reactions in the local media. “Some of the countries in the region don’t recognise Israel’s right to exist and blatantly call to annihilate it,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson was quoted in the liberal newspaper Haaretz.” “In this context, the chemical weapons threat against Israel and its civilian population is neither theoretical nor distant,” the official said by way of rationale for not ratifying the Convention. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Jerusalem to brief Netanyahu about the U.S.-Russian framework agreement on terminating Syria’s chemical weapons the day after it was a done deal. “If we achieve that,” Kerry declared, “We’ll have set a marker for the standard of behaviour with respect to Iran and North Korea.” “The determination the international community shows regarding Syria will have a direct impact on the Syrian regime’s patron Iran,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said to Kerry. “If diplomacy has any chance to work, it must be coupled with a credible military threat.” Netanyahu knows that the U.S., after having precisely adopted such a two-pronged approach on Syria, cannot afford not to back Israel publicly on Iran, even as Tehran is signalling readiness to compromise on its nuclear programme. And for the time being, demands for Israel to disarm from its alleged poison gas arsenal are bound to evaporate into thin air.

Professor Ake Sellstrom (left), head of the chemical weapons team working in Syria, hands over the report on the Aug. 21, 2013 Al-Ghouta massacre to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 2013 (IPS)

After an intense investigation of the military attack on civilians in Syria last month, a U.N. team of arms inspectors has reached a predictable conclusion: the deadly attack had all the trappings of the widespread use of chemical weapons.

But the team left an equally important question unanswered: who was responsible for that attack?

According to a mandate given by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. team, led by Professor Ake Sellstrom of Sweden, did not have the authority to investigate culpability.

The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the rebel groups blame each other for the attack.

“The results are overwhelming and indisputable. The facts speak for themselves,” Ban told the Security Council Monday, immediately following the release of the team’s detailed report.

There must be accountability for the use of chemical weapons, he asserted. “Any use of chemical weapons by anyone, anywhere, is a crime.”

Ban told delegates the team has concluded that “chemical weapons were used on a relatively large scale” in the Ghouta area of Damascus in the context of the ongoing conflict in Syria.

Dr. Ian Anthony, director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Programme at the Stockolm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS the next logical step would seem to be for the Security Council to evaluate the information as an urgent matter and come to a conclusion on the issue of who is responsible for the use of chemical weapons.

“The Security Council, with all its members acting together, then needs to chart a path forward,” he added.

The team interviewed more than 50 survivors, medical personnel and first responders. It applied a rigorous and objective selection process designed to identify survivors who may have been exposed to chemical agents, according to Ban.

The team also assessed symptoms and collected biomedical samples, including from hair, urine and blood.

Ban told delegates the team documented and sampled impact sites and munitions, and collected 30 soil and environmental samples far more than any previous such U.N. investigation.

The statements by survivors offer a vivid account of the events on that fateful day, Aug. 21.

He said survivors reported that immediately after the attack, they quickly experienced a range of symptoms, including shortness of breath, disorientation, eye irritation, blurred vision, nausea, vomiting and general weakness.

Many eventually lost consciousness. First responders described seeing a large number of individuals lying on the ground, many of them dead or unconscious.

The team also interviewed nine nurses and seven treating physicians, several of whom responded immediately to the incident.

“They reported seeing a large number of people lying in the streets without external signs of injury, some with laboured breathing, most of them unconscious,” Ban told delegates.

After the briefing, Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant of Britain told reporters “there is no doubt” chemical weapons were used by Syrian security forces, not rebels.

“These were not cottage industry weapons,” he added, implicitly accusing the Syrian government of the attack.

Reinforcing his argument, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told reporters the 122 mm rockets used to deliver the chemical arms were “not improvised weapons” but professionally manufactured.

“There is no evidence that opposition forces are armed with sarin gas,” she added.

But Ambassador Vitaly Chukrin of Russia, a country strongly supportive of Assad, decried the attempt to “jump to conclusions”.

Poo-poohing the charges, he said if the Syrian government had in fact used chemical weapons, how is it that there wasn’t a single rebel casualty in the attack, which killed mostly civilian men, women and children.

“The rockets missed all their targets,” he added, with a tinge of sarcasm.

In a statement released Monday, Philippe Bolopion, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said the fact that no perpetrator was clearly fingered in the Sellstrom report should further compel the Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC), so those behind the vicious Ghouta chemical attacks, and the other major crimes in Syria, can be held to account.

“Enforcing a red line on the future use of chemical weapons will take more than a deal on monitoring Syria’s stocks: it will require that those who pressed the chemical button face justice for their crime,” he added.

SIPRI’s Anthony told IPS that based on the U.N. team’s findings, the Security Council needs to craft a response that on the one hand holds the identified perpetrators accountable, and on the other hand does not either escalate the present conflict, or derail the prospects for progress towards ending the conflict through a political settlement.

The way forward must include implementing chemical weapons disarmament, he said.

Meanwhile, the U.N. team is expected to return to Syria “as soon as practical” to complete its investigation of an earlier chemical weapons attack in Khan Al Assal.

The team will issue its final report after that investigation.

President Barack Obama meets with Members of Congress to discuss Syria in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Sep. 3, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s decision to put off a vote by Congress on the use of military force against Syria in order to pursue a Russian proposal to place Damascus’ chemical-weapons arsenal under international control has evoked both cheers and jeers from across the political spectrum here Wednesday.

While Obama’s supporters defended his decision – which he announced in a much-anticipated address to the nation Tuesday night – as both politically and diplomatically astute, hawks denounced it as what they see as yet another abdication of U.S. leadership in global affairs.

“The move may rescue Mr. Obama and Congress from the political agony of a vote on a resolution to authorize a military strike on Syria,” the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal wrote in its lead editorial Wednesday. “But the diplomatic souk is now open, and Mr. Obama has turned himself into one of the junior camel traders.

“A weak and inconstant U.S. President has been maneuvered by America’s enemies into claiming that a defeat for his Syria policy is really a triumph,” it declared, adding that Obama’s opting for delay and diplomacy could make an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities more likely.

On the other hand, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, one of the few Democrats who came out in strong support of Obama’s request for authorisation to take military action, praised his decision.

“Pres. Obama’s leadership brought diplomatic solutions back to the table, shows his willingness to exhaust every remedy before use of force,” she tweeted immediately after Obama concluded his speech.

The 15-minute address had originally been intended as the capstone of an intense week-long lobbying effort to persuade reluctant lawmakers to approve his request for an Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to punish Damascus for its alleged use of chemical weapons. It came less than 48 hours after Russia, Syria’s most important ally, unexpectedly tabled its proposal to bring Syria’s chemical arsenal under international control.

The proposal was immediately welcomed by Syria’s foreign minister, who subsequently declared his government’s willingness to join the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and open its sites for international inspection.

“It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad regime keeps its commitments. But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force,” Obama said, adding that he had ordered the military “to maintain our current posture and to be in a position to respond if diplomacy fails.”

He also announced that he was sending Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva Thursday to begin negotiations on how the proposal will be implemented and in what time frame.

Those questions were uppermost in the minds of most analysts here who voiced varying degrees of scepticism about whether Assad was indeed prepared to give up his chemical arsenal, which is believed to be one of the world’s largest, and how feasible it would be, given the ongoing civil war and resulting lack of security in Syria.

Some hawks argued that Obama should have rejected the Russian proposal outright and launched missile strikes as he originally said he would several days after the alleged chemical attack Aug. 21 that, according to the White House, killed more than 1,400 people.

However, most observers agree that he had little choice once he asked Congress – in the wake of the British Parliament’s rejection of the UK’s participation in any military action – for the AUMF.

Initially, the administration thought that a combination of loyal Democrats and hawkish Republicans would give it the majorities it needed to pass some form of authorisation for one or two days of missile strikes that was narrowly aimed at deterring Damascus from using chemical weapons again.

But it soon became clear that public opinion strongly opposed any action that could involve the U.S. in yet another civil war in the Middle East. And, as the administration tried to appease Republican hawks like Senator John McCain, who favoured broader strikes designed to weaken Assad’s military machine, popular opposition to any military action grew.

“The administration’s best chance to get public support was to stick to the normative argument [that it was necessary to uphold the international norm against chemical weapons] and not to get involved in affecting the course of the civil war,” Stephen Kull, director of worldpublicopinion.org, told IPS.

“But the normative argument got muddied by more talk about trying to affect the outcome of the war and that – combined with the fact that there was no U.N. Security Council approval – clearly bothered people.”

Thus, despite intensive lobbying by the administration, which also enlisted the active and uncharacteristically public support of the powerful Israel lobby, opposition to military action surged from about 50 percent 10 days ago to around 70 percent of respondents, according to a flurry of polls taken over the past weekend.

By Monday, several senators who had been thought to be with the administration deserted it, casting the outcome in the Democratic-led upper chambre into doubt and forcing Majority Leader Harry Reid to put off a test vote scheduled for Wednesday. In the Republican-led House, which had always been considered an uphill climb, the chances of approval were considered close to nil.

Thus, when Moscow unexpectedly put forward its proposal, the White House, after some initial confusion, grabbed it as a way to avoid what was turning out to be a political – if not a diplomatic – catastrophe.

It also brought some considerable relief to lawmakers on Capitol Hill who clearly were uncomfortable with the unfamiliar position in which Obama had placed them – sharing responsibility for committing an act of war.

Even McCain, who found himself unable to rally most of his Republican Senate colleagues behind him but who blamed the administration’s incompetence in presenting the case for military action, said Washington had to test Russia’s proposal.

“The fact is you can’t pass up this opportunity if it is one,” he told CNN. “But you’ve got to right away determine whether it’s real or not.”

The big question now is whether Kerry and Lavrov, who will also meet with the U.N.’s Special Envoy on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, can agree on a plan to begin implementing the Russian proposal within a short period of time.

A bipartisan group of mainly hawkish senators, including McCain, are working with the administration on a revised AUMF that would authorise strikes if implementation has not begun within a fixed period of time– reportedly from 45 to 90 days – or if chemical weapons are believed to have been used again.

Whether such an AUMF would have a better chance of gaining approval in light of the events of the past two weeks, however, is the source of considerable debate.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Samantha Power (left), Permanent Representative of the United States to the U.N., speaks to journalists on the Syrian crisis Sep. 5, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/JC McIlwaine

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 10 2013 (IPS)

If Syria eventually agrees to relinquish its stockpile of chemical arms under the 1993 international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), what of the six other countries that have either shown reluctance or refused to join the treaty?

Currently, there are 189 states that have signed and ratified the treaty prohibiting the manufacture, use and transfer of the deadly weapons. But seven member states have been holdouts: Burma and Israel have signed but not ratified, while Angola, North Korea, Egypt, South Sudan and Syria have neither signed nor ratified.

If Syria agrees to accept the U.S.-Russia proposal to abandon its weapons under the CWC, it still leaves six others outside the treaty.

A meeting of the Security Council to discuss Syria, scheduled to take place Tuesday, was cancelled without explanation.

If a resolution, inspired by Western nations, is adopted by the Council later in the week, Syria is expected to agree to hand over all of its chemical weapons for storage and destruction by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Asked what progress the Security Council has made on the proposal, the president of the Council, Ambassador Gary Francis Quilan of Australia, told reporters it was premature to speculate.

“It’s a step by step process,” he said.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, who has written extensively on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), singled out two other Middle Eastern nations, Egypt and Israel, as either having developed or used chemical weapons.

He pointed out that Israel is widely believed to have produced and stockpiled an extensive range of chemical weapons and is engaged in ongoing research and development of additional chemical weaponry.

“The insistence that Syria must unilaterally give up its chemical weapons and missiles while allowing a powerful and hostile neighbour to maintain and expand its sizeable arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is simply unreasonable,” Zunes told IPS.

No country, whether autocratic or democratic, could be expected to accept such conditions, he added.

Egypt was the first country in the region to obtain and use chemical weapons, using phosgene and mustard gas in the mid-1960s during its intervention in Yemen’s civil war.

“There is no indication Egypt has ever destroyed any of its chemical agents or weapons,” said Zunes.

The U.S.-backed regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak continued its chemical weapons research and development programme until its ouster in a popular uprising two and a half years ago, and the programme is believed to have continued subsequently, he noted.

Asked whether the United Nations has the capacity to handle the weapons, U.N. associate spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS, “The secretary-general has consistently called for Syria to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention and to fully abide by its responsibility to maintain the physical security of any chemical weapon stockpiles in its possession.”

The OPCW, which oversees the CWC, has considerable experience storing and destroying chemical weapons.

In a statement released Tuesday, Amnesty International USA said it welcomes steps that would lead to the removal or destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, given that they are internationally banned and their use is a war crime.

“Taking this initiative to the U.N. Security Council offers an opportunity for the international community to take other concrete action to stop the flow of conventional weapons that have caused the vast majority of civilian deaths, refer the situation for criminal investigation, and demand unfettered access for the U.N.-mandated Commission of Inquiry,” said Amnesty’s Deputy Executive Director Frank Jannuzi.

Asked about the proposal to transfer Syria’s chemical stocks to international control, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters Monday, “I think that would be proper [thing] for Syria to do, to agree to these proposals.

“Then I am sure that the international community will [take] very swift action to make sure that these chemical weapons stocks will be stored safely and will be destroyed. I do not have any doubt and worry about that. First and foremost, Syria must agree positively to this,” he added.

Harking back in history, Zunes told IPS Syria’s chemical weapons programme was established in response to Israel’s development of a chemical and nuclear arsenal.

The Syrian government has long expressed its willingness to give up its chemical weapons as part of a regional disarmament agreement as called for in U.N. Security Council resolution 687, which stated that Iraqi disarmament was the first step in establishing a regional disarmament regime.

When it had a non-permanent seat on the Security Council in December 2002, Syria introduced a draft resolution to this effect, but it was not tabled due to a threatened U.S. veto, he added.

Zunes said for more than 45 years, the Syrians have witnessed successive U.S. administrations provide massive amounts of armaments to a neighbouring country with a vastly superior military capability which has invaded, occupied, and colonised Syria’s Golan province in the southwest.

In 2007, the United States successfully pressured Israel to reject peace overtures from the Syrian government in which the Syrians offered to recognise Israel and agree to strict security guarantees in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory, he noted.

With President Barack Obama facing increasingly certain defeat in his quest for Congressional authorisation to carry out military strikes against Syria, the Russian government Monday appeared to offer the White House a way out of the crisis.

Seizing on what seemed to be an offhand remark by Secretary of State John Kerry during a London press conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pledged that Moscow would support any effort to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control and eventually destroy them.

Lavrov was meeting in the Russian capital with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallem, who immediately “welcome(d)” the idea.

The proposal, which in the course of the day was also embraced by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, appeared initially to provoke as much scepticism among administration officials here as it did when Kerry first raised the idea in response to a question of what Damascus could do to avoid military action.

“Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week – turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting,” Kerry replied. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”

After Lavrov’s endorsement, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf asserted that Kerry “was not making a proposal” but was instead offering a “rhetorical statement about a scenario that we think is highly unlikely.” She said Washington was prepared to take a “hard look” at the idea which, said, should be met with “serious, deep scepticism”.

But, by mid-afternoon, that scepticism appeared to turn more to hope as former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, emerging from a White House meeting with Obama himself, called the plan an “important step” in defusing the crisis.

In an interview aired on the Public Broadcasting System’s Newshour Monday evening, Obama also suggested Washington would take it seriously.

“(M)y intention throughout this process has been to ensure that the blatant use of chemical weapons that we saw doesn’t happen again,” he said. “If in fact there’s a way to accomplish that diplomatically, that is overwhelmingly my preference. And you know, I have instructed John Kerry to talk directly to the Russians and run this to ground.

“And if we can exhaust these diplomatic efforts and come up with a formula that gives the international community a verifiable, enforceable mechanism to deal with these chemical weapons in Syria, then I’m all for it.”

The day’s surprising turn of events came amidst growing indications that, absent some unanticipated move, Obama faced a major political defeat in Congress over his requested authorisation despite the support of the most of the Congressional leadership of both parties and an all-out lobbying effort by his administration, the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and prominent neo-conservatives and former senior officials of the George W. Bush administration.

As of Monday, Obama took personal leadership of the effort, taping interviews on virtually all of the major television network and cable news programmes, in addition to PBS, and preparing a major policy address to the nation Tuesday evening.

According to a number of published reports earlier Monday, a vote in the Democratic-led Senate, which could come as early as Thursday, was expected to be extremely close despite the apparent support of a majority of the Democratic caucus there.

But in the Republican-led House, the authorisation faced almost certain defeat with even a majority of Democrats considered likely to vote “no”, while opposition to the measure among Republicans, despite their leadership’s support, was believed to be much greater.

“If I were the president, I would withdraw my request for the authorisation at this particular point,” said Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern, a liberal Democrat who has generally – if somewhat reluctantly – supported Obama on foreign-policy issues, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” public affairs programme Sunday.

Congressional opposition is strongly bolstered by the latest polling that shows that, if anything, Obama’s case for attacking Syria has lost ground significantly among voters across the country over the past week.

According to a Pew Research Center/USA Today survey conducted Sep. 4-8 and released Monday, 63 percent of respondents said they oppose a strike – 15 percent more than a week ago. Of that 63 percent, 45 percent said they are “strongly oppose(d)” to military action.

Despite the enlistment last week of former senior Bush officials in the administration’s lobbying effort, the erosion of support among grassroots Republicans has been especially severe. Four in 10 self-identified Republicans said they opposed strikes in the earlier poll; as of Sunday, seven in 10 Republicans voiced opposition.

Opposition has also grown among the independents, according to survey, with two-thirds now opposed, up from half the weekend before.

A less detailed CNN/ORC poll conducted over the past weekend gained a somewhat more-favourable result for the administration, with 59 percent of respondents voicing opposition and 39 percent in favour. Only 28 percent of Pew respondents said they favoured airstrikes against Syria.

Moreover, 71 percent of the CNN respondents said Obama should not attack Syria if Congress fails to pass the authorisation. In the Pew poll, 61 percent of respondents said Congress – not Obama -should have the final say on whether to take military action.

If domestic support for strikes appeared to plunge, Obama was not doing much better on the international front.

He was embarrassed last week when only half of the leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) – five of which (the U.S., Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) have been aiding Syrian rebels for some time – meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia signed on to a statement expressing support for “efforts undertaken by the United States and other countries to reinforce the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons” although it not explicitly endorse military action.

On Monday, the White House announced that 14 other countries had signed on – far less than the “several dozen” that, according to unnamed administration officials and Congressional supporters, allegedly support U.S. military action. Of the 14, the only G20 member was Germany; the others included mainly Central European nations, the three Baltic states, Denmark, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Honduras.

In this context, the possibility that the U.S. and Russia, Assad’s most important international supporter, could agree on a plan that would satisfy U.S. demands to eliminate any possibility that the regime could use chemical weapons would appear to be particularly attractive to Obama.

Early indications suggest that the administration will, as Clinton argued, use the proposal’s timing to persuade reluctant lawmakers to pass the authorisation in order to maintain pressure on Moscow and Damascus to follow through.

“It could be used either way; it could take the steam out of the administration’s lobbying effort or give it a new argument for making military action appear more credible if they don’t co-operate,” one lobbyist opposed to military strikes told IPS.

The idea that Syria would give up its chemical weapons arsenal to avoid an attack was circulated quietly on Capitol Hill by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin last week in the form of an alternative resolution which demanded that Damascus sign and comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) within 45 days or face an attack.

Some lawmakers reportedly objected to the idea because it would implicitly put pressure on Israel, which signed the treaty in 1993 but never ratified it, making it, along with Syria, the two Koreas, Egypt, Angola, and Myanmar, one of seven non-member states worldwide.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The United Nations, which has remained deadlocked over Syria, is in danger of being craftily exploited to justify the impending air strike on Damascus.

The threat of double vetoes by Russia and China against an attack on Syria has shifted the focus to the U.N. team of inspectors whose report on the chemical weapons attack may be released either later this week or next week."The claim will be that the U.N. is involved and somehow that means it's a legal attack." -- Michael Ratner of the Centre for Constitutional Rights

But the conclusions of the report are predictable – within the team’s limited mandate, as laid out by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The team is expected to only confirm the use of chemical weapons in Syria and leave unanswered the more important question of who used those weapons.

The Syrian government and rebel forces are blaming each other, with no positive proof on either side.

But the administration of President Barack Obama has repeatedly said the U.N. evaluation is “irrelevant” – and it knows more about the chemical weapons attack than the United Nations does and hopes to.

Still, European governments, and particularly France, have said they would not endorse a military strike until the U.N. report is released. French President Francois Hollande was quoted as saying last week his government would not act militarily before the U.N. inspectors presented their findings on the Aug. 12 attack in Syria.

According to one published report, the U.N. findings “would enable European governments to tell their constituents that there has been U.N. involvement before military action, and it would not appear to tie the Americans’ hands.”

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS many of those governments prefer to support the United States and will use the “fig leaf of the U.N. inspections” and its conclusion – assuming it states chemical weapons are used – to give that support.

“The claim will be that the U.N. is involved and somehow that means it’s a legal attack. Nothing could be further from the truth or law,” he said.

Without Security Council approval, an attack violates the U.N. Charter and is utterly lawless.

“Let’s hope for once that governments, including my own, listen to people they purportedly represent. [That] would be a major breakthrough in the struggle for a more democratic world,” said Ratner, who is also president of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights.

He said most of Europe, particularly its population, like that of the United States is reluctant or opposed to bombing of Syria.

Meanwhile, reports surfaced Monday that Russia, backing a demand from the United States, was urging Syria to give up its chemical weapons and put them under international control and then destroy them.

Such a move could also possibly prevent a U.S. military attack on Syria.

“We have given our proposal to Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and are counting on a fast and, I hope, positive response,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters.

Asked for his comments, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters Monday, “I have already been considering certain proposals that I could make to the Security Council when I present the investigation team’s report.

“I am considering urging the Security Council to demand the immediate transfer of Syria’s chemical weapons and chemical precursor stocks to places inside Syria where they can be safely stored and destroyed.

“And I urge again [that] Syria should become party to the OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]”, which bans the production, use and distribution of chemical weapons, he added.

Pressed about a timeline for such a transfer, Ban said if and when Syria agrees to the proposal, “I am sure that the international community will [take] very swift action to make sure these chemical weapons stocks will be stored safely and will be destroyed. I do not have any doubt and worry about that.”

But first and foremost, he noted, Syria must agree positively to this.

Asked about the punishment for the use of chemical weapons, either by the Syrian government or the rebels, Ban said there will be an “accountability process” making sure that nobody commits such horrendous use of chemical weapons and gets away with it.

“So I believe that even with this, accountability should be pursued in accordance with what had happened, in accordance with the investigative team’s report,” Ban said.

Ratner told IPS it’s hard to believe people and governments are accepting anything the U.S. says on this topic.

“Even assuming the U.N. inspectors conclude chemical weapons were used on Aug. 21 – and we do not yet know – where is the proof that Assad ordered them used?” he said. So far, he noted, the U.S. has offered the world no proof – except what it calls “common sense”.

“So the U.S. and European countries should bomb another country and kill people based on common sense. Common sense makes no sense,” Ratner concluded.

Contrary to the general impression in Congress and the news media, the Syria chemical warfare intelligence summary released by the Barack Obama administration Aug. 30 did not represent an intelligence community assessment, an IPS analysis and interviews with former intelligence officials reveals.

The evidence indicates that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper culled intelligence analyses from various agencies and by the White House itself, but that the White House itself had the final say in the contents of the document.

Leading members of Congress to believe that the document was an intelligence community assessment and thus represents a credible picture of the intelligence on the alleged chemical attack of Aug. 21 has been a central element in the Obama administration’s case for war in Syria.

That part of the strategy, at least, has been successful. Despite strong opposition in Congress to the proposed military strike in Syria, no one in either chamber has yet challenged the administration’s characterisation of the intelligence. But the administration is vulnerable to the charge that it has put out an intelligence document that does not fully and accurately reflect the views of intelligence analysts.

Former intelligence officials told IPS that that the paper does not represent a genuine intelligence community assessment but rather one reflecting a predominantly Obama administration influence.

In essence, the White House selected those elements of the intelligence community assessments that supported the administration’s policy of planning a strike against the Syrian government force and omitted those that didn’t.

In a radical departure from normal practice involving summaries or excerpts of intelligence documents that are made public, the Syria chemical weapons intelligence summary document was not released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence but by the White House Office of the Press Secretary.

It was titled “Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013.” The first sentence begins, “The United States government assesses,” and the second sentence begins, “We assess”.

The introductory paragraph refers to the main body of the text as a summary of “the intelligence community’s analysis” of the issue, rather than as an “intelligence community assessment”, which would have been used had the entire intelligence community endorsed the document.

A former senior intelligence official who asked not to be identified told IPS in an e-mail Friday that the language used by the White House “means that this is not an intelligence community document”.

The former senior official, who held dozens of security classifications over a decades-long intelligence career, said he had “never seen a document about an international crisis at any classification described/slugged as a U.S. government assessment.”

The document further indicates that the administration “decided on a position and cherry-picked the intelligence to fit it,” he said. “The result is not a balanced assessment of the intelligence.”

Greg Thielmann, whose last position before retiring from the State Department was director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told IPS he has never seen a government document labeled “Government Assessment” either.

“If it’s an intelligence assessment,” Thielmann said, “why didn’t they label it as such?”

Former National Intelligence Officer Paul Pillar, who has participated in drafting national intelligence estimates, said the intelligence assessment summary released by the White House “is evidently an administration document, and the working master copy may have been in someone’s computer at the White House or National Security Council.”

Pillar suggested that senior intelligence officials might have signed off on the administration paper, but that the White House may have drafted its own paper to “avoid attention to analytic differences within the intelligence community.”

Comparable intelligence community assessments in the past, he observed – including the 2002 Iraq WMD estimate – include indications of differences in assessment among elements of the community.

An unnamed “senior administration official” briefing the news media on the intelligence paper on Aug. 30 said that the paper was “fully vetted within the intelligence community,” and that, ”All members of the intelligence community participated in its development.”

But that statement fell far short of asserting that all the elements of the intelligence community had approved the paper in question, or even that it had gone through anything resembling consultations between the primary drafters and other analysts, and opportunities for agencies to register dissent that typically accompany intelligence community assessments.

The same “senior administration official” indicated that DNI Clapper had “approved” submissions from various agencies for what the official called “the process”. The anonymous speaker did not explain further to journalists what that process preceding the issuance of the White House paper had involved.

However, an Associated Press story on Aug. 29 referred to “a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence outlining the evidence against Syria”, citing two intelligence officials and two other administration officials as sources.

That article suggests that the administration had originally planned for the report on intelligence to be issued by Clapper rather than the White House, apparently after reaching agreement with the White House on the contents of the paper.

But Clapper’s name was not on the final document issued by the White House, and the document is nowhere to be found on the ODNI website. All previous intelligence community assessments were posted on that site.

The issuance of the document by the White House rather than by Clapper, as had been apparently planned, points to a refusal by Clapper to put his name on the document as revised by the White House.

Clapper’s refusal to endorse it – presumably because it was too obviously an exercise in “cherry picking” intelligence to support a decision for war – would explain why the document had to be issued by the White House.

Efforts by IPS to get a comment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence suggest strongly that Clapper is embarrassed by the way the Obama White House misrepresented the Aug. 30 document.

An e-mail query by IPS to the media relations staff of ODNI requesting clarification of the status of the Aug. 30 document in relation to the intelligence community was never answered.

In follow-up phone calls, ODNI personnel said someone would respond to the query. After failing to respond for two days, despite promising that someone would call back, however, ODNI’s media relations office apparently decided to refuse any further contact with IPS on the subject.

A clear indication that the White House, rather than Clapper, had the final say on the content of the document is that it includes a statement that a “preliminary U.S. government assessment determined that 1,429 people were killed in the chemical weapons attack, including at least 426 children.”

That figure, for which no source was indicated, was several times larger than the estimates given by British and French intelligence.

The document issued by the White House cites intelligence that is either obviously ambiguous at best or is of doubtful authenticity, or both, as firm evidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack.

It claims that Syrian chemical weapons specialists were preparing for such an attack merely on the basis of signals intelligence indicating the presence of one or more individuals in a particular location. The same intelligence had been regarded prior to Aug. 21 as indicating nothing out of the ordinary, as was reported by CBS news Aug. 23.

The paper also cites a purported intercept by U.S intelligence of conversations between Syrian officials in which a “senior official” supposedly “confirmed” that the government had carried out the chemical weapons attack.

But the evidence appears to indicate that the alleged intercept was actually passed on to the United States by Israeli intelligence. U.S. intelligence officials have long been doubtful about intelligence from Israeli sources that is clearly in line with Israeli interests.

Opponents of the proposed U.S. strike against Syria could argue that the Obama administration’s presentation of the intelligence supporting war is far more politicised than the flawed 2002 Iraq WMD estimate that the George W. Bush administration cited as part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

*The story moved on Sep. 9, 2013, incorrectly attributed the pull quote to Greg Thielmann, when in fact it is attributable to the unnamed former senior intelligence official cited earlier in the story.

World leaders from G20 are meeting in St Petersburg, Russia, amid sharp differences over possible U.S. military action against Syria in response to what the U.S. administration calls a deadly chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government.

Thursday’s summit comes hours after a U.S. Senate panel voted to give President Barack Obama authority to use military force against Syria – the first time lawmakers in that country have voted to allow military action since the October 2002 vote authorising the invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. and Russia, which is a key Syrian ally, remain at odds as Obama has tried to build his case for military action. The U.S. president has vowed to continue to try to persuade his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, of the need for punitive strikes against President Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons, when the two meet in St Petersburg.

As Putin opened the summit, he spoke exclusively about the global economic crisis, which forms the primary agenda of the summit, stressing the need for coordinated international policy-making in order to combat continuing volatility in economic markets.

He suggested that world leaders discuss the subject of Syria “during dinner” on Thursday night, so as not to take away from the summit’s primary economic agenda.

Kerry ‘a liar’

Earlier, Putin had again questioned Western evidence justifying a military strike against Syria, accusing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry outright of lying when, in urging Congress to approve strikes, he played down the role of al-Qaeda in the rebel forces.

“Al-Qaeda units are the main military echelon, and they know this,” Putin said. “He is lying and knows he is lying. It’s sad.”

Putin said U.S. congressional approval without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be an act of aggression. He also told The Associated Press this week that he “does not exclude” supporting U.N. action – if it is proven that the Syrian government used poison gas on its own people.

Obama had previously stated that he was prepared to bypass the U.N. Security Council on the issue. But he put the matter to a Congressional vote. Members of the full U.S. Senate are due to debate the matter next week.

The conflict in Syria, which began with a popular uprising in March 2011, has been stalemated, and it is not clear if U.S. military strikes over the government’s alleged chemical weapons use would change that. Obama has said he seeks limited pinpoint action to deter future chemical attacks, not regime change.

Economic and nuclear risks

Meanwhile, China has warned other world powers of global economic risks following the potential U.S. strikes on Syria.

Speaking in St Petersburg ahead of the G20 summit on Thursday, Chinese Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said such “military action would definitely have a negative impact on the global economy, especially on the oil price”.

He cited estimates that a 10 dollar rise in oil prices could push down global growth by 0.25 percent.

He urged a negotiated U.N. solution to the standoff over allegations that Syria’s government used chemical weapons against its own people, expressing hope that “the world economic balance will become more stable rather than more complex and more challenging.”

Russia has also issued a warning that U.S. strikes on Syria’s atomic facilities might result in a nuclear catastrophe and is urging the U.N. to present a risk analysis of such a scenario. The issue will be brought up at a meeting of the 35-nation IAEA board next week, the Interfax news agency reported.

Little international support

Obama has been lobbying for international and domestic support for punishing Assad’s regime, which the U.S. says fired rockets loaded with the nerve agent sarin on rebel-held areas near Damascus before dawn on Aug. 21, killing hundreds of civilians.

So far, however, he has won little international backing for action. The U.S. has France’s support for military action in Syria. But several other G20 powers, including China and Germany, have firmly voiced their opposition.

Ben Rhodes, a senior Obama national security aide, said that the U.S. would use the summit in St Petersburg to “explain our current thinking” to allies and partners and explore what type of “political and diplomatic support they may express for our efforts to hold Syrian regime accountable”.

With pressure mounting on the G20 to make a decision regarding the conflict, the U.N. announced on Thursday that Lakhdar Brahimi, its special envoy to Syria, was travelling to St Petersburg to make a push for peace talks.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

With Congress still deliberating over Barack Obama’s request for authorisation to take military action against Syria, the powerful Israel lobby here has taken the lead in pressing the president’s case.

But in addition to echoing the administration’s view that Damascus’ alleged violations of international norms against the use of chemical weapons must be punished, pro-Israel groups are  focusing their appeals at least as much, if not more, on stopping what they say is Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme.

“The Syria issue needs to be largely understood through the context of Iran,” said Michael Makovsky, the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), as he unveiled his organisation’s latest report, “Strategy to Prevent a Nuclear Iran,” here Wednesday.

“Stopping a nuclear-capable Iran is the gravest, most pressing national security threat facing the United States today,” he added, quoting from the introduction of the report, the product of a task force that included several former George W. Bush administration officials, several retired flag officers, and Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s top adviser on Iran for most of his first term.

“(I)f there isn’t a [Congressional] response to the crossing of the red line [against the use of chemical weapons], the Iranians will draw the lesson that when we create red lines, we don’t mean it,” Ross said.

“So when the administration makes it clear that prevention [of Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon] is the objective, [the failure to act on Syria] will make it look more rhetorical than real,” according to Ross, who currently serves as counsellor to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank.

“So, I think there’s a direct relationship between what’s going on on Syria and how the Iranians would perceive it.”

Those warnings came as the administration appeared to make progress on Capitol Hill Wednesday in rallying Congress behind military action.

In a 10-7 vote, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution authorising Obama to conduct military strikes against Syria. Two Democrats and five Republicans, including presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, opposed the resolution. Another Democrat abstained.

To rally a majority, the resolution’s authors limited the authorisation to 60 days – with a possible 30-day extension – and banned the use of ground forces in Syria “for the purpose of combat operations”.

But they also appeased hawkish forces, led by Republican Sen. John McCain, by adding a statement that any action should aim to “change the momentum on the battlefield” in favour of the rebels in order to enhance the chances of a negotiated settlement to the two-year-old civil war. The resolution, which will go to the floor next week, also urged an increase in U.S. military aid to the rebels.

The draft resolution submitted by the White House had called for a “limited” action to prevent the use or proliferation of chemical weapons in Syria.

While some administration officials initially predicted a campaign of only two or three days of cruise-missile strikes that would not necessarily affect the current balance of power in the war, stronger action now appears more likely unless the Republican-led House of Representatives votes no or places more limits on its version of the authorisation when it meets next week.

The administration’s efforts to gain authorisation have been significantly bolstered by the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had maintained a public silence on the issue. However, some of its more important institutions had been quietly pressing both the administration and lawmakers for a more aggressive policy toward Damascus for weeks, even before the alleged Aug. 21 chemical attack that killed more than 1,400 people, according to the White House.

On Tuesday, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the lobby’s most powerful group, came out strongly in support of the authorisation, as did the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organisations and the Anti-Defamation League.

They were followed by, among others, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a group dominated by strongly anti-Obama wealthy donors who have provided millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and are closely associated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party.

While most of the group echoed the administration’s position that the use of chemical weapons must be punished, they also stressed that Washington’s credibility regarding its enforcement of “red lines” was at stake, particularly with respect to Iran.

“This critical decision comes at a time when Iran is racing toward obtaining nuclear capability,” AIPAC stressed in its endorsement.

“Failure to approve this resolution would weaken our country’s credibility to prevent the use and proliferation of unconventional weapons and thereby greatly endanger our country’s security and interests and those of our regional allies.”

That was very much the message conveyed by the new JINSA report and its two co-chairs, Ross and Bush’s former undersecretary of defence for policy, Eric Edelman, among other task force members present for the report’s release.

“I do think it’s important …for the credibility of the president’s statements [to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon] with regard to Iran that the Congress authorise the use of force,” Edelman said.

“Unless Iran believes there is a credible military option underpinning the willingness to negotiate, there will not be a successful negotiation,” he added in reference to the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) talks with Iran that are considered likely to resume later this month.

JINSA’s task force consists largely of members of a previous task force that issued a series of very hawkish reports on Iran for the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) over the past five years.

It said Washington’s explicit policy objective should be “to render Iran unable to develop a nuclear weapons capability” which it defined as the point at which Iran could “manufacture fissile material for a nuclear device in less time than would be required to detect and respond to such activity.” According to some experts, that threshold is likely to be reached by mid-2014.

With the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president, it said, Washington should “try to make diplomacy work,” although the task force failed to reach agreement on what terms would be acceptable.

While some members of the task force, including Ross, said the U.S. should offer a deal that would permit Iran to enrich uranium up to five percent and limit its stockpile of enriched uranium subject to a strict inspections regime, others said Iran should not be permitted any enrichment capability.

In the meantime, the task force argued against recent calls by think tanks and Iran experts for Washington to make goodwill gestures, such as recognising Iran’s right to enrich or “preemptively signal a willingness to lift sanctions during talks”.

On the contrary, the report urges increasing the pressure on Iran by imposing new sanctions and preparing and developing “a very real military strike capability against Iran’s nuclear and strategic facilities, and an array of opportunities for pursuing political warfare against the Iranian regime.”

With respect to the former, Ross suggested “we should have a demonstration [of a 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster bomb’], put it on YouTube, let it go viral, let the Iranians see it; this is a capability that was developed basically to deal with them…”

“I still think at this point, given where we are in Syria, the most important thing right now is to act on the resolution and do it in a way that is seen as being effective and meaningful and serious,” he added.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The United States, which is preparing to launch a military strike on Syria, is being cautioned by several former world leaders and Nobel Peace laureates to seek a political solution to the ongoing crisis – and forego armed intervention in the beleaguered Middle Eastern nation.

Former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan argues that there is “no military solution” to the crisis in Syria. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who described the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as “illegal” and a violation of the U.N. charter, unequivocally declared Wednesday there is no military solution to the crisis in Syria.

Six Nobel Peace laureates, speaking on behalf of the Nobel Women’s Initiative (NWI), called upon the United States and its allies to use the international legal system, primarily the International Criminal Court (ICC), to respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

At the same time, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said if the United States goes ahead with the military attack, it will have taken such action for reasons largely divorced from the interests of the Syrian people.

“The administration has cited the need to punish, deter and prevent use of chemical weapons – a defensible goal, though Syrians have suffered from far deadlier mass atrocities during the course of the conflict without this prompting much collective action in their defence,” said ICG.

Even as the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has decided to bypass the Security Council, Annan said the 15-member U.N. body has “a moral responsibility to find common ground, putting the well-being of the Syrian people at the forefront of its decisions.”

This is the only way, he said, to end the violence and achieve a peaceful settlement based on an inclusive political process.

But the Security Council remains deadlocked, with Russia and China threatening to veto any resolution endorsing military action against Syria.

Speaking on behalf of the 11-member group called ‘The Elders’, Annan said: “We urge all member states to await the report of the U.N. inspectors on the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the deliberations of the Security Council before drawing conclusions and deciding on the course of action.”

The Elders, founded in 2007 by former South African President Nelson Mandela and currently chaired by Annan, is a group that includes former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former Irish President Mary Robinson and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.

In a statement released Wednesday, Annan said the Elders are appalled by the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.

“We strongly condemn the use of such weapons as inhumane and criminal. Those responsible must be held accountable both individually and collectively,” the statement read.

The group says U.N. inspectors should determine the facts and the United States should await their report to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. There is no timeline for the release of the report, which focuses primarily on the chemical arms attack in Syria on Aug. 21.

The United States says it has evidence to prove that Syrian security forces were responsible for the attack but President Bashar al-Assad has accused rebel forces of using weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

The Syrian conflict has raged for two and a half years with over 100,000 people killed, many thousands injured, two million refugees and over four million people internally displaced within Syria.

“There is no military solution to this conflict. Therefore every effort must be made to stop further bloodshed and to re-energise the political process to put an end to the conflict that has devastated and brutalised Syria,” Annan said.

The Nobel laureates, including Jody Williams (U.S.), Shirin Ebadi (Iran), Tawakkol Karman (Yemen), Mairead Maguire (Ireland), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia) and Rigoberta Menchu Tum (Guatemala), are asking the U.N. Security Council to refer the case of the chemical weapons attack to the ICC.

“We hope that U.S. legislators, like their British counterparts, will recognize that there is no public appetite to resolve this problem through more bombs and more violence,” said Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace prize in 1997 for her work against the use of anti-personnel landmines.

“Americans know that any intervention, far from being a strategic move, will only lead to more loss of lives and even possibly to retaliation against Americans,” she added.

Last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron lost a vote – on military intervention in Syria – in the House of Commons.

The laureates say the use of chemical weapons is a “war crime that should be addressed by the international legal system created precisely for such events”.

They are urging the international community to convene the Syria Peace Conference, known as Geneva II, as one of the many nonviolent measures available to the international community help resolve Syria’s conflict and to include women in the peace process.

President Barack Obama meets with his National Security Staff to discuss the situation in Syria, in the Situation Room of the White House, Aug. 30, 2013. From left at the table: National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice; Attorney General Eric Holder; Secretary of State John Kerry; and Vice President Joe Biden. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

In an important boost for President Barack Obama, two key Republicans and the Israel’s lobby’s two most influential groups Tuesday announced their support for a proposed Congressional resolution authorising limited military strikes against Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons.

“I believe that my colleagues should support this call for action,” said Rep. John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, after emerging from a White House meeting with Obama. The Republican majority leader, Eric Cantor, who also took part in the meeting, echoed his endorsement.

Several hours later, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which advertises itself as “the most influential foreign policy lobbying organisation on Capitol Hill”, came out with its own endorsement, implicitly linking military action to past pledges by Obama to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons, by military means if necessary.

“This is a critical moment when America must …send a message of resolve to Iran and Hezbollah – both of whom have provided direct and extensive military support to [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad. The Syrian regime and its Iranian ally have repeatedly demonstrated that they will not respect civilized norms,” the group said.

“That is why America must act, and why we must prevent further proliferation of unconventional weapons in this region,” it added.

A key Jewish group, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, also came out in favour of military action based on much the same argument.

Referring to the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against an opposition stronghold outside Damascus that the administration has said killed more than 1,400 people, the group declared, “Those who perpetuate such acts of wanton murder must know that they can not do with impunity.

“Those who possess or seek weapons of mass destruction, particularly Iran and Hezbollah, must see that there is accountability,” according to the Conference. “Failing to take action would damage the credibility of the U.S. and negative impact the effort to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capacity.”

The endorsements came on the second day of what some administration officials called a “full-court press” to persuade lawmakers to back the resolution when Congress officially returns from its August recess next week. They do not guarantee its passage, but are seen as key milestones along the way.

They marked the latest developments following Obama’s surprise decision this past weekend to seek authorisation to carry out limited strikes against Syria – an action which most observers had expected would have taken place by now – from Congress.

That decision was bitterly denounced by neo-conservatives and other hawks, such as Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham, as an abdication of leadership and the latest in what they regard as a disastrous series of moves by Obama to extricate the U.S. from the Middle East.

It followed the unexpected defeat in the British House of Commons last Thursday of a preliminary motion by Prime Minister David Cameron to authorise military action against Syria.

The vote, which effectively deprived Washington of its most loyal military ally, stunned the administration. With many lawmakers from both sides of the aisle here also pressing for a vote, Obama, who had seemed increasingly determined in the preceding days to carry out cruise-missile strikes from warships in the eastern Mediterranean as early as last weekend, apparently decided to yield to their demands.

Still, the White House has said Obama retains the authority as commander-in-chief to go ahead without Congress’ approval.

Obama announced his decision in a televised address Saturday and subsequently submitted a draft Authorisation to Use Military Force (AUMF) which will serve as the basis for the Congressional debate.

If approved in its present form, it would give Obama the authority to use the military “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria” in order to “prevent or deter” their “use or proliferation” and “protect the United States and its allies and partners against the threat posed by such weapons.”

Hawks, the most visible of whom have been McCain and Graham, initially said they could not support the resolution because it was too limited in purpose and did not appear to be “part of an overall strategy that can change the momentum on the battlefield, achieve the President’s stated goal of Assad’s removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict.”

After meeting with Obama at the White House Monday, however, the two men came out in support of the resolution both because, in McCain’s words, a no vote would be “catastrophic” for Washington’s international credibility and because of their understanding that the president was committed to “very serious’ strikes against Syria beyond the “shot across the bow” that he had spoken of earlier in the week.

In addition, they suggested that Obama had assured them that Washington will step up military aid to Syrian rebels, something which he has long been reluctant to do.

But appeasing the hawks may make it more difficult to overcome the concerns of the anti-war faction in his own party, as well as the embryonic coalition of libertarians, neo-isolationists, and fiscal conservatives among Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives whose members are traditionally more sceptical of foreign entanglements than the Senate where Obama should have an easier ride.

While the top two House Democrats have endorsed the proposed resolution, others have said they will support it only if it is drawn more narrowly, such as explicitly excluding the use of ground troops and setting limits on its duration in time and its geographical scope to within Syria’s borders. Of course, if Obama agrees to such limits, he risks losing support from the hawks.

As for the Republicans, Boehner and Cantor are considered relatively weak leaders who have repeatedly failed to keep their caucus in line on many issues. Newer members, many of whom associate themselves with the “Tea Party” movement and are reflexively anti-Obama, been particularly unruly.

Moreover, with public opinion among both Democrats and Republicans – although Republicans are somewhat more evenly split – running against military action, Obama could face a difficult climb in getting the House behind him. A Pew Research Centre poll conducted over the weekend found 48 percent of respondents opposed to airstrikes on Syria, while 29 percent approved.

While only 33 percent of respondents said they thought such strikes would be effective in deterring the use of chemical weapons, 74 percent said they thought a regional backlash against the U.S. was likely to occur if the attacks took place, and 61 percent said strikes would likely lead to a long-term military commitment.

Still, active lobbying by AIPAC and the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had publicly maintained a discreet silence about how Washington should react to the alleged chemical attacks, could prove decisive to the outcome in Congress.

The New York Times this weekend called AIPAC “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” whose unquestioned influence was needed by the administration to prevail. (Significantly, the Times omitted the quote in updated online versions of the story.)

While the group argued in a reference to the alleged chemical-weapons attack that “barbarism on a mass scale must not be given a free pass,” it suggested that Iran and its nuclear programme – which successive Israeli governments have denounced as the number one threat – loomed as large or larger in considering how to respond.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses a Sep. 3, 2013 press conference on the latest developments related to the crisis in Syria. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 3 2013 (IPS)

When Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was South Korea’s foreign minister during 2004-2006, his answers to reporters were so predictably evasive the press corps in Seoul affectionately dubbed him “the slippery eel”.

Even at the United Nations, where he succeeded Kofi Annan as U.N. chief in 2007, Ban has continued to cultivate the art of dodging questions – notably during the current Syrian crisis where the United States has threatened to attack Syria without Security Council authorisation.

At a press conference Tuesday, Ban continued to reiterate the importance of both the U.N. charter and the Security Council, the only international body with the power to declare war and peace.

But he refused to answer a pointed question about whether a U.S. attack on Syria without Security Council endorsement would be an “illegal” act committed by the administration of President Barack Obama.

Ban would only say, “I have taken note of President Obama’s statement. And I appreciate his efforts to have his future course of action based on the broad opinions of American people, particularly the Congress, and I hope this process will have a good result.”

In contrast, his predecessor Kofi Annan of Ghana went out on a limb describing the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as “illegal” and in “violation of the U.N. charter” – later paying a heavy political price for his outspokenness.

Ban spoke to reporters Tuesday hours before his departure to the summit meeting of the G20 industrialised countries, scheduled to take place Thursday in St. Petersburg, Russia.

He said the G20 summit is meant to focus on economic issues, including the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and sustainable development.

“But I will use the opportunity of this gathering to engage with world leaders on this [Syrian] tragedy, including humanitarian assistance for the more than two million refugees and 4.2 million Syrians who have been displaced internally. It is imperative to end this war,” he said.

Since the alleged poison gas attacks in Syria last month, and the subsequent threat of a U.S. military strike on Damascus, Ban has continued to dwell on the primacy of the Security Council.

“As I have repeatedly said,” he told reporters Tuesday, “the Security Council has primary responsibility for international peace and security.”

He said any future course of action – depending upon the outcome of the scientific analysis by a U.N. team on the use of chemical weapons – will have to be considered by the Security Council for action.

“That’s my appeal that everything should be handled within the framework of the United Nations Charter,” Ban stressed.

He also pointed out the use of force is lawful only when in the exercise of self-defence, in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter and/or when the Security Council approves such action.

“That is the firm principle of the United Nations,” he said – still avoiding the two politically-sensitive words: “illegal” and “violation”.

Since the poison gas attacks, Ban has briefed the five permanent (P5) members of the Security Council – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – about the status of the U.N. team which was sent to investigate whether or not chemical weapons were used.

The team does not have a mandate to identify who may have used such weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) – whether the Syrian security forces or the rebels battling to oust the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“I have called for the U.N. mission to be given every opportunity to complete its task. The United Nations investigation is uniquely placed to independently establish the facts in an objective and impartial manner,” Ban said.

Its work will be conducted strictly according to internationally recognised standards, he added.

The team has worked around the clock following its return from Syria to prepare the materials it gathered for analysis.

“I am pleased to announce that all biomedical and environmental samples will have arrived at the designated laboratories [all of them in Europe] by tomorrow,” Ban said, although he did not provide a deadline as to when the results would be ready.

“We are doing our utmost to expedite the process. At the same time, I need to stress the importance of not jeopardising the scientific timelines required for accurate analysis.”

As soon as the team has arrived at findings, Ban said, he will “promptly report” the results to member states and to the Security Council.

After the submission of the report, the team will return to Syria to complete its second investigation of other alleged attacks in Syria – and then to prepare its final report.

“As I have stressed repeatedly, if confirmed, any use of chemical weapons by anyone under any circumstances would be a serious violation of international law and an outrageous war crime,” Ban said.

In a statement last week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said rather bluntly: “The U.N. cannot tell anything… we don’t already know.”

President Bashar al-Assad greets people from almost every street in the areas of Damascus that are under his control. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
ERBIL, Iraqi Kurdistan , Sep 3 2013 (IPS)

“Life is almost normal in the centre of Damascus,” local resident Hisham says from the predominantly Christian neighbourhood of Bab Touma. “Only the occasional noise of artillery on the outskirts reminds me that we are at war.”

The sound of artillery is now normal in Damascus. Hisham tells IPS on the phone from Damscus of the constant jams “due to the tight security measures” as well as increases in the price of food and fuel. But shops are still well stocked in his district, he says. This is an area where President Bashar al-Assad and his late father and former President Hafez al-Assad still fight for hegemony, which is depicted in street murals, on car windshields and even as souvenirs."Why has the West closed its eyes to the atrocities suffered by the Syrian people as a whole until now?” -- Khyder, a resident from the district of Mezzeh in central Damascus

“I feel like I’m living in some kind of golden cage: I go to the gym every day after work, I hang out with friends in the same places… But I know that just a mile away people struggle to survive in the worst conditions.” Like many in Damascus Hisham gave only his first name due to security concerns.

After a couple of years of war in Syria, downtown Damascus looks very much like Baghdad. The city centre is surrounded by a ring of concrete blocks guarded by tight security to protect Assad’s city strongholds from other areas that are divided, or already under control of the armed opposition.

The atmosphere is a good deal gloomier after the alleged chemical attack on Aug. 21 on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, and there have been warnings of missile strikes.

Last Saturday, U.S. President Barack Obama talked about a limited but strong operation to deter a future chemical attack. The American Congress is due to convene on Sep. 9 to discuss this.

Aram, a Bab Touma resident in his 30s, cannot hide his concern.

“I don’t support the attack and I’m not afraid of American bombs. I only fear they could pave the way to all the terrorists that are today trying to destroy our country.”

Today no one denies the fact that since the beginning of the uprising in March 2011, the Syrian opposition has been backed by numerous armed groups, many of which pay allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Salim Muslim, co-president of the Democratic Union Party, the dominant party among Syrian Kurds, claims that such alliances have already taken their toll.

“Today we cannot say that Assad is stronger, it’s simply that, after two-and-a-half years, the opposition is weaker. It is fragmented in a myriad of different branches with support from both outside and inside Syria [and is] diminishing by the day.

“The weakness of the Free Syrian Army makes it difficult for them to distance themselves from Islamic radicals because the latter have more military power.”

The situation in Saida Zainb, a working class suburb south of Damascus, hardly resembles that in Bab Touma. The area is a battleground between the government and the opposition. Many of its buildings have collapsed as a result of heavy shelling.

Hani Hosam, who openly supports the Syrian insurgents, says shops and stalls are being attacked by Assad loyalists in the district. Power cuts here are common, and supplies scarce.

Hosam doubts that there will be an intervention.

“An eventual attack will not favour any of the foreign countries’ interests. It will only bring destruction to the Syrian people,” Hosam told IPS on Skype. “The situation on the ground is very complex, and we badly need a peaceful solution.”

In Jaramana in east Damascus, another restive district, Naziha does not agree.

“The U.S. will attack because they need to fulfil their plan to control the region,” says Naziha, a Druze. She says the situation in her district is “not too bad.”

Naziha says she has supported the uprising since March 2011 but she fears the destruction an intervention would bring. Besides, she is not comfortable with Washington’s alleged support.

“We have to be careful. Even if the opposition ever manages to take control of the country, the United States will always try to control us.”

From the relatively calm district of Mezzeh in central Damascus, Khyder complains that the chemical attack has caught the attention of the international community, as al-Qaeda continues killing Kurdish civilians and committing all kinds of atrocities against Syrian Kurds.

Over the last few weeks, the predominantly Kurdish northeast is seeing fierce clashes between groups linked to al-Qaeda and Kurdish militiamen who have so far not taken sides either with Assad or the insurgents.

“Why has the West closed its eyes to the atrocities suffered by the Syrian people as a whole until now?” says Khyder. “Do Kurds, or anyone else, need to get gassed with chemicals to force an intervention?”

Khyder says it might already be “too late” for any foreign intervention. Ilya Topper, an Istanbul-based Middle East analyst, concurs.

“If there was a need for an attack it should have been conducted two years ago. At that time, the fall of Assad would not have affected the structure of Syria, the country would have maintained its Constitution and it could have become the first secular and more or less democratic republic in the so-called Arab world,” Topper tells IPS.

“Any attack meant to overthrow the regime and open the way for a military victory of the rebels will turn Syria into a theocracy ruled by clerics, similar to Iran. The same Iran that supports Assad so strongly.”

Portraits of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Credit: james_gordon_losangeles/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama indicated Friday he would soon conduct what he called “very limited” military action against Syria to punish its alleged use of chemical weapons which, according to the White House, killed more than 1,400 people in several Damascus suburbs last week.

At a brief press appearance, Obama insisted that he still was consulting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and foreign leaders and had not yet made a “final decision about various actions that might be taken” to enforce the international norm against the use of chemical weapons. The options he was considering “would be very limited and would not involve a long-term commitment or a major operation,” he said, and would “in no event…involve boots on the ground.”

“But we are looking at the possibility of a limited, narrow act that would help make sure that not only Syria, but others around the world, understands that the international community cares about maintaining this chemical weapons ban and norm,” he said, stressing that U.S. “national security interests” were at stake.

Obama spoke shortly after his secretary of state, John Kerry, read a lengthy statement summarising the unclassified evidence about the alleged attack and the Syrian government’s responsibility for it and stressing the importance of Washington and the world’s reaction.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons not only threatens international arms-limitations accords and potentially the security of neighbouring countries, notably Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Kerry, but it also “matters deeply to the credibility and the future interests of the United States of America and our allies.”

“It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk,” he said, explicitly citing Iran, Hezbollah and Iran.

“It is about whether Iran, which itself has been a victim of chemical weapons attacks, will now feel emboldened in the absence of action to obtain nuclear weapons. It is about Hezbollah, and North Korea, and every terrorist group or dictator that might ever again contemplate the use of weapons of mass destruction.”

As Kerry was speaking, the White House issued a four-page briefing paper apparently cleared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) about the alleged Aug. 21 attack. It concluded “with high confidence” – one level short of “confirmation” – that the Syrian government was responsible and that it was “highly unlikely” that opposition forces could have carried it out.

The paper said U.S. intelligence had intercepted communications involving a senior official who confirmed the regime had used chemical weapons and was concerned with the U.N. inspectors in the country at the time finding evidence. It also charged that in subsequent days Syrian artillery greatly intensified its shelling of the affected neighbourhood in an effort to cover up the evidence.

The paper, which was based on “human, signals, and geo-spatial intelligence, as well as a significant body of open source reporting”, including 100 videos, made what it called a “preliminary” assessment of 1,429 people killed in the attack, including at least 426 children.

Friday’s developments followed multiple setbacks to Obama’s efforts to rally support here and overseas for any military action he may undertake and which some observers believe could come as soon as Saturday, when U.N. inspectors are expected to leave Syria and report back to the world body.

While the Arab League earlier this week denounced Syria for the alleged attack, it did not endorse military reprisals, calling instead for the “Syrian regime [to be held] fully responsible.”

And, in a vote Thursday evening that stunned the administration, the British Parliament rejected a watered-down motion by Prime Minister David Cameron calling for consideration of international military action on humanitarian grounds in response to the chemical attack.

According to commentators, the vote – which means that, for the first time in the post-Cold War era, Britain is unlikely to join the U.S. as part of a military “coalition of the willing” – was attributed in large part to the legacy of distrust, especially about Washington’s misuse of intelligence, left by the George W. Bush administration in its drive to war in Iraq ten years ago.

That leaves France and Turkey as the only U.S. allies that have said they are willing to take action along with Washington, although some U.S. officials said Friday they believed more countries would join.

Back home, meanwhile, lawmakers, including some who were briefed by top administration officials in a 90-minute telephone conference call Thursday evening, appeared deeply divided both on the strategic wisdom of the kind of “limited” attack that Obama appears to be planning for and on whether he should be required to seek Congressional authorisation before an attack takes place.

More than 160 members have signed letters calling for Obama to ask Congress for authorisation. Particularly notable were statements issued over the past two days by the far-right senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, opposing any military action due to the “financial crisis in our military”.

Democrats have also voiced concern that even the “very limited” actions Obama is considering – reportedly “stand-off” strikes by ship-based cruise missiles against selected military targets – could create a “slippery slope” toward greater involvement in Syria’s civil war, particularly if Assad or his allies retaliate in some way, either by escalating the war or striking out against possible targets in other countries, notably Lebanon or Iraq both of which have seen an upswing in sectarian violence.

Still, faced with the shocking videos of the aftermath of last week’s alleged attack, an otherwise war-weary public appeared to be moving more in favour of military action, so long as it was indeed limited. Thirty-one percent of respondents in a poll taken earlier this week agreed with the proposition that the U.S. has a responsibility to prevent Syria from using chemical weapons.

In an NBC poll released Friday, 42 percent said the United States should take military actions against Syria’s government if it used chemical weapons against its citizens, while 50 percent said it should not. But when asked if the military action was limited to air strikes by cruise missiles against Syrian military units and infrastructure used for chemical warfare, 50 percent agreed, while 44 percent disagreed. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said Obama should be required to gain Congressional approval before taking military action.

In his remarks, Obama stressed both his understanding for what he called a “certain suspicion of any military action post-Iraq”.

“My preference obviously would have been that the international community already acted forcefully,” he said. “But what we have seen so far at least is an incapacity at this point for the [U.N.] Security Council to move forward in the face of a clear violation of international norms.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly said that the Syrian crisis can be solved only politically. Credit: IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

If and when the United States launches a military attack on Syria, one of the biggest political losers would be the United Nations.

The administration of President Barack Obama will not only bypass the Security Council, the only body mandated to declare war and peace, but also rebuff Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has repeatedly said the Syrian crisis can be resolved only politically, not militarily, even as he continues to underscore the importance of the U.N. charter.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters Friday, “We believe in the United Nations,” but still complained the U.N. investigative team in Syria is not mandated to confirm who used the chemical weapons, only whether or not they were used.

“The U.N. cannot tell anything…we don’t already know,” Kerry added.

U.N. spokesperson Martin Nesiry told reporters Friday the focus is on completing the analysis of the incident of Aug. 21.

“Everybody concerned, including the Syrian authorities, agreed that this should be a priority, that there should be the focus on this, but I have just made clear that the team will be returning to continue its work on those other incidents to be able to complete a final report.”"If [the ICC] decided that crimes against humanity had been committed, the entire political landscape would change."
-- Jonathan Granoff

The military attack on Syria will also prove once again the ineffectiveness and irrelevance of the 15-member Security Council, which has remained deadlocked because of threatened vetoes by Russia and China, who have refused to endorse the impending U.S. invasion.

But the council, the most powerful organ in the world body, could have still played a relatively significant role by urging the International Criminal Court (ICC) to move against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, says Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute.

“There would be a different political dynamic if the ICC were to determine that sufficient evidence for a prosecution exists,” he added.

“If it decided that crimes against humanity had been committed, the entire political landscape would change,” said Granoff, who is also an adjunct professor in international law at the Widener University School of Law.

He told IPS the use of chemical weapons is a war crime within the terms of the ICC Statute only if they are used in an international armed conflict, which the conflict in Syria is not. However, their use is illegal as a war crime if intentionally directed against a civilian population in a non-international armed conflict.

Such a crime can be prosecuted by the ICC, said Granoff.

Syria is not a member of the ICC nor is it a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), but for the ICC to formally investigate allegations of criminal conduct, such as mass indiscriminate killings or the use of chemical weapons, the Security Council could “refer” Syria, or the rebels, or both, to the Court.

References by the Security Council to the court have been made in the recent past – including Darfur, Sudan in 2005, and Libya in 2011.

Frank Jannuzi, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA, believes the best course of action would be for the United Nations to complete its investigation into this latest outrage and for the Security Council to refer all evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity from this and other incidents to the ICC.

“Those responsible must be brought to justice. The walls of impunity must come down,” he said.

It is also not too late for the Security Council to consider other measures, including targeted economic sanctions and the deployment of international human rights monitors, to reduce the ripping apart of families and the bloodshed of this protracted conflict.

Targeted sanctions (namely a freeze on the assets of President Bashar al-Assad and others who may be involved in ordering or perpetrating crimes under international law), a referral of the situation in Syria to the ICC and the deployment of international human rights monitors would help contribute to conditions for fruitful negotiations aimed at a solution that respects the human rights of all Syrians, he declared.

Without Security Council authorisation, coercive military intervention in Syria would not be legal, Granoff told IPS.

Since the fighting in Syria is not threatening another country, the circumstance of self-defence, which would allow the immediate use of force against Syria by the threatened country without approval of the Security Council, is not applicable.

The actions of the Assad regime are horrible, but international law should not be set aside with impunity, he said, pointing out that alternative routes exist.

Mass atrocities are not new for the Assad regime. The U.N. Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, as early as December 2011, called for the ICC to investigate mass killings. She was correct then, he noted.

It is worth noting, said Granoff, that she has recently called for ICC investigations of rebel slaughters as well. There is firm legal foundation for ICC involvement.

Although Syria is not a party to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, that does not matter, said Granoff.

Customary international law prohibits the use of such weapons of indiscriminate effect generally, and Syria would be responsible, especially if they were used against civilian populations regardless of whether they are party to the Treaty, he added.

The legal hurdles to such a reasonable course of action are not as high as the political ones.

However, advancing world security through the rule of law will provide much greater benefit than such short-term political posturing that does little to stop the brutality the people of Syria are experiencing, Granoff said.

One problem of a referral to the court is that if it commences prosecuting, it might make the horse-trading negotiations between the various rebel groups and the Assad regime difficult. If either faces prosecution in the event of losing militarily it could diminish incentives to achieve peace, he added.

“The status quo is worse than this risk. It is certainly preferable to risking very dangerous unintended consequences of an illegal military strike now,” Granoff declared.

A U.S. strike on Syria could be launched from navy destroyers in the Mediterranean. Credit: Official US Navy Imagery/CC by 2.0

By Lawrence Wilkerson
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

Now that we have heard Secretary of State John Kerry’s emotional plea for us to believe the still rather ambiguous intelligence on chemical weapons use in Syria, there are far more substantive answers to be sought from the Obama administration.

Putting aside the remaining ambiguities as well as all the experience those of us over 60 years old have with any administration’s unequivocal assurances preceding its use of military force, the basic context surrounding that use against Syria still requires intense analysis.

Forget about those prematurely-born babies stripped from their cradles in the maternity wards in Kuwait, later demonstrated as a figment of war advocates’ vivid imaginations; forget about the utter certainty with which every principal in the G. W. Bush administration assured Americans of Saddam Hussein’s WMD; and forget about for a moment John Kerry’s overly emotional remarks about Syria. Just examine some pertinent facts.

First, tens of thousands of North Koreans have died from hunger imposed by at least two of the latest DPRK dictators.  Is dying of hunger somehow better than dying of chemicals?  Or might it be that the DPRK has no oil and no Israel?  Of course, there are other examples of dastardly dictators and dying thousands; so where does one draw the line of death in future?

Second, how does one surgically strike Syria, as the Obama administration asserts it wishes to do?  That is, to use military force without becoming a participant in the ongoing conflict, simply to send a signal that chemical weapons use will not be tolerated?

Kosovo is a lousy example – where the promised three-days-of-bombing-and-the-dictator-will-cave turned into 78 long days and a credible threat of ground forces before he actually did cave. Not to mention all the death and destruction wrought by Serbia while much the same was being hurled at it.

Libya is a lousy example because Libya is now a haven for al-Qaeda and next-door-neighbour Mali is destabilised because of it.  Libya itself is hardly stable – except in the eyes of those who no longer want to look at it. Of course the light sweet crude seems to be getting out and to the right people…

Egypt is dissolving; Iraq is returning to civil war; Lebanon is becoming destabilised by the refugees pouring into it from Syria; Jordan is looking dicey having absorbed countless Iraqis from that country’s war-caused diaspora and now taking on Syrians.

How are cruise missiles and bombs and whatever else we choose to send to Syria short of ground forces, going to ameliorate this mess?

Moreover, what do we do when President Bashar al-Assad ignores our missiles and bombs and continues right on with his war?  Even, perhaps, uses chemical weapons to do so? Hit him again? Remember, we are not going to become participants in the civil war, we are not going to own Syria.

The man or woman who believes that he or she can be surgical with military force is an utter fool. No plan survives first contact with the enemy. No use of military force is surgical. It is blunt, unforgiving, tending to produce results and effects never dreamt of by the user. In for a penny, in for a trillion.

Go ahead, President Obama. Strike that Syrian tarbaby. If your hands, feet, and head are not eventually stuck in its brutal embrace – if you stop, reconsider, back out and are allowed to get away with it – what have you accomplished?  Preserving your credibility?

U.S. credibility in this part of the world is shot to hell already – largely by the catastrophic invasion of Iraq (not Obama’s fault, to be sure; but just as surely, America’s fault – foreigners do not differentiate presidents.) Credibility has been further shredded by continued drone strikes, by a failure to take any actions against the flow of arms from Saudi Arabia into Syria; by tacit support of the Saudi reinforcement of the dictatorship in Bahrain; and most powerfully by the failure to remain balanced – and therefore of some use – in the issue of Israel and Palestine.

When I survey that long, sunken black granite wall near the Lincoln Memorial and consider the over 58,000 names etched on it, and the two and a half million Vietnamese who, if they had such a wall, would be similarly inscribed, I get angry.

I know that President Johnson’s team, notably his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, assured the President that U.S. prestige was at stake in Vietnam. LBJ’s team knew they could not win the war, but they thought they could preserve U.S. prestige.

I just wish they had had to tell that to the families of every name on that wall – and every Vietnamese who would be on that country’s wall if it had one: you all died for prestige.

*Lawrence Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army infantry. His last position in government was as secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff. He currently teaches government and public policy at the College of William and Mary.

In an echo of the tactics they used to promote U.S. intervention in the Balkans, Iraq and Libya, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives published a letter Tuesday urging President Barack Obama to go far beyond limited military strikes against Syria in retaliation for its government’s alleged use last week of chemical weapons that reportedly killed hundreds of people.

Signed by 66 former government officials and “foreign policy experts” – almost all of them strongly pro-Israel neo-conservatives – the letter, which was released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), called for Washington “and other willing nations [to] consider direct military strikes against the pillars of the Assad regime” as part of more ambitious strategy to support “moderate” Syrian rebels and dissuade Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Any military action should aim to ensure that the government of President Bashar al-Assad will be unable to use chemical weapons and should deter or destroy its “airpower and other conventional military means of committing atrocities against civilian non-combatants,” according to the letter.

The letter’s most prominent signatories included several senior officials of the George W. Bush administration, such as his top Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams, former Undersecretary of Defence Eric Edelman and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser, John Hannah, and was given a bipartisan gloss with the inclusion of former Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman and several liberal interventionist commentators identified with the Democratic party who signed previous statements by the FPI and its predecessor, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

The letter also called on Obama to “accelerate efforts to vet, train, and arm moderate elements of Syria’s armed opposition” to help them prevail against both Assad and growing Al Qaeda-affiliated or extremist factions. It was released amidst growing indications that the Obama administration, which Monday called the alleged attack a “moral obscenity”, is determined to take limited military action – most likely through cruise-missile strikes launched from naval vessels based in the eastern Mediterranean – against selected targets in Syria for up to three days, possibly as early as this weekend.

It is expected that Britain and France and possibly Turkey will also take part in operations under a NATO mandate and with the support of the Arab League which, meeting in Cairo Tuesday, blamed Syria for the attack and called for its perpetrators to be brought to justice.

Despite the fact that U.N. inspectors, who on Monday visited the site of the alleged attack outside Damascus and took blood and tissue samples from some victims, have not yet submitted their findings, administration officials said they had concluded that the attack did take place and that government forces were responsible.

At the White House Tuesday, spokesman Jay Carney said the administration will release a report detailing the basis for its conclusions later this week and that Obama was currently considering various options prepared by the Pentagon, although he also insisted that any action taken by the United States will not be intended to achieve “regime change” in Damascus.

That assurance will no doubt frustrate neo-conservatives, many of whom have long held the Assad dynasty in their sights and who  had hoped that the 2003 invasion of Iraq – which they promoted through organisations like PNAC, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the Foundation for Defence of Democracy (FDD) – would lay the foundations for Assad’s ouster, too.

Indeed, a number of neo-conservatives, including signatories of the FPI letter, are insisting that U.S. action aim to end Assad’s regime.

One, Eliot Cohen, argued in a Washington Post op-ed Monday that “a bout of therapeutic bombing is an even more feckless course of action than a principled refusal to act altogether,” a point echoed on the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page – a favourite neo-conservative forum – Tuesday.

Another signatory, Reuel Marc Gerecht, who promoted the Iraq war at AEI and is now based at FDD, called for a “devastating” attack targeting “elite military units, aircraft, armour and artillery; all weapons-depots; the myriad organisations of the secret police; the ruling elite’s residences; and other critical Alawite infrastructure” in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday.

Founded by two prominent neo-conservatives in 1997, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC published a series of letters and manifestos that helped shape the foreign policy trajectory, especially regarding the Middle East, of Bush’s first term. Among its charter members are eight men who held key posts under Bush, including Cheney; his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; Abrams and the Pentagon’s foreign policy chief, Peter Rodman.

In 1998, PNAC published letters favouring legislation adopting “regime change” as official U.S. policy toward Iraq that was eventually signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. Nine days after 9/11, it published another letter to Bush signed by 41 policy analysts – virtually all neo-conservatives – that laid out an ambitious agenda for his “global war on terror”.

It insisted that failure to remove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.” It also urged that Bush “should consider appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they refused to comply with demands that they cease support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

PNAC faded into oblivion by the beginning of Bush’s second term as the situation in Iraq deteriorated and neo-conservatives lost influence. In early 2009, however, Kagan and Kristol founded FPI and were joined as directors there by Edelman and Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.

In January 2011, FPI published a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former Bush administration officials, calling on Obama to press NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Libya and the country’s naval vessels.

By the following summer, it joined with FDD in calling for tough economic sanctions against Syria and the creation of no-fly or no-go zones in Syrian territory to protect civilians, and in December 2011, it released a letter signed by 58 individuals – most of whom also signed Tuesday’s letter – calling for military aid to opposition forces “whose political goals accord with U.S. national security interests”.

Among the more notable signatories of the most recent letter are French writer Bernard-Henri Levy, who played a key role in mobilising international support for the NATO intervention in Libya; Christian Right activist Gary Bauer, who, with Kristol, was a founding board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel; Bush political adviser Karl Rove; the former head of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, Randy Scheunemann; and former CPA chief, L. Paul Bremer, as well as Kagan and Kristol.

Surprisingly absent from the list were some of the most visible and controversial architects and supporters of the Iraq war and those who had previously associated themselves with PNAC or FPI, such as Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, former CIA director James Woolsey, and AEI’s Richard Perle, who chaired the Defence Policy Board under Rumsfeld.

Secretary of State John Kerry (shown as a senator in 2009) has called the use of chemical weapons in Syria a "moral obscenity". Credit: Ralph Alswang, Center for American Progress Action Fund/CC by 2.0

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the U.N. to call off its investigation.

The administration’s reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between Syria and the U.N., was reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday and effectively confirmed by a State Department spokesperson later that day.

In his press appearance Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who intervened with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to call off the investigation, dismissed the U.N. investigation as coming too late to obtain valid evidence on the attack that Syrian opposition sources claimed killed as many 1,300 people.

The sudden reversal and overt hostility toward the U.N. investigation, which coincides with indications that the administration is planning a major military strike against Syria in the coming days, suggests that the administration sees the U.N. as hindering its plans for an attack.

Kerry asserted Monday that he had warned Syrian Foreign Minister Moallem last Thursday that Syria had to give the U.N. team immediate access to the site and stop the shelling there, which he said was “systematically destroying evidence”. He called the Syria-U.N. deal to allow investigators unrestricted access “too late to be credible”.

After the deal was announced on Sunday, however, Kerry pushed Ban in a phone call to call off the investigation completely.

The Wall Street Journal reported the pressure on Ban without mentioning Kerry by name. It said unnamed “U.S. officials” had told the secretary-general that it was “no longer safe for the inspectors to remain in Syria and that their mission was pointless.”

But Ban, who has generally been regarded as a pliable instrument of U.S. policy, refused to withdraw the U.N. team and instead “stood firm on principle”, the Journal reported. He was said to have ordered the U.N. inspectors to “continue their work”.

The Journal said “U.S. officials” also told the secretary-general that the United States “didn’t think the inspectors would be able to collect viable evidence due to the passage of time and damage from subsequent shelling.”

The State Department spokesperson, Marie Harf, confirmed to reporters that Kerry had spoken with Ban over the weekend. She also confirmed the gist of the U.S. position on the investigation. “We believe that it’s been too long and there’s been too much destruction of the area for the investigation to be credible,” she said.

That claim echoed a statement by an unnamed “senior official” to the Washington Post Sunday that the evidence had been “significantly corrupted” by the regime’s shelling of the area.

“[W]e don’t at this point have confidence that the U.N. can conduct a credible inquiry into what happened,” said Harf, “We are concerned that the Syrian regime will use this as a delay tactic to continue shelling and destroying evidence in the area.”

Harf did not explain, however, how the Syrian agreement to a ceasefire and unimpeded access to the area of the alleged chemical weapons attack could represent a continuation in “shelling and destroying evidence”.

Despite the U.S. effort to portray the Syrian government policy as one of “delay”, the formal request from the United Nations for access to the site did not go to the Syrian government until Angela Kane, U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, arrived in Damascus on Saturday, as Ban’s spokesman, Farhan Haq, conceded in a briefing in New York Tuesday.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said in a press conference Tuesday that Syria had not been asked by the United Nations for access to the East Ghouta area until Kane presented it on Saturday. Syria agreed to provide access and to a ceasefire the following day.

Haq sharply disagreed with the argument made by Kerry and the State Department that it was too late to obtain evidence of the nature of the Aug. 21 incident.

“Sarin can be detected for up to months after its use,” he said.

Specialists on chemical weapons also suggested in interviews with IPS that the U.N. investigating team, under a highly regarded Swedish specialist Ake Sellstom and including several experts borrowed from the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, should be able to either confirm or disprove the charge of an attack with nerve or another chemical weapon within a matter of days.

Ralph Trapp, a consultant on proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, said he was “reasonably confident” that the U.N. team could clarify what had happened.

“They can definitely answer the question [of] whether there was a chemical attack, and they can tell which chemical was used,” he said, by collecting samples from blood, urine and hair of victims. There was even “some chance” of finding chemical residue from ammunition pieces or craters where they landed.

Trapp said it would take “several days” to complete an analysis.

Steve Johnson, who runs a programme in chemical, biological and radiological weapons forensics at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, said that by the end of the week the U.N. might be able to answer whether “people died of a nerve agent.”

Johnson said the team, if pushed, could produce “some kind of view” on that issue within 24 to 48 hours.

Dan Kastesza, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and a former adviser to the White House on chemical and biological weapons proliferation, told IPS the team will not be looking for traces of the nerve gas sarin in blood samples but rather chemicals produced when sarin degrades.

But Kastesza said that once samples arrive at laboratories, specialists could make a determination “in a day or two” about whether a nerve agent or other chemical weapons had been used.

The real reason for the Obama administration’s hostility toward the U.N. investigation appears to be the fear that the Syrian government’s decision to allow the team access to the area indicates that it knows that U.N. investigators will not find evidence of a nerve gas attack.

The administration’s effort to discredit the investigation recalls the George W. Bush administration’s rejection of the position of U.N. inspectors in 2002 and 2003 after they found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the administration’s refusal to give inspectors more time to fully rule out the existence of an active Iraqi WMD programme.

In both cases, the administration had made up its mind to go to war and wanted no information that could contradict that policy to arise.

The United States is debating whether to intervene militarily in Syria. Above, Syrian rebel forces. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.

On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility is at stake, especially now that Secretary of State John Kerry has publicly endorsed the case that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad must have been responsible for the alleged chemical attack on a Damascus suburb that was reported to have killed hundreds of people.

Just one year ago, Obama warned that the regime’s use of such weapons would cross a “red line” and constitute a “game-changer” that would force Washington to reassess its policy of not providing direct military aid to rebels and of avoiding military action of its own.

After U.S. intelligence confirmed earlier this year that government forces had on several occasions used limited quantities of chemical weapons against insurgents, the administration said it would begin providing arms to opposition forces, although rebels complain that nothing has yet materialised.

The hawks have further argued that U.S. military action is also necessary to demonstrate that the most deadly use of chemical weapons since the 1988 Halabja massacre by Iraqi forces against the Kurdish population there – a use of which the US. was fully aware but did not denounce at the time – will not go unpunished.

Military action should be “sufficiently large that it would underscore the message that chemical weapons as a weapon of mass destruction simply cannot be used with impunity,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “The audience here is not just the Syrian government.”

While the hawks, whose position is strongly backed by the governments of Britain, France, Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel, clearly have the wind at their backs, the doves have not given up.

Remembering Iraq

Recalling the mistakes and distortions of U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, some argue that the administration is being too hasty in blaming the Syrian government. "The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends."
-- Eliot Cohen

If it waits until United Nations inspectors, who visited the site of the alleged attack Monday, complete their work, the United States could at least persuade other governments that Washington is not short-circuiting a multilateral process as it did in Iraq.

Many also note that military action could launch an escalation that Washington will not necessarily be able to control, as noted by a prominent neo-conservative hawk, Eliot Cohen, in Monday’s Washington Post.

“Chess players who think one move ahead usually lose; so do presidents who think they can launch a day or two of strikes and then walk away with a win,” wrote Cohen, who served as counsellor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends.”

“What if [Obama] hurls cruise missiles at a few key targets, and Assad does nothing and says, ‘I’m still winning.’ What do you then?” asked Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), who served for 16 years as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Do you automatically escalate and go up to a no-fly zone and the challenges that entails, and what then if that doesn’t get [Assad’s] attention?

“This is fraught with tar-babiness,” he told IPS in a reference to an African-American folk fable about how Br’er Rabbit becomes stuck to a doll made of tar. “You stick in your hand, and you can’t get it out, so you then you stick in your other hand, and pretty soon you’re all tangled up all this mess – and for what?”

“Certainly there are more vital interests in Iran than in Syria,” he added. “You can’t negotiate with Iran if you start bombing Syria,” he said, a point echoed by the head of the National Iranian American Council, Trita Parsi.

“There is a real opportunity for successful diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear issue, but that opportunity will either be completely spoiled or undermined if the U.S. intervention in Syria puts the U.S. and Iran in direct combat with each other,” he told IPS. Humanitarian concerns and U.S. credibility should also be taken into account when considering intervention, he said.

Remembering Kosovo

Still, the likelihood of military action – almost certainly through the use of airpower since even the most aggressive hawks, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have ruled out the commitment of ground troops – is being increasingly taken for granted here.

Lingering questions include whether Washington will first ask the United Nations Security Council to approve military action, despite the strong belief here that Russia, Assad’s most important international supporter and arms supplier, and China would veto such a resolution.

“Every time we bypass the council for fear of a Russian or Chinese veto, we drive a stake into the heart of collective security,” noted Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Long-term, that’s not in our interest.”

But the hawks, both inside the administration and out, are urging Obama to follow the precedent of NATO’s air campaign in 1999 against Serbia during the Kosovo War. In that case, President Bill Clinton ignored the U.N. and persuaded his NATO allies to endorse military intervention on humanitarian grounds.

The 78-day air war ultimately persuaded Yugoslav President Milosovic to withdraw his troops from most of Kosovo province, but not before NATO forces threatened to deploy ground troops, a threat that the Obama administration would very much like to avoid in the case of Syria.

While the administration is considered most likely to carry out “stand-off” strikes by cruise missiles launched from outside Syria’s territory to avoid its more formidable air-defence system and thus minimise the risk to U.S. pilots, there remains considerable debate as to what should be included in the target list.

Some hawks, including McCain and Graham, have called not only for Washington to bomb Syrian airfields and destroy its fleet of warplanes and helicopter and ballistic capabilities, but also to establish no-fly zones and safe areas for civilians and rebel forces to tilt the balance of power decisively against the Assad government. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, have urged the same.

But others oppose such far-reaching measures, noting that the armed opposition appears increasingly dominated by radical Islamists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, and that the aim of any military intervention should be not only to deter the future use of chemical weapons but also to prod Assad and the more moderate opposition forces into negotiations, as jointly proposed this spring by Moscow and Washington. In their view, any intervention should be more limited so as not to provoke Assad into escalating the conflict.

The United States should think twice before intervening military in Syria, says Robert Hunter. Credit: FreedomHouse/CC by 2.0

By Robert E. Hunter
WASHINGTON, Aug 26 2013 (IPS)

President Obama got it right. He was picked by U.S. voters to put the nation’s interests first – not those of any ally, any member of Congress, or the media, even if they clamour for him to “do something” yet do not take responsibility for the consequences if things go wrong, as they have for some time in the Middle East.

Today, the issue raised by U.S. media and some of America’s allies are allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used poison gas to kill or maim thousands of Syrians. The consensus among Western commentators, in and outside of the government, has been built around this proposition, and it may be right.

United Nations inspectors may be able to verify the causes and perpetrators of these deaths and injuries. Let us hope so, before the United States or other countries begin direct military action of any kind that will be crossing the Rubicon.

Perhaps U.S. intelligence knows the facts; again, let us hope so. And let us hope that we do not later discover that intelligence was distorted, as it was before the ill-fated U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the consequences of which are still damaging U.S. interests in the Middle East and eroding the region’s stability.

In addition to being unable to turn back once the United States becomes directly engaged in combat, however limited, is the difficulty of believing that Assad would have been so foolish as to use poison gas, unless Syrian command-and-control is so poor that some military officer ordered its use without Assad’s permission.

If one invokes the concept of cui bono (“to whose benefit?”), those with the most to gain if the United States acted to bring down the current Syrian government would be Syrian rebels or their supporters, including Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Such a move would increase the likelihood of even more killing and perhaps genocide against Syria’s Alawites."It has long been clear that the Syrian conflict is not just about Syria."
-- Robert E. Hunter

But citing the possibility that we are all being misled about who used poison gas – a tactic known as a false flag – does not mean it is true. It does redouble the need for the United States to be certain about who used the gas before taking military action. Obama has gotten this right, too.

So if we become directly involved in the fighting, then what?

This question must always be asked before acting. Sometimes, such as with Pearl Harbour, Hitler’s declaring war on the United States, or pushing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, striking back hard for as long as it takes is clearly the right course.

Less clear of a situation was Vietnam. Ugly consequences also ensued from arming and training Osama bin Laden and his ilk to punish the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and, in one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history, from invading Iraq in 2003.

It has long been clear that the Syrian conflict is not just about Syria. It is also about the balance between Sunni and Shia aspirations throughout the core of the Middle East. Iran, a Shia state, started the ball rolling with its 1979 Islamic revolution. Several U.S. administrations contained the virus of sectarianism, but invading Iraq and toppling its minority Sunni regime got the ball rolling again.

Now Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are bent on toppling the minority Alawite – a mystical offshoot of Shi’ism – regime in Syria. Even if they succeed, the region’s internecine warfare won’t stop there.

Meanwhile, there is a geopolitical struggle for predominance in the region, principally involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. Iran has Shia-dominated Iraq, Assad’s Syria, and Hezbollah as acolytes. Saudi Arabia has the other Gulf Arab states, while Turkey has its regional ambitions extending to Central Asia. And since Israel’s conclusion that its Syrian strategic partner, the Assad family, is doomed, it has thrown in its lot with the Sunni states. But it wants change before Syria is completely dominated by the fundamentalists.

From the U.S. perspective, the regional situation is a mess, and the tipping point that would make things much worse could be direct military intervention in Syria.

It is too late for Obama to take back his ill-considered statement about the use of poison gas being a “red line” in Syria when he was not prepared to go for broke in toppling Assad. It is too late as well for him to reconsider his call for Assad to go, which further stoked the fears of the Alawites that they could be slaughtered.

It is also late for him to tell Gulf Arabs to stop fostering the spread of Islamist fundamentalism of the worst sort throughout the region, from Egypt to Pakistan to Afghanistan, where American troops have died as a result.

It is also late, but let us hope not too late, for a U.S.-led full-court press on the political-diplomatic front to set the terms for a reasonably viable post-Assad Syria rather than sliding into war and unleashing potentially terrible uncertainties. Let us recall what happened in Afghanistan after we stayed on after deposing the Taliban, and in Iraq after 2003. Neither place is in much better shape, if at all, even after the loss of thousands of U.S. lives and trillions in U.S. treasure.

And it is also late, but hopefully not too late, for the Obama administration to engage in strategic thinking about the Middle East; to see the region from North Africa to Southwest Asia as “all of a piece”, and to craft an overall policy towards critical U.S. interests throughout the area.

This week, President Obama should heed the clear wake-up call, resist the call to do something militarily in Syria, and place his bet on vigorous and unrelenting diplomacy for a viable post-Assad Syria and the reassertion of U.S. leadership throughout the region.

*Robert E. Hunter, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, was director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council Staff in the Carter Administration and in 2011-12 was Director of Transatlantic Security Studies at the National Defense University.

Excerpt:

Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson speaks to journalists on Aug. 21 following his closed-door briefing to the Security Council on the latest allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 22 2013 (IPS)

The United States, Britain and France, three veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, are making a strong push for an “urgent” U.N. investigation of the alleged use of chemical weapons Wednesday in Syria.

The UK Deputy Permanent Representative Ambassador Phillip Parham told reporters Thursday that a letter, signed by over 35 member states, was being delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for a “swift investigation”.

But he refused to identify the countries, nor was letter made public.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, did not contain the list of signatories. The only three permanent members taking the lead, and whose signatures appear on the letter, were the United States, Britain and France.

Both Russia and China, the other two permanent members, were not signatories.

The letter, dated Aug. 21, says: “We would like to bring to your attention credible reports of the use of chemical weapons on 21 August 2013 in Rif Damascus. Given the gravity of these reports, we judge it essential that all the pertinent facts are swiftly investigated.”

The letter requests the secretary-general to launch an urgent investigation into these allegations “as expeditiously as possible” under the auspices of the secretary general’s ‘Mechanism for the Investigation of Alleged Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons.’

This “mechanism” was derived from the mandate established by the U.N. General Assembly in its resolution A/RES/42/37C of Nov. 30, 1987.

The letter requests Ban to “report back to Member States as soon as possible”.

Russia, which has stood by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, claims the alleged chemical arms attack Wednesday was a “pre-planned provocation” orchestrated by the rebels.

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying, “All of this looks like an attempt at all costs to create a pretext for demanding that the U.N. Security Council side with opponents of the regime and undermine the chances of convening the Geneva conference.”

The proposed conference was aimed at peace negotiations between the Syrian government and rebels, but it has failed to get off the ground.

Currently, there is a U.N. team in Damascus trying to investigate earlier attacks with chemical weapons, but the team’s mandate is limited to whether or not chemical weapons were used in these attacks last year. And the team does not have a mandate to pin the blame either on the Syrian government or the rebels.

“We are aware that the UN Mission is now in Damascus,” the letter notes. “We urge you to do all you can to ensure that the Mission has urgent access to all relevant sites and sources of information.”

To assist the investigation, the letter lists a selection of open source information, along with web links.

Meanwhile, in a statement released Thursday, the secretary-general said he was shocked to hear the reports of the alleged use of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus.

Professor Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish expert on chemical weapons, and his team are currently in Syria to investigate the alleged use of chemical weapons reported by the government of Syria at Khan al-Assal, as well as two other allegations of the use of chemical weapons reported by member states, he noted.

According to the agreement reached in Damascus in July, the two parties are discussing, in parallel, other allegations and their related sites.

The United Nations mission to investigate allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria is following the current situation in Syria carefully, and remains fully engaged in the investigation process that is mandated by the secretary-general, said a statement from his spokesman.

“Professor Sellstrom is in discussions with the Syrian government on all issues pertaining to the alleged use of chemical weapons, including this most recent reported incident. The Secretary-General reiterates that any use of chemical weapons by any side under any circumstances would violate international humanitarian law,” the statement added.

Meanwhile, the 15-members of the Security Council issued a statement Thursday calling for a U.N. investigation of the chemical weapons attack. But it stopped short of adopting a resolution, which would have been vetoed by Russia and possibly China.

Philippe Bolopion, U.N. Director at Human Rights Watch, said the “tortuous Security Council unofficial statement” on Syria misses the mark and fails the victims.

“When faced with serious allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria, rather than seeking the truth and demanding cooperation with U.N. investigators, Russia and China chose once again to protect a government that has been slaughtering its own population,” he said.

“They will go down in history as two major enablers of Assad’s bloody tactics to repress the Syrian people.”

Syrian activists claim that government forces have carried out a “poisonous gas” attack in suburbs of the capital, Damascus, leaving hundreds of people dead.

Activists said regime forces fired “rockets with poisonous gas heads” in the alleged attack early on Wednesday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the shelling was intense and hit the eastern suburbs of Zamalka, Arbeen and Ein Tarma.

It said at least 100 were killed, while the Local Coordination Committees said hundreds of people were killed or injured in the shelling.

The attack coincided with the visit by a 20-member U.N. chemical weapons team to Syria to investigate three sites where chemical weapons attacks allegedly occurred over the past year.

Syrian authorities dismissed reports of a chemical attack on Wednesday as “baseless”, and said the reports were intended to hinder the mission of U.N. inspectors.

The main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, accused the regime of killing more than 650 people on Wednesday.

“Over 650 confirmed dead result of deadly chemical weapon attack in Syria,” the National Coalition said on Twitter.

The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Al Jazeera’s Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from neighbouring Jordan, said there were videos allegedly showing both children and adults in field hospitals, some of them suffocating, coughing and sweating.

“We have been receiving reports that the doctors in the field hospitals do not have the right medication to treat these cases and that they were treating people with vinegar and water,” she said.

Call for U.N. probe

The head of the U.N. chemical weapons inspectors in Syria said that reports of the gas attack should be investigated.

Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom told news agency TT that while he had only seen TV footage, from which nothing could be determined, the high number of casualties reported sounded “suspicious”.

The Syrian National Coalition has called for an urgent U.N. Security Council meeting after the deadly attack.

“I call on the Security Council to convene urgently,” National Coalition leader Ahmed al-Jarba told Al-Arabiya news channel, condemning the Syrian army’s bombardment of the suburbs of Damascus as a “massacre.”

He urged the U.N. team now in Syria to visit the site.

In Cairo, the Arab League also urged the U.N. inspectors to visit the site of the alleged attack immediately. And Saudi Arabia as well urged the U.N. and EU ministers to immediately address the “massacre”.

UK said it would raise the reported chemical weapons attack at the U.N. Security Council and called on Damascus to give U.N. inspectors access to the site.

“I am deeply concerned by reports that hundreds of people, including children, have been killed in airstrikes and a chemical weapons attack on rebel-held areas near Damascus,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a statement.

France will also ask U.N. experts to visit the site of the alleged chemical attack in Syria, a French government spokesman said.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

The Obama administration intends to militarily arm Syrian opposition. Credit: FreedomHouse2/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Despite Thursday’s announcement that President Barack Obama has decided to provide direct military assistance to Syrian rebels, what precisely the administration has in mind remains unclear.

Analysts here are also questioning whether the decision is part of a deliberate strategy – and, if so, what that strategy is – or whether it is instead another in a series of efforts to relieve growing pressure from its allies in Europe and the Gulf and hawks at home to take stronger military measures designed to shift the 27-month-old civil war decisively in favour of the opposition.

“When Julius Caesar actually crossed the [Rubicon], he proceeded rapidly to mission accomplishment in accordance with a sound strategy,” noted retired Ambassador Frederic Hof, a Syria specialist at the Atlantic Council who has long called for stronger U.S. military intervention.

“Although the administration’s crossing [decision] is significant, welcome, and long overdue, it is far from certain whether this particular legion will move smartly toward an objective or simply mill around the river bank.”

The White House tied the decision to escalate the “scope and scale” of military aid to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian Military Council (SMC) to the U.S. intelligence community’s determination that the Syrian forces had used chemical weapons – albeit “on a small scale” – against rebel forces in multiple battles over the past year.

It also cited the deepening involvement of Iran and Hezbollah militants from Lebanon in support of the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, whose departure from office Obama has repeatedly demanded since hostilities first broke out more than two years ago."It is far from certain whether this particular legion will move smartly toward an objective."
-- Frederic Hof

The announcement, however, followed a series of intensive internal meetings over the past two weeks, as it became clear that the regime’s forces had made a series of battlefield advances – most importantly by capturing, with Hezbollah’s help, the strategic western town of Al-Qusayr close to the Lebanese border – that threatened to tip the war decisively in Assad’s favour.

With pro-government forces and Hezbollah fighters reportedly preparing a major assaults on the key city of Aleppo and other “moderate” opposition leaders appealing desperately for weapons, the administration has found itself under pressure from both its allies abroad and hawks here to “do something” that could halt, if not reverse, the regime’s momentum and restore the “strategic stalemate” that Washington considers essential to any prospect for a political settlement.

But what precisely that “something” is or will be remains unclear. In a briefing for reporters Thursday evening, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes repeatedly avoided answering the question, insisting, however, that Washington will increase “the scope and scale” of direct aid to the SMC which so far has received mainly humanitarian and “non-lethal” assistance.

According to various published reports, Obama has indeed decided to provide small arms and ammunition but still pending are decisions on rebel requests for anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Washington had previously ruled out the latter, in part due to Israel’s concerns that they could be used against its aircraft, particularly if they fall into the hands of radical Islamist factions among the anti-Assad forces.

But hawks here have argued that small arms and even anti-tank weapons are at this point insufficient to redress the rapidly tilting balance of power on the ground.

“The president must rally an international coalition to take military actions to degrade Assad’s ability to use airpower and ballistic missiles and to move and resupply his forces around the battlefield by air,” declared Congress’s most visible interventionists, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham late Thursday. “We must take more decisive actions now to turn the tide of the conflict in Syria.”

They and others have called for Washington to create “no-fly zones” along Syria’s Turkish and Jordanian borders that would both safe havens for refugees and rebels and permit the latter to be trained, armed and supplied for operations against government forces inside Syria.

Hof has urged that such a zone also be used protect a rebel government that could gain formal recognition from the United States and other allies, request heavier weapons and eventually go to peace talks as diplomatic, as well as military, equals of the Assad government.

While Rhodes told reporters that Obama has “not made any decision to pursue a military operations such as a no-fly zone”, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that a Pentagon proposal still under consideration calls for a limited “no-fighting” zone extending up to 40 kilometres inside Syria that would be enforced by U.S. and allied aircraft operating from Jordanian airspace.

In recent months, Washington has set up Patriot air-defence batteries and sent fighter jets to bases inside Jordan, where it has also been secretly training rebel and Jordanian forces on securing chemical-weapons facilities and weapons in the event the Assad regime collapses, according to some reports.

Some analysts who have opposed escalating U.S. involvement in the civil war agree that directly supplying arms to the rebels would be unlikely to turn the military tide, certainly in the short term, and could carry additional risks.

“Selective arms shipments could [spur] clashes between rival rebel groups. Extremist elements might attack more moderate rebel units receiving better arms, driven by need, resentment or both,” according to Wayne White, the former deputy director of the State Department intelligence unit on the Near East, who noted that this could actually strengthen the regime. Indeed, he added, the “rebel military vanguard” for some time has been the “radical Islamist in character – even Al-Qaeda affiliated”.

He also expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone, noting that it would risk swift escalation. “The rebels would remain at the mercy of the regime’s other heavy weapons on the ground, thus tempting those establishing any sort of no-fly zone to attack regime ground targets as well.”

“The first step on the slippery slope is always easy, but it’s much harder to actually resolve a conflict or to find a way out of a quagmire,” wrote Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, on the eve of the White House announcement.

For Lynch, who has long urged Obama to resist calls to escalate Washington’s intervention, the key issue is what U.S. policy ultimately aims to achieve and whether providing military aid or taking more aggressive measures will help achieve them.

“Should Syria be viewed as a front in a broad regional cold war against Iran and its allies or as a humanitarian catastrophe that must be resolved?” he asked, noting that very different strategies should be followed depending on the answer to that question.

At the moment, according to Lynch, “advocates of arming the rebels switch between making the case that it would strike a blow against the Iranians (and Hezbollah) and that it would improve the prospects for a negotiated solution.”

While the White House clearly framed its decision this week in the latter terms, it may nonetheless add momentum to those who tend to view the Syrian conflict more as part of the larger conflict against Tehran the model for which, according to Lynch, “would presumably be the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan – a long-term insurgency coordinated through neighbouring countries, fuelled by Gulf money, and popularised by Islamist and sectarian propaganda”.

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

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 4 2013 (IPS)

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.

U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel briefs the press in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, April 25, 2013. Hagel announced that the U.S. intelligence community assesses with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons -- specifically the nerve-agent sarin -- on a small scale. Credit: DOD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Apr 26 2013 (IPS)

A White House letter Thursday to Congressional leaders suggesting chemical weapons use by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has reignited debate about direct U.S. military involvement in the war-torn country.

“Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin,” the letter said, a day after a letter by eight senators was sent to the president asking if chemical weapons had been used by the Assad regime since the conflict there began in 2011."This administration will likely remain well aware of the Colin Powell dictum: 'You break it; you own it'." -- Wayne White

Republican Senator John McCain, one of the co-signers of the letter to the White House, said Thursday that president Obama’s “red line” on Syria has been “crossed”.

“Not only have our intelligence people concluded that, but as importantly the Israeli, the British and the French have as well,” McCain said on Fox News.

“The president clearly stated that it was a red line and that it couldn’t be crossed without the United States taking vigorous action,” he said.
But it’s not clear whether the president’s red line has been crossed.

The White House is also seeking confirmation of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment before taking action.

“…Precisely because the president takes this issue so seriously, we have an obligation to fully investigate any and all evidence of chemical weapons use within Syria,” the White House letter said before calling for a U.N. investigation to “credibly evaluate the evidence and establish what took place”.

“There was wiggle room [in the letter] about who might have been actually doing it,” Robert E. Hunter, who served on the National Security Council staff throughout the Jimmy Carter administration, told IPS.

“That letter is a wonderful weasel-worded letter to try to make the president look good and preserve all options. And I don’t mean the option to go to war, I mean the option to not go to war,” said Hunter, who was U.S. ambassador to NATO from 1993-98.

“It’s not clear to me that the administration has figured out what’s in the best American interest after period X…because we’ve been ambivalent about that or because in the president’s statement it says Assad ought to go, then if that’s where you are, what are you prepared to do to see it come about, and if it does come about, then what are you prepared to do?” said Hunter.

“You can arm the rebels, you can have a no-fly zone, you can use air power…we now have a capacity to use air power at relatively low risk. But that still begs the question: then what happens? How do you protect the minority if Assad goes? How do you keep this from becoming a spill-over into what I call a slow-rolling civil war throughout this part of the Middle East,” he said.

“It does not appear that the proverbial Obama administration ‘red line’ has been crossed – yet – because there clearly are some differences about the level of certainty within the U.S. intelligence community over whether regime lethal chemical weapons (CW) use has taken place,” Wayne White, a former deputy director of the State Department’s Middle East/South Asia Intelligence Office (INR/NESA), told IPS.

“Also at issue is whether, if this has occurred, the incident was significant or relatively isolated and minor, as well as whether the level of danger that any such use would be repeated,” said White, now a scholar at the Middle East Institute.

There is meanwhile differing opinion among U.S. Mideast policy experts about whether Washngton should militarily intervene in Syria, something which the Obama administration has so far resisted.

“It doesn’t really matter which intelligence assessment – Israeli or American – is accurate, this is no longer an academic question. The U.S. and its allies, in or outside the U.N., must act swiftly to bring down the regime and prevent any further use of chemical weapons by the regime,” Emile Nakhleh, a an expert on Middle Eastern society and politics who served in the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993-2006, told IPS.

“It is time the Obama administration acts on its own to speed up Assad’s fall. If the president had followed his earlier statement that Assad should go, the Syrian people would have been spared the horrible destruction that the regime has inflicted on the country, the deaths of almost 100,000 people, and the flight of almost three million Syrians as refugees to neighbouring countries.

“More importantly, such action would have removed the possibility of the regime using weapons of mass destruction against the Syrian people,” Nakhleh, who formerly headed the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Programme, told IPS.

The White House’s letter release Thursday coincided with a library dedication ceremony for President George W. Bush, which was attended by all living U.S. presidents including Obama.

Bush spoke highly of his two-term presidency, which included U.S.-waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“…We liberated nations from dictatorship and freed people from AIDS. And when our freedom came under attack, we made the tough decisions required to keep the American people safe,” said Bush at the library dedication ceremony on the campus of SMU in Dallas, Texas.

But successive polls show little support now by U.S. citizens for involvement in another Mideast war.

In December 2013, a Pew Research poll showed that 65 percent of respondents opposed the U.S. and its allies even sending arms and military supplies to anti-government groups in Syria.

“The Obama administration, already heavily committed in Afghanistan, addressing significant military-related budget cuts, and well aware of the need to avoid an Iraq-like scenario, will move with much greater caution in dealing with Syria than did the Bush administration (which eagerly sought an all-out war with Iraq) back in 2003,” White told IPS.

“Particularly with Islamic extremists (in fact, many directly affiliated with Al-Qaeda) important players in the complex situation on the ground in Syria, this administration will likely remain well aware of the Colin Powell dictum: ‘You break it; you own it’,” said White.

“Syria already is, in effect, broken, but the U.S. so far has played only a marginal role in determining the flow of events there. Indeed, so far, this remains very much a Syrian conflict, despite the involvement of various outside governments (including Iran),” he said.

The Halabja poison gas attack took place on Mar. 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran-Iraq War, when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan. Credit: Sayeed Janbozorgi/GFDL license

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4 2012 (IPS)

The beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accused of readying its chemical weapons against rebel forces, is one of three governments in the militarily-volatile Middle East which has shied away from the international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

The other two countries, Egypt and Israel, have also distanced themselves from the CWC, either for political or military reasons.

According to the United Nations, there are currently eight countries – Angola, Egypt, Israel, Myanmar (Burma), North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan and Syria – which have either refused or shown reluctance to commit themselves to the legally-binding prohibition against the manufacture, use and transfer of the deadly weapons.

As a result of the eight holdouts, the CWC has lacked universality, unlike most other key international treaties and conventions.

Asked whether this is an indication that some or most are in possession of chemical weapons, John Hart, senior researcher and head of the Chemical and Biological Safety Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS there are various reasons why states have delayed joining the CWC.

For states in the Middle East, one possible reason is a political linkage made over the years by some that all states in the region should verifiably renounce all weapons of mass destruction (WMDs, including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons).

More specifically, all states in the region should join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), they insist. Until it appears that a WMD-Free Zone is imminent in the region, said Hart, some have argued it is better to delay accession to the CWC.

This argument has lost some of its force in recent years, partly because some states in the Middle East region have in fact joined the CWC.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama says chemical weapons are a “red line” which Syria should not cross.

Addressing a nuclear non-proliferation conference in Washington Monday, Obama said, “The use of chemical weapons is, and would be, totally unacceptable.

“And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons,” he said, directing his warning at the Syrian president, “there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”

The CWC, whose implementation is overseen by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, currently has 188 states parties representing more than 98 percent of the world’s population and chemical industry.

In October, the CWC marked its 15th anniversary since entering into force.

Last month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for universality, urging the eight states to join the CWC which aims to eliminate the use, development, production and transfer of chemical weapons.

Asked about the deadly effects, George A. Lopez, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, Professor of Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, told IPS “their use is taboo”.

“This is held strongly and globally and even articulated by the highest possessing nations, the United States and Russia,” he said.

Lopez said the use of chemical weapons has implications and reverberations beyond the number of victims, primarily due to the horror of their effects.

The use of these weapons in the Iraq-Iran war by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein turned Western opinion strongly against Iraq, although action against him was limited by the international community, said Lopez, a former U.N. advisor and an expert on U.N. war sanctions.

“I suspect that if Assad used (these weapons), such an act would become the justification for international intervention,” said Lopez.

He also said the blistering damage due to VX or nerve agents that Syria probably possesses could hit hundreds or thousands, if dropped from the sky.

Depending on proximity and wind patterns, it is a horrible death for those in close range, and a slower death for those in medium range who probably have limited medical care, while others will carry the scars for life and die later from immune system disorders.

SIPRI’s Hart told IPS another reason for non-accession to the CWC is the question of political priorities.

Israel signed the CWC and participated in the Preparatory Commission meetings prior to the CWC’s entry into force and also sent observers to the annual CWC’s Conference of the States Parties.

“This can be taken as an indication that, under certain broader geopolitical considerations, Israel would be willing to accede to the convention,” Hart said.

North Korea does not respond to OPCW efforts to engage in a dialogue concerning possible CWC accession.

“This partly relates to the broader geopolitical dynamics for that region. Much of this discussion is speculative, including with respect to motivations, capabilities and policies,” he noted.

Angola had observer status at the November Conference of the States Parties (CSP) in The Hague. This presumably signals a willingness and intention to accede to the CWC. Myanmar also sent an observer, Hart said.

There was some informal contact between OPCW and Syria about two and a half years ago to explore the parametres of possible CWC accession.

“This was done within the framework of continuing OPCW efforts to achieve universal treaty membership. The current instability has negatively affected this process,” he added, since Syria has been fighting a 21-month-old, stalemated insurgency.

He pointed out that the European Union has provided financial and other support for efforts to promote effective CWC implementation and universal treaty membership.