[PAULYPOKER]

10 reasons why diplomatic solution is unlikely in Syria




Over the past few days, there has been a tremendous wave of optimism that it may be possible for war with Syria to be averted. Unfortunately, it appears that a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Syria is extremely unlikely.


Assad is certainly willing to give up his chemical weapons, but he wants the US to accept a bunch of concessions that it will never agree to. And it certainly sounds like the Obama administration has already decided that “diplomacy” is going to fail, and they continue to position military assets for the upcoming conflict with Syria. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are all going to continue to heavily pressure the Obama administration. They have invested a huge amount of time and resources into the conflict in Syria, and they desperately want the US military to intervene. Fortunately, overwhelming domestic and global opposition to an attack on Syria has slowed down the march toward war for the moment, but unfortunately that probably will not be enough to stop it completely. The following are ten reasons why war is almost certainly coming…

#1 Assad wants a guarantee that he will not be attacked by the United States or by anyone else before he will give up his chemical weapons.

That is extremely unlikely to happen.

#2 Assad is not going to agree to any chemical weapons deal unless the US stops giving weapons to al-Qaeda terrorists and other jihadist rebels that are fighting against the Syrian government.

That is extremely unlikely to happen.

In fact, according to the Washington Post, the US has been ramping up the delivery of weapons to jihadist rebels in Syria…

The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to US officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear - a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the US role in Syria’s civil war.

#3 Assad is suggesting that the Israelis should give up their weapons of mass destruction.

That is extremely unlikely to happen.

#4 The Syrian “rebels” desperately want the US military to intervene in the war in Syria. In fact, that was the entire reason for the false flag chemical weapon attack in the first place.

The “top rebel commander” is now declaring that the Free Syrian Army “categorically rejects the Russian initiative”, and he is calling on the United States to strike the Assad regime immediately.

#5 Saudi Arabia desperately wants the US military to intervene in Syria. The Saudis have spent billions of dollars to support the rebels in Syria, and they have been lobbying very hard for an attack.

#6 Qatar desperately wants the US military to intervene in Syria. Qatar has also spent billions of dollars to support the rebels in Syria, and it has been reported that “Arab countries” have even offered to pay for all of the costs of a US military operation that would remove Assad.

#7 Turkey has wanted a war which would remove Assad for a very long time. And CNN is reporting that Turkey has moved troops to the border with Syria in anticipation of an upcoming attack.

#8 Many members of the US Congress want this war. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are virtually foaming at the mouth, and Robert Menendez, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that he “almost wanted to vomit” after reading Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plea for peace in the New York Times.

#9 Obama does not want to look weak, and he seems absolutely obsessed with starting a war with Syria. For the moment, he has been backed into a corner diplomatically by Russia, but the Obama administration is already laying the groundwork for making it look like “diplomacy has failed”. According to CNN, US Secretary of State John Kerry is already talking about the “consequences” that will happen when the Syria deal falls apart…

Any agreement reached must be “comprehensive,” “verifiable,” “credible” and “able to be implemented in a timely fashion,” Kerry said, adding that “there ought to be consequences if it doesn’t take place.”

#10 There have been reports that US soldiers are now receiving orders to deploy to Syria. For example, the following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson…

For the moment, Obama and Kerry will dance around and make it look like they are considering peace. They will try to get Congress to authorize a strike “if diplomacy fails.”

But they already know that diplomacy is going to fail. Once they are ready, Obama will declare that the conditions for war set forth in the congressional authorization have been fulfilled and then he will start raining cruise missiles down on Syria.

[PAULYPOKER]

Obama Cherry-picking evil




“Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them.”


Why does the president need to address a classroom full of third-graders?

On Tuesday night - hallelujah - he stepped back from the brink of war, but in his address to the nation he spent most of his time justifying his earlier aggression toward Syria, detailing the Assad government’s single, heinous deviation from the civilized norms of war.

The ever-fresh PR stratagem of war is to cherry-pick an example of evil behavior on the part of the designated enemy and rally the outrage against it, never, never looking inward at one’s own behavior, and in our ignorance bonding as a clan or a nation or whatever in our determination to destroy the perpetrator of said evil.

A little over a decade ago, just after we launched our shock-and-awe bombing campaign against Iraq, I wrote: “Pro-war logic ultimately undergoes a mysterious transformation - from a moral absolutism condemning Saddam to a moral relativism justifying the use of MOABs and daisy cutters and even first-strike nukes, if necessary, to get rid of him. Some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet have no problem with the slaughter of civilians.”

So Barack Obama, in his role as president, belies both his own intelligence and that of - my guess - most of his constituents when he asks us to play along with the game. Yes, poison gas is a ghastly evil (though who actually used it in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta remains uncertain), but what a ruse to muster all one’s outrage over images of “men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk” - and then use that outrage as the pretext to justify counter-actions on our part that are equally indiscriminate in their delivery of hell to the same people.

Virtually every aspect of modern warfare fits the description Obama drew as a sort of “red line” of bad behavior: the use of weaponry that kills on a mass scale, making no distinction between soldier and infant. We are, after all, the nation that developed nuclear weapons and, over the next half century, spent some $5.5 trillion playing arms race with the Soviet Union and, ultimately, with no one at all. We’re still developing further generations of “tactical” nukes, bleeding more than $30 billion annually into this insanity.

The point being, Mr. President, yes, yes, we feel the outrage of Syria’s horrific civil war, and no, we’re not content doing nothing about that or any other massacre taking place on the planet, whether perpetrated by ally or designated enemy. But we’re sick of the inane “solutions” mouthed by tyrants and presidents that do nothing but perpetuate the hell of war and feed the hidden interests of its corporate profiteers. Your decision to step back from the brink of an intervention-lite in Syria is worth celebrating, but spare us the “God bless America” that’s backed by Tomahawk missiles and, ultimately, nuclear weapons, and address the nation and the world with courage about how we’ll take the lead to end war itself.

As Sarah van Gelder wrote last week in Yes! Magazine: “Instead of launching an assault on Syria, the United States could lead a ‘coalition of the willing’ in rebuilding the tattered foundation of international law.”

Van Gelder’s excellent essay, on alternatives to military strikes in Syria, addresses a profound void in the public and political imagination: If there’s trouble, the only appropriate - “real” - response is a violent one. If you don’t show the bad guy who’s boss, whoa, watch out, wimp!

And this leads to the idolatry of uncritical “weapons worship,” a staple of mainstream media coverage of all matters military, especially during, but not limited to, times of war buildup. For instance: “The Tomahawk cruise missile is standard equipment on U.S. Navy destroyers and cruisers, but it is reserved for the most serious occasions. The United States fired them at Libya in March 2011 and before that during the ‘shock and awe’ campaign at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. . . .

“They carry a 1,000-pound warhead to ‘soften’ land targets and make way for manned aircraft runs and, if necessary, ground troops.”

This story, which ran last week in the San Diego Union-Tribune, describes how awesome and humbling it is to be the captain of a ship that fires off a Tomahawk in a real battle, but avoids the least reflection on the consequences of doing so - on what happens when it lands. Maybe these million-dollar, thousand pound behemoths “can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant,” but when we do it, we’re simply softening up the land targets.

And this is all Obama wanted to do, but the plan, instead of being met with a public shrug, encountered a shockwave of opposition. The normal marketing strategies didn’t work. Then the Russians made a geopolitical chess move, suggesting that Syria surrender its chemical weapons stockpile to international control, and Obama announced: “I have therefore asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path.”

As David Swanson put it, “Out of whatever combination of factors, it just may turn out that we’ve stopped a war. Which means that we can stop another war. Which means that we can begin to work our way out of the war machine that has eaten our economy, our civil liberties, our natural environment, and our soul.”

It’s written off as war weariness or Republican spleen toward Obama, but there’s another factor as well: an intelligently angry slice of the American public that sees through war itself and will no longer buy into the sales job that precedes it. As this constituency grows, the public imagination will begin to open to the endless possibilities for conflict resolution and transformation that exist beyond war.

AGB/AGB