Syria - Please Do What You Can Now to Halt this Rush to War

[Independent]

Actually that's a brilliant step to enable Bashar to stay and continue on his agenda!

By the Russians, yes. Why does everyone always talk about the Americans when they're not the key players in this scenario?

Any votes in the U.N can be vetoed by Russia and that would take the edge off the U.S they still come out the good guys when they're all devils!

This episode has already caused the Obama administration considerable problems and no political advantage. I wonder if perhaps you have heard of the Cold War? It would be worth googling a few details. I feel you should know, the US and Russia have not exactly been best buddies over the last 70 years.

 

[جوري]

By the Russians, yes. Why does everyone always talk about the Americans when they're not the key players in this scenario?

They don't need to be key players, they just need to be players.

I wonder if perhaps you have heard of the Cold War?

Thank God for your presence here and 'marie' to point out historical, political and philosophical nuggets that us enshrouded cavemen and women have never heard of!
The U.S isn't best buddies with Iran either overtly so but they also share a common agenda. You don't need to be simpatico in creed and style to share common grounds.

 

[Independent]

The U.S isn't best buddies with Iran either overtly so but they also share a common agenda

I'm always reading here that everything is a supposed to be secret US plan to target Iran (because Americans are closet Sunnis perhaps). But you say the US is in fact in cahoots with Iran! What agenda is this?

 

[Berries'forest]

About the chemical weapons thingy..what I don't understand is why the 'international community' or western alliance showing concern over 'what kinds of weapons being used' for killing innocent people more than the killing of people itself. So, does it make it right or okay if people were being killed just without the use of chemical weapons?. So just as long as the Asad regimine don't use chemical weapons the killing is of less concern...?

 

[جوري]

I'm always reading here that everything is a supposed to be secret US plan to target Iran (because Americans are closet Sunnis perhaps). But you say the US is in fact in cahoots with Iran! What agenda is this?

I don't think anything is a secret really. Your ignorance doesn't equate to secrecy.
If you want to learn about the matter you may go to your library here's a good read on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/Treacherous-A...835514&sr=8-1&keywords=a+treacherous+alliance

 

[WarriorforMarie]

I don't think anything is a secret really. Your ignorance doesn't equate to secrecy.
If you want to learn about the matter you may go to your library here's a good read on the subject:

This is actually a good book, I recommend it.

 

[WarriorforMarie]

Thank God for your presence here and 'marie' to point out historical, political and philosophical nuggets that us enshrouded cavemen and women have never heard of!

I should point out that I'm not Marie. My id is WarriorforMarie. I am the Warrior who fights on her behalf.

 

[WarriorforMarie]

The west is very happy with despots ruling over Muslims, they're also very happy with Muslims specifically Sunnis dying any which way and the 4th generation style war where the nation eats itself from within is their best bet for now!

Admittedly, there are many in the United States who believe we should simply stand aside and allow the two sides to kill as many of each other as possible. I cannot deny that on advantage the United States has vis-a-vis the Islamic World is the latter's inclination to tear itself apart over seemingly trivial differences in religion. I understand that differences between Sunni and Shia probably seem pretty big to some Muslims, but from a Western perspective it is baffling in a way. Both sides are Muslim!!!!

 

[WarriorforMarie]

Well, I hope the United States doesn't put ground troops into Syria. It certainly was a waste of time, money and lives for the United States to go into Iraq. The Muslim Middle East is far behind the rest of the world in political development that it is ridiculous trying to build democracy there. I suppose I do prefer for the Assad regime to fall though. By removing Saddam the United States allowed Iraq to fall into the Iranian sphere of influence, we need to balance things out by removing Syria from Iranian influence. Of course if that moron George W. Bush hadn't taken us into Iraq we wouldn't have to balance things out because Iraq would still be an Iranian enemy and we could leave the Assad regime in place.

 

[جوري]

that it is ridiculous trying to build democracy there.

The U.S has proven that it has no interest in democracy east or west and as the Arabic adage goes 'faqid ashya la yo3teeh' all it is, is about the system they want and it doesn't matter to them who runs that system or under what title it falls just so long as it prevails!


best,

 

[Independent]

Good news - Assad is to get his chance to disarm his chemical weapons voluntarily:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24043751
Hopefully this will not turn out to be a delaying strategy. If it is, it will damage all such negotiations in the future, as well as the Syrian situation.

It is a much better outcome than a strike because, if the agreement is honoured, it stands a chance of removing such weapons from the region totally. Whereas a strike could only have hoped to destroy a small percentage of the capacity and risked spreading what remained into even worse hands.

It also makes a nonsense of that subset of conspiracy theories which claimed Obama couldn't wait to invade Syria and/or Iran (if they weren't such a nonsense anyway).

 

[Taabuu]

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take action to save Syria's children by signing the petition

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http://www.avaaz.org/en/syria_will_the_world_look_away_c/?cl=1838929184&v=14806


Posted: 28 May 2012

The pictures from Al Houla, Syria, last Friday are almost too brutal to look at. I have a 5 year old daughter and I know it's only luck of birth that separates her from this horror. But my shock led me to write this today as I know there is something we can all do together to stop this.

Dozens of children lie covered with blood, their faces show the fear they felt before death, and their innocent lifeless bodies reveal an unspeakable massacre. These children were slaughtered by men under strict orders to sow terror. Yet all the diplomats have come up with so far is a few UN monitors 'observing' the violence. Now, governments across the world are expelling Syrian ambassadors, but unless we demand strong action on the ground, they will settle for these diplomatic half-measures.

The UN is discussing what to do right now. If there were a large international presence across Syria with a mandate to protect civilians, we could prevent the massacres while leaders engage in political efforts to resolve the conflict. I cannot see more images like these without shouting from the rooftops. But to stop the violence, it is going to take all of us, with one voice, demanding protection for these kids and their families. Sign the urgent petition on the right to call for UN action now and share this campaign with everyone.

Alice Jay, Campaign Director
Tell Your Friends


Right now governments are deciding what to do. The more of us join this call, the stronger it becomes! Please help spread the word using the Facebook and Email tools below and forward the original email from Avaaz!

for the tools, go to their website :
http://www.avaaz.org/en/syria_will_the_world_look_away_c/?cl=1838929184&v=14806http://www.avaaz.org/en/syria_will_the_world_look_away_c/?cl=1838929184&v=14806

: I do not deem this a political post but a humanitarian one.

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[IAmZamzam]

Independent, come now.

THERE'S ALMOST NO CHANCE RUSSIA'S PLAN FOR SYRIA'S CHEMICAL WEAPONS COULD WORK

Russia's proposal for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to place his chemical weapons under international supervision and then destroy them is quickly gaining steam. Assad's government accepted the plan this morning. A few hours later, President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande announced that they'd seriously explore the proposal. It already has the backing of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and a growing number of influential lawmakers from both parties. There's just one problem: the plan would be nearly impossible to actually carry out.

Experts in chemical weapons disposal point to a host of challenges. Taking control of Assad's enormous stores of the munitions would be difficult to do in the midst of a brutal civil war. Dozens of new facilities for destroying the weapons would have to be built from scratch or brought into the country from the U.S., and completing the job would potentially take a decade or more. The work itself would need to be done by specially-trained military personnel or contractors. Guess which country has most of those troops and civilian experts? If you said the U.S., you'd be right.

"This isn't simply burning the leaves in your backyard," said Mike Kuhlman, the chief scientist for national security at Battelle, a company that has been involved in chemical weapons disposal work at several sites in the U.S. "It's not something you do overnight, it's not easy, and it's not cheap."

The decades-long U.S. push to eliminate its own chemical weapons stockpiles illustrates the tough road ahead if Washington and Damascus come to a deal. The Army organization responsible for destroying America's massive quantities of munitions says the effort will take two years longer than initially planned and cost $2 billion more than its last estimate. The delay means an effort that got underway in the 1990s will continue until roughly 2023 and ultimately cost approximately $35 billion.

To be fair, the U.S. stockpiles were far larger than Assad's. At its height, the American military possessed 30,000 metric tons of mustard gas, VX and sarin, the nerve agent Assad is alleged to have used to kill more than 1,400 civilians late last month. Assad has similar weapons, but his arsenal is thought to be significantly smaller. On the other hand, the U.S. chemical weapons were stored at just a handful of sites. Assad's have been disbursed across dozens of sites, many of them moveable, so locating all of the facilities would require the complete cooperation of the Assad regime. That, to put it mildly, is far from guaranteed.

Gwyn Winfield, the editorial director of CBRNe World, a magazine that focuses on biological and chemical weapons, said the success of the Russian proposal "depends on Assad making an honest declaration of where his munitions are" because the personnel charged with destroying those weapons can only work at sites they know about. Assad, he noted, would have a clear incentive to hold on to as much of his stockpile as possible.

"The reason why they created this program in the first place was as a deterrent to the expected Israeli nuclear option," he said. "That isn't going to go away."

Finding and securing all of Assad's sites would be the first major challenge of implementing the Russian plan, but it would be far from the only one. The U.S. and allied personnel would then have to separate the chemical substances themselves from the warheads of his rockets, artillery shells or missiles that had been designed to carry them to their targets. The work itself would be carried out by either robots, contractors or specially-trained troops, but it would still be time-consuming and dangerous.

The next step would be to physically destroy all of chemical weapons, which can be done through one of two basic options. The first involves spraying the chemicals themselves into specialized furnaces and then burning them at around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for one or two seconds. Nerve agents like sarin can also be rendered largely harmless by the addition of liquid sodium hydroxide, while mustard gas can be made safe with alkaline water.

Kuhlman and other experts say that either type of destruction would have to be done at individual Syrian weapons sites because it wouldn't be safe to move the munitions to a centralized collection point inside Syria while the fighting was raging. That would mean either building a new permanent disposal facility at each Syrian compound or bringing in newly-fielded mobile disposal units from the U.S. The mobile systems have not been tested in an active warzone and may not have the capacity to deal with Assad’s huge quantities of weapons.

"Do you really want to have truckloads of chemical weapons driving around Syria during the current situation?" Kuhlman asked.

A senior Defense Department chemical weapons specialist raised a different concern. The official said the biggest security challenge would be keeping the weapons safe while they were in storage waiting to be destroyed, not while they were being moved.

“Does an insurgent group attack a heavily armed convoy of chemical weapons moving from one or more sites to a disposal facility, with lots of response plans and forces on call, or does it wait until the weapons are moved and the nasty military units go away and the disposal operations start,” the official said. “The easier target is the disposal facility.”

The official said a safer option might involve moving the weapons out of Syria entirely and doing the disposal work in a safer and more secure country.

Cheryl Rofer, who supervised a team responsible for destroying chemical warfare agents at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said none of the work could be carried out until there was a full cease-fire between Assad and the rebels fighting to unseat him. There are no indications, she noted, that either side was prepared to come to the negotiating table or wind down a civil war that has already been raging for more than two years.

"This is simply dangerous to do while people are shooting at each other," she said.

Libya, the most recent country to embark on a chemical weapon destruction effort, offers another cautionary tale. Tripoli declared its possession of the weapons in January 2004 and voluntarily promised to get rid of them. In November 2011, the Libyan government abruptly declared that it had found a "previously undeclared chemical weapons stockpile" that included several hundred munitions loaded with mustard gas. The destruction of those weapons was halted because of a technical malfunction at the disposal facility and is still not complete. Nine years after vowing to get rid of its weapons, Libya has destroyed barely half of its total mustard gas stockpile and just 40% of its stores of chemical weapons precursor elements.

Rofer noted that Syria has far more chemical weapons than Libya, so getting rid of them could take even longer. "I wouldn't be surprised to see this last as long as ten years," she said.

If the U.S. and Syria came to a deal -- a very, very big if -- there would still be one major wrinkle. Rofer said that the only two organizations who really know how to get rid of chemical weapons are the Russia and American militaries. Given the amount of time it would take to build and then operate the disposal facilities, those specially-trained troops would need to stay in Syria for years. In a war-weary U.S., keeping that many boots on the ground for that long would be an extremely hard sell.

(Source: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/p...an_plan_for_syrias_chemical_weapons_will_work)

Besides, even the article you cited makes it sound fairly doubtful for various reasons.

 

[Independent]

Besides, even the article you cited makes it sound fairly doubtful for various reasons.

I don't think anyone's seriously expecting 100% perfection in the short term. But voluntary chemical disarmament is better than anything else. For starters, the Syrians actually know where the weapons are hiding. The weapons are not in rebel territory, they are under government control (at least, no one has claimed otherwise). If the Syrians are sincere (admittedly a big 'if') then they should be able to do the job over time. The problem is not elimination, but verification.

Most of all, it offers the real prospect that the government won't actually use the weapons again - which is surely the best possible outcome in the short term. If Syria claims to have eliminated the weapons, but then uses them, not even the Russians could save them from attack.

Longer term it means that another very significant country has abandoned chemical weapons and sets a great precedent for the Egyptians and others to follow suit. There really will be a 'red line' against chemical weapons.

Compare that to the only other alternative - a US bombing campaign that absolutely no one, not even the most die-hard hawk, thinks will hit all the weapons. And which may well provoke Assad to use the weapons again.

How is that not a better outcome? What other possible options are there? The only negative is for those who wish to see an American attack because they want to see the end of Assad (which doesn't look like it's going to happen any other way).

 

[IAmZamzam]

Nobody was speaking of mere verification. And I hadn't even mentioned how Kerry admitted to the impossibility of the demand he was making (and then nervously recanted the comment without a legitimate excuse).

"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 a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

(Source: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/per...yria-strike-gaffe-may-spur-breakthrough-.html)

No "mystery" there. Sometimes a man lets more of his true leanings and intentions slip than he means to, that's all.

 

[Independent]

No "mystery" there. Sometimes a man lets more of his true leanings and intentions slip than he means to, that's all.

This deal has come about in a strange way, through a random remark by Kerry. But however it began it's in the process of happening, so who cares?

Kerry seems to have been given the 'bad cop' role in the push to drum up support for war. Whether his rhetoric comes from personal conviction, or because that's his brief, I don't know. But he has been well ahead of Obama in the strength of his language. I've always felt that Obama is reticent about war and made the 'red line' speech because he thought that would be enough to stop the use of chemical weapons. Having had his bluff called, he then felt obliged to act tough. The current situation is a way out.

No matter about the political background, it still seems to me the best outcome under the circumstances (except for those who want regime change and those rebels that hoped for assistance). However long it takes to actually destroy these weapons, from the moment Syria signs up to this deal it becomes incredibly hard for them to use them again. Military action would be certain, and not just by the US - even the UK might come back into play. Assad cannot renege on such a promise without expecting the worst consequences.

Better still, it creates a hugely significant worldwide precedent for chemical disarmament. What other possible outcome could be better than this? I genuinely can't think of one.

 

[IAmZamzam]

Independent, your thinking always seems to be plagued by this same one problem, and it makes it increasingly harder for anyone to communicate with you about anything remotely political. Namely, you appear to define “conspiracy theory” as any viewpoint of any kind whatsoever, under the sun, which attributes an ulterior motive, under any circumstances at all (at the very least not long in retrospect), to a human being who’s in a position of authority. Basically if anyone should ever dare to suggest that the powers-that-be anywhere are fudging and distorting and hiding things, or even grossly enough understating or euphemizing their true reasons for doing something—in other words, whenever anybody has the sense to claim that a politician is being a politician—you shrug this off as being, to some extent or other, comparable to 9/11 trutherism and the moon landing hoax community or the people who believe that Elvis is still alive somewhere and living in a trailer park in Waco. Evidently there’s some little voice in your subconscious (don’t get me wrong, this is a very repressed voice you will deny) which always tells you that the only people on Earth who never lie about what they’re up to are the people who have the most obvious and pressing incentives to do so. Or is there a one in five chance that there are a few countries where you wouldn’t be pulling this stunt? Are there maybe a few countries, or a few politicians, besides Kerry who could have spoken those same exact words without you responding with, “There’s no way to know for sure what they indicate, and who cares anyway?” What exactly is going on here?

 

[Independent]

Namely, you appear to define “conspiracy theory” as any viewpoint of any kind whatsoever, under the sun, which attributes an ulterior motive, under any circumstances at all (at the very least not long in retrospect), to a human being who’s in a position of authority

I'm confused - are you suggesting there is a conspiracy with regard to this offer? I've re-read your post and I'm not sure which part of the offer you don't believe, or who you think is deceiving who, and about what.

 

[Trumble]

No matter about the political background, it still seems to me the best outcome under the circumstances (except for those who want regime change and those rebels that hoped for assistance). However long it takes to actually destroy these weapons, from the moment Syria signs up to this deal it becomes incredibly hard for them to use them again. Military action would be certain, and not just by the US - even the UK might come back into play. Assad cannot renege on such a promise without expecting the worst consequences.

Better still, it creates a hugely significant worldwide precedent for chemical disarmament. What other possible outcome could be better than this? I genuinely can't think of one.

I can; peace in Syria. All this is just a carefully arranged diversion.

I can't really suggest this 'deal' is what Assad and Putin planned all along without entering 'conspiracy theory' territory, but it couldn't have worked out any better for them. While everyone messes about with face-saving diplomacy and then difficult technicality, Assad just gets on with his war free from any intervention. Other than assistance for himself from Russia and Iran, of course. The opposition in Syria, of all flavours, have been stitched up like the proverbial kipper, and must be in complete despair.

 

[IAmZamzam]

Independent, if I haven't made myself clear by now, I've apparently lost all ability to communicate whatsoever. Not that you needed me, what with the government telling the same old story with every single war now. It's getting old, and that's why people are getting cynical. How many times, I wonder, will the exact same thing have to happen in a row, with each successive presidency, before it ceases to become a "conspiracy theory" for us to notice it?