UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan announced on Monday that a new framework has been reached with President Bashar Assad to end the violence in Syria. “We agreed on an approach which I will share with the armed opposition,” Annan said following a two-hour meeting with Assad which he described as “candid and constructive.”
Annan’s efforts to broker an end to the Syrian conflict have unravelled in recent months, as the uprising that began with peaceful protests in March 2011 has spiralled towards civil war. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that 17,129 Syrians have been killed in the last 16 months, including 11,897 civilians.
Annan’s optimism follows his acknowledgement Saturday in an interview with the French daily Le Monde that the international community’s attempts to find a political solution to the escalating violence in Syria have failed. As per his new plan, then? Annan reportedly will focus on long-time Syrian ally Iran, which he believes “should be part of the solution.”
Annan arrived in Tehran late Monday for related talks.
Despite previously agreeing to a series of peace proposals, the Assad regime has repeatedly ignored its commitments and instead continued to wage a brutal crackdown on dissent. There is little evidence that Annan’s latest effort will promote a different result.
ANNAN’S FAILURE
Editorial
Daily Star (Lebanon), July 9, 2012
Kofi Annan’s return to Damascus on Sunday adds insult to injury after his admission over the weekend that his peace plan for Syria has failed. Since the U.N.-Arab League envoy’s six-point plan was apparently introduced in April, activists say some 4,000 more people have been killed, bringing the total to around 17,000.
The cease-fire that it called for has been ignored by both sides on a daily basis, and the 300 observers who are currently in the country are rarely even allowed to leave their hotel rooms due to violence outside their doors.
Reaching a conclusion the rest of the world had seemingly already arrived at, Annan this weekend admitted that, “Evidently, we have not succeeded.” But rather than follow that admission up with an announcement that the mission will cease operations, surely the next logical step, Annan actually returns to the scene of the crime, to continue flogging this dead horse.
The observer mission, which will already go down as a black mark on the history of the United Nations, has no purpose in Syria. Undeniably, it was to face huge challenges but it has proven incapable of improving the situation on the ground in any tangible way, instead actually bearing witness to one of the bloodiest periods in the now 16-month-long uprising.
Whether due to miscalculations, personal political ambitions, or a mixture of both, the mission has now become an accomplice in the enduring regime-sponsored destruction of Syria and its people. And the sooner the U.N. withdraws the mission, the better, for this act might finally prompt the international community to sit up and create alternative, effective methods to end the massacres.…
Appeals to the regime, and to President Bashar Assad himself, whom Annan met Sunday evening, are no longer enough. A regime which kills its own people, destroys its cities, ruins its economy, makes refugees of its citizens and which can count its remaining international friends on one hand, is not a regime which will make compromises and agree to concede power.
The Syrian government has shown no indication that it has any intention to veer from its own “security solution,” and yet Annan seems to think he can politely discuss a cease-fire in Damascus. If his failed six-point plan has achieved anything, it is to prove, once and for all, that the regime is prepared to fight to retain power, at any cost.
If anything is to be salvaged from Annan’s meaningless six-point plan now, it is vital for the international community to take his admission of failure as a cue to introduce a new round of measures against the Assad regime, and measures which actually hurt the regime, not merely tickle it.
This dictatorship has persisted for 40 years now, and if the necessary steps are not taken by world powers, it is not impossible that it will continue its killing and its burning until it feels the next 40 years are guaranteed.
A SCAPEGOAT FOR SYRIA?
Editorial
Washington Post, July 6, 2012
It was just a week ago that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cheerfully reported that Russia was ready to “lean” on the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad as part of a new United Nations plan for a transitional government. “They have told me that,” she assured one interviewer following a June 30 conference in Geneva. “They’ve decided to get on one horse, and it’s the horse that would back a transition plan that Kofi Annan would be empowered to implement,” she told another.
Oops. It immediately became clear that Moscow had no such intention. In the past week, the official Ms. Clinton cited as her source—Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov—has said repeatedly that his government will not pressure Mr. Assad to leave power. “This is either an unscrupulous attempt to mislead serious people who shape foreign policy or simply a misunderstanding of what is going on,” Mr. Lavrov said [last] Thursday. Western policy, he added, “is most likely to exacerbate the situation, lead to further violence and ultimately a very big war.”
At yet another [“Friends of Syria”] conference in Paris [last] Friday, Ms. Clinton had changed her tune. Now she is accusing Russia and China of “blockading” progress on Syria, insisting that is “no longer tolerable” and warning that they “will pay a price.” She pleaded with participating governments to lobby Vladimir Putin to change course. This raises an interesting question: Was Ms. Clinton taken in by Mr. Lavrov? Or did she know all along that the new U.N. plan she has been promoting was stillborn?
Either way, the Obama administration’s Syria diplomacy is making it look foolish as well as feckless. U.S. officials, apart perhaps from Ms. Clinton, appear to have no faith in their own policy. Conceding that the plan to appoint a transitional government is going nowhere, while Syrians die by the score every day, they resort to blaming Russia—as if they are shocked to discover that the Kremlin doesn’t want to support a pro-Western, pro-democracy agenda.
In fact Mr. Putin’s intransigence was entirely predictable. Apart from the fact that the Assad regime is a long-time Russian client and arms purchaser, the KGB-trained strongman seethes at the notion of Western intervention to support a popular revolution against a dictator. Blocking such action—and being seen to do so—is his overriding priority. The more Ms. Clinton blames him for “blockading,” the more Mr. Putin preens.
The administration does have reason to pretend that Russia is cooperating or can be induced to do so. Were it to acknowledge that that cause is hopeless—and that action at the United Nations is therefore impossible—it might come under pressure to consider other measures. One would be the protection of an rebel safe zone in northern Syria, which could help turn the military tide against the regime. The Turkish government reportedly proposed—again—at a NATO meeting last week that preparations for such a step be made. According to the Hurriyet newspaper, the idea was rejected by the United States, among others.
So which government is preventing effective action on Syria, and which will pay the price? Ms. Clinton’s attempt to pin the blame on Russia looks like a diversion.
The following is excerpted from Barry Rubin’s July 4 article,
titled “Extra! Extra! World Agrees On How To Solve Syrian Civil War!”,
describing the outcome of the June 30 international conference on the Syrian crisis.
Here it is at last. The perfect case study of the “international community’s” diplomacy on the Middle East, as quoted from a Wall Street Journal article describing efforts to resolve the Syria conflict. And the article has the perfect headline, too! “World Powers Reach Syria Compromise.”
So the problem is solved, right? Below find the stunning solution:
“An international meeting in Geneva on Syria’s crisis agreed, with support from Russia, to support a political transition. However, officials at the meeting said any chance for a political transition to succeed rests on the willingness of the Syrian regime to cooperate.”
That’s right! The powers have agreed to a transition to a new government which will go into effect as soon as the current dictatorship agrees to be overthrown and its rulers flee for their lives and watch their supporters probably be massacred. Perhaps the world will then install a new Islamist government in Syria, forcing it down the throats of the real democratic opposition, which will be dedicated to spreading revolution and striking against Western interests. And the opposition isn’t happy about being asked to leave the regime in power until the dictatorship decides to step down.
Isn’t diplomacy wonderful?…
WHY RUSSIA IS BACKING SYRIA
Ruslan Pukhov
NY Times, July 6, 2012
Many in the West believe that Russia’s support for Syria stems from Moscow’s desire to profit from selling arms to Bashar Assad’s government and maintain its naval facility at the Syrian port of Tartus. But these speculations are superficial and misguided. The real reason that Russia is resisting strong international action against the Assad regime is that it fears the spread of Islamic radicalism and the erosion of its superpower status.…
Since 2005, Russian defense contracts with Syria have amounted to only about $5.5 billion—mostly to modernize Syria’s air force and air defenses.… Syria is among Russia’s significant customers, but it is by no means one of the key buyers of Russian arms—accounting for just 5 percent of Russia’s global arms sales in 2011. Indeed, Russia has long refrained from supplying Damascus with the most powerful weapons systems so as to avoid angering Israel and the West—sometimes to the detriment of Russia’s commercial and political ties with Syria. To put it plainly, arms sales to Syria today do not have any significance for Russia from either a commercial or a military-technological standpoint.…
The Russian Navy’s logistical support facility at Tartus is similarly unimportant. It essentially amounts to two floating moorings, a couple of warehouses, a barracks and a few buildings. On shore, there are no more than 50 seamen.… Tartus has more symbolic than practical significance. It can’t serve as a support base for deploying naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea, and even visits by Russian military ships are carried out more for demonstrative purposes than out of any real need to replenish supplies.
Russia’s current Syria policy basically boils down to supporting the Assad government and preventing a foreign intervention aimed at overthrowing it, as happened in Libya. President Vladimir Putin is simply channelling public opinion…while playing his customary role as the protector of Russian interests who curtails the wilfulness of the West.
Many Russians believe that the collapse of the Assad government would be tantamount to the loss of Russia’s last client and ally in the Middle East and the final elimination of traces of former Soviet prowess there—illusory as those traces may be. They believe that Western intervention in Syria (which Russia cannot counter militarily) would be an intentional profanation of one of the few remaining symbols of Russia’s status as a great world power.
Such attitudes are further buttressed by widespread pessimism about the eventual outcome of the Arab Spring, and the Syrian revolution in particular. Most Russian observers believe that Arab revolutions have completely destabilized the region and cleared the road to power for the Islamists. In Moscow, secular authoritarian governments are seen as the sole realistic alternative to Islamic dominance.…
There is no doubt that preserving his own power is also on Mr. Putin’s mind as his authoritarian government begins to wobble in the face of growing protests that enjoy political approval and support from the West. He cannot but sympathize with Mr. Assad as a fellow autocratic ruler struggling with outside interference in domestic affairs.
But ideological solidarity is a secondary factor at best. Mr. Putin is capitalizing on traditional Russian suspicions of the West, and his support for Mr. Assad is based on the firm conviction that an Islamist-led revolution in Syria, especially one that receives support through the intervention of Western and Arab states, will seriously harm Russia’s long-term interests.
(Ruslan Pukhov is publisher of the Moscow Defense Brief.)
TURKISH AND ISRAELI MILITARY ALERTS
SHOW RISKS OF WIDER SYRIAN WAR
Matt Gurney
National Post, June 29, 2012
Perhaps the only real practical argument that can be made for Western intervention in Syria is that civil wars have a nasty habit of jumping borders and simply becoming wars. As Syria’s vicious crackdown on an armed insurgency continues, and violence spreads to the capital of Damascus, its neighbours are becoming increasingly wary. This is especially true given last [month]’s shoot-down of a Turkish reconnaissance plane near Syrian airspace.…
That is not to deny that there are moral or humanitarian reasons for getting involved in Syria. The regime of Bashar Assad has long been brutal, and having seen what befell other leaders who did not react with sufficient swiftness to the Arab Spring (Tunisia and Egypt being notable examples), it has found it within itself to be even more brutal as it tries to crush an uprising that would otherwise be likely to sweep it from power. This has involved using military forces and heavy weapons in civilian areas, directly targeting Western journalists and using state-supported militaries outside the formal military chain of command to attack civilian populations in areas under (or believed to be under) the sway of the rebellion. Torture, executions and rape are reported to be rampant in Syria’s detention facilities, where enemies of the regime—real or imagined—are being held by the thousands.
Any of these things would be sufficient moral reason for someone to come along and clobber Assad…if it ended there. But it doesn’t. Syria’s advanced military forces would not be a pushover as is often the case when international humanitarian interventions are being considered abroad in a Third World country. It would require a powerful and sophisticated military force to overwhelm the Syrian forces with the speed and firepower needed to keep casualties, on all sides, to an acceptable level. Effectively, only NATO could do it, or the U.S., alone or with coalition partners.… And even that is not guaranteed.…
Yet the West cannot afford to turn a blind eye to what is happening in the region beyond Syria’s borders. Turkey has already skirmished with its neighbour, losing a plane and two aircrew in the process. It is currently moving anti-aircraft weapons and armoured ground units to its border with Syria, warning that any Syrian military forces that approach the Turkish frontier will be fired upon on sight. Fighting has already spilled over the border into Lebanon on several occasions. Syrian military forces have conducted offensive operations against the rebels in close proximity to its land border with Western-aligned Jordan. And, of course, Israel is closing watching its always tense frontier with Syria.
Any of these borders could easily become a flashpoint, if, for example, Syrian military forces crossed any of these borders to pursue fleeing or regrouping rebels, or if two military units, each on their side of the border, “bumped” into each other. This is what happens when countries mobilize their forces and push them into border areas. It doesn’t take much to set off the shooting.
On the face of it, Syria has nothing much to gain from adding a conventional border war to the civil war its already fighting. But it’s far from clear that the central government in Damascus is even fully in control of its armed forces—armed forces, it must be said, that possess one of the largest chemical weapon stockpiles in the world. NATO and the West may not see any reason to get involved in a Syrian civil war. But they can’t ignore the possibility that a civil war that began in one country could quickly begin to suck in all the neighbours.…
SYRIA IS THE NEW SINAI
Yaakov Katz
Jerusalem Post, June 29, 2012
A few weeks ago, Syrian civilians broke into a UN peacekeeping post along the border with Israel. The civilians came to steal supplies, but in Israel, the event—which would have been unheard of a year ago—was noted with extreme interest as another sign that President Bashar Assad was losing control over his country.
An even further sign is the increase in the number of land mines being dug up by Syrian civilians near the border and thrown into Israel. Since the beginning of the year, six mines have been thrown into the country, compared to two in 2011 and zero the year before.
All of this adds up to a dire assessment within the IDF Northern Command that Syria is on its way to becoming something of a “hybrid” state where Assad will continue to control some parts—particularly main metropolitan areas like Damascus and Aleppo—but will lose control over other parts like Hauran, an area in the southwest along the border with Israel.
For this reason, the IDF…is focused on preparing for scenarios it believes could evolve over the coming months, with an eye on the increase in the presence of global jihad elements in Syria and their potential involvement in attacks against Israel.
The change for the IDF is significant.
One place where that change is apparent is along a section of the border in the central Golan Heights where for years the IDF had invested in creating obstacles to prevent Syrian tanks from crossing into the country. Today, the military is creating obstacles aimed at preventing people from infiltrating the border, as part of an understanding that the new threat is one of guerrillas and terrorism.
This is a lesson from what has happened along one of the country’s other active fronts today—the Sinai, which also used to be under the control of a regime (Hosni Mubarak) but today is a lawless territory where terrorists appear to run free.…
The fighting between [Syrian] rebels and the military is not yet directly along the border with Israel, but it is not far, reaching places like Deraa—a mere 11 km. from Israel.…
