How the Gray Lady Works for the Government

This Friday Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu will confer with their American counterparts, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense of Chuck Hagel, in Washington D.C. to see if they can salvage the September presidential summit in Moscow between Putin and Obama. The main sticking point seems to be Russia's decision to grant renegade NSA contractor Edward Snowden temporary asylum. But, according to a story by Michael Shear and Steven Lee Myers that appears in today's New York Times, "Kerry, Hagel and Russians Will Meet on Issues Imperiling Obama-Putin Visit," differences over Syria loom large as well.

Towards the end of the story, after Shear and Myers have summarized the American position on Snowden's asylum, there is a description of Russia's stance on various issues, including the Syrian civil war:

[Mr. Lavrov] also discussed the need to move ahead with Syrian peace talks that he and Mr. Kerry agreed to in Moscow in May. 

“The more we delay calling it, the more victims there will be among civilians,” Mr. Lavrov said, according to the Interfax news agency. He blamed the Syrian rebels for resisting opening talks with President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

The bold facing of the last sentence is mine. I think it's noteworthy because though otherwise an innocuous statement -- it is factually accurate -- it is manipulative. There is no question that the Syrian National Coalition is opposed to peace talks. This is beyond dispute. Ahmad al-Jarba, the head of the opposition, did briefly, the weekend before last, raise the possibility of his group attending peace talks in Geneva, but then, a few days later, he corrected himself and returned to the opposition's default position: No peace talks until military gains are achieved and al-Assad steps down.

To frame this as Russians blaming the rebels for resisting negotiations is to make it seem as if it is all just tit-for-tat, "he said/she said," blame-game petulance of equally guilty squabbling parties trying to secure the upper hand. It's nothing of the sort. It's a civil war where one side -- the side the United States supports with money and munitions and CIA training -- favors war, with its resulting death and devastation, over peace. The United States position is to continue with war and death. This has to be elided somehow, obfuscated. And the Gray Lady, as an extension for the most part of the U.S. government, plays its part.

Coming on the heels of yesterday's report of Islamist rebel gains in Aleppo at the Minakh airbase and the push by ISIS into the coastal mountain Alawite villages surrounding Latakia, there is a report this morning of a government ambush of Al Nusra Front fighters outside Damascus with over 60 killed.