U.S. Says al-Assad Used Chemical Weapons

Based on a reading of this morning's story by Mark Mazzetti, Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, "U.S. Is Said to Plan to Send Weapons to Syrian Rebels," which is definitely worth checking out, yesterday's announcement that U.S. analysts have concluded that the Assad government has used poison gas and that military support for the Syrian opposition will now commence is not as dire as first imagined. It appears that Obama has only signed off on small arms and ammunition with the possibility of antitank weapons. No antiaircraft weapons will be supplied; a no-fly zone is all but ruled out.

This will please neither the Arab monarchies, nor the war pigs in the State Department and the U.S. Senate. To be charitable to Obama, a weakness to which I am susceptible, he appears to be trying to deftly defuse a lot of unseemly war lust. Reading the statement by Benjamin Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser wunderkind, one finds that it is pretty tepid. Here's the part that deals with the allegation that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian government:

Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year. Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information. The intelligence community estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks in Syria to date; however, casualty data is likely incomplete. While the lethality of these attacks make up only a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria, which now stands at more than 90,000 deaths, the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses clear red lines that have existed within the international community for decades. We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons. 

The body of information used to make this intelligence assessment includes reporting regarding Syrian officials planning and executing regime chemical weapons attacks; reporting that includes descriptions of the time, location, and means of attack; and descriptions of physiological symptoms that are consistent with exposure to a chemical weapons agent. Some open source reports from social media outlets from Syrian opposition groups and other media sources are consistent with the information we have obtained regarding chemical weapons use and exposure. The assessment is further supported by laboratory analysis of physiological samples obtained from a number of individuals, which revealed exposure to sarin. Each positive result indicates that an individual was exposed to sarin, but it does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination.

There was a prompt push back from Syria and Russia. And it is important to keep in mind that the UN fact finding mission does have evidence of rebel use of chemical weapons. We know this from Carla Del Ponte's statement in May. The portion of Rhodes' statement that deals with this is ridiculously weak. "We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons." One can easily imagine a situation where a deserter grabs a cache of canisters on his way out the door.

No, it appears that this is all just status quo. And the status quo favors the Syrian government. The opposition has no answer for the more highly motivated fighting forces of the government and its Hezbollah allies. Antitank guns will not change this; a no-fly zone would, but this does not appear to be in the offing.

An interesting portion of the Mazzetti et al. story is the growing impatience of the rancid Arab monarchies with Obama:

But the president’s caution has frayed relations with important American allies in the Middle East that have privately described the White House strategy as feckless. Saudi Arabia and Jordan recently cut the United States out of a new rebel training program, a decision that American officials said came from the belief in Riyadh and Amman that the United States has only a tepid commitment to supporting rebel groups. 

Moreover, the United Arab Emirates declined to host a meeting of allied defense officials to discuss Syria, concerned that in the absence of strong American leadership the conference might degenerate into bickering and finger-pointing among various gulf nations with different views on the best ways to support the rebellion.

It's safe to assume that Obama's approval of small arms will be followed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar moving to provide the jihadi heavier weapons.

On top of this there is the filthy spectacle of the flaccid Bill Clinton doing his Gulf paymasters' bidding and shilling for more rebel weapons. (See also Colum Lynch's Turtle Bay blog.)

Adding to those voices was former President Bill Clinton, who earlier this week endorsed a more robust American intervention in Syria to help the rebels, aligning himself with hawks like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who fault Mr. Obama for his reluctance to get entangled in the war. 

Speaking on Tuesday at a private session in New York with Mr. McCain, Mr. Clinton said, “Sometimes it’s best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit.”

Clinton has a knack for fomenting war. Think about Yugoslavia in 1999. Clinton took his high approval ratings following the GOP impeachment and went to war against a country trying to put down an internal uprising that was stoked by foreign intelligence agencies. Today Kosovo is a failed state held together by UN assistance; it is known for exports of harvested organs and prostitutes.

Rebel Defeat in Qusayr

Jacob Wirtschafter, reporting for USA TODAY, says that Qusayr has been taken by government troops:

"Yes, al-Qusayr fell to regime control," said 25-year-old Muhammad Awad of the Free Syrian Army's al-Farouk Battalion in Qusayr. "Let the world, the regime and all the people against us be happy. We retreated because we could not take them on anymore." 

The Free Syrian Army, which had held on to the city for months through increasingly fierce bombardment and attacks by the regime, killing hundreds, conceded that they had to make a retreat from the town that lies on a key supply route.

Widely predicted to determine the outcome of the revolution, Qusayr puts the West in a difficult spot. How will it respond? Look no further than today's story by Steven Erlanger, Nick Cumming-Bruce and Alan Cowell, "France and Britain Say Nerve Gas Likely Used in Syria":

A day after France announced that French laboratory tests had confirmed that sarin gas had been used “multiple times” in Syria “in a localized way,” Britain on Wednesday repeated an earlier assessment that “a growing body of limited but persuasive information” pointed to the use of the same toxin.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said that in one case, at least, “there is no doubt it was the regime and its accomplices” that used the gas. France and Britain said their conclusions were based on samples brought out of Syria.

The statements came as United States, Russian and United Nations officials prepared for talks on Wednesday in Geneva on setting up a possible international peace conference. 

In a statement, Mr. Fabius said samples of body fluids taken from victims in Syria and tested at a French laboratory — including urine samples carried out of Syria by French reporters — “prove the presence of sarin,” a poisonous nerve gas. 

“It would be unacceptable that those guilty of these crimes can benefit from impunity,” Mr. Fabius said, without specifying of whom he spoke. But sarin is in the government’s stock of chemical weapons, and he later told France 2 television that blood samples from victims of a helicopter attack in April in Idlib Province left no doubt that it was the government that had used sarin. 

“We are aware of the entire chain, from when the attack took place to when the people were killed and the samples taken,” he said.

The Assad government, so it appears, has finally mastered how to defeat the rebels: use surface-to-surface missiles and air power to pound opposition forces and then send in tanks and infantry. The rebels can't hold turf in face of this; they don't have the firepower. For a description of this, check out C.J. Chivers' frontpage story this morning, "Syrian Rebels Meet Setbacks on a New Front." Chivers describes the fighting in the towns of the Hama plain east of the Damascus-Aleppo Highway in northern Syria:

The battles have shown the strains on all sides in a war in its third year. 

The rebels are pulled between the limits inherent to a lightly equipped and fundamentally guerrilla force and their urge to fight with the battlefield weight of an army.

And the Syrian Army and its loyalist militias are simultaneously trying to maintain a sprawling network of outposts on territory sympathetic to the opposition, while repositioning forces with hopes of reversing the rebels’ gains of the past year. 

The West now appears to be committed to ginning up a justification for direct military intervention. It won't have a UN stamp of approval. Carla Del Ponte's statement in early May that UN investigators had "strong, concrete suspicions" that rebels used sarin gas undercuts the rationale for an attack on the Assad government. This means that it would have to be a NATO operation like Libya. But it is not clear -- because of Germany -- that NATO would lead an assault. So it would probably fall to the old colonial powers -- France, Britain -- in concert with the U.S., Israel and the Gulf monarchies. To go this route the West will have to accept the likely outcome -- world war in the Middle East and replacing Sykes-Picot for something that would look like Somaliland. At this point I'm not sure that the West is willing to stomach this. Clearly a bellicose posture is being maintained in an attempt to get Assad to bargain away the territorial integrity of Syria.

West Trying to Make War Worse

"Diplomatic Stirrings on Syria," an unsigned editorial that appears in today's New York Times, is interesting in what it reveals about the confused and contradictory positions that the paper has staked out on the Syrian civil war. Calls for escalation (Bill Keller's embarrassingly superficial Monday column) are combined with warnings about those "who would lead the country unwisely into war"; Assad is accused of using chemical weapons without a word about Carla Del Ponte's Sunday bombshell that evidence of the use of nerve gas exists but it points to the rebels; Russia is blamed exclusively for the continuation of the conflict because of its support for Assad but not a word about the gulf states acting as quartermaster for Wahhabi jihadists threatening a region-wide Sunni-Shiite sectarian war.

As John Kerry makes phone calls in Rome in an attempt to organize his peace conference, Russia is planning a sale to Syria of advanced S-300 missile batteries, an obvious response to Israel's multiple unanswered bombing runs and warhawk agitation in the West for a no-fly zone. On the ground, Hezbollah fighters are proving superior to the rebels. All in all it's not going the Empire's way. What is cause for concern is that the West, unable and unwilling to acknowledge its limitations, will continue to pursue its confused and contradictory positions and make the war worse.

Desecration Hijr bin Adi al-Kindi's Shrine

At the end of a story today by Thomas Erdbrink and Hania Mourtada about the desecration of a Shiite shrine in a Damascus suburb by Syrian rebels readers are treated to a rare unvarnished -- albeit brief -- description of the Iranian perspective on Islamic sectarian conflict:

Iranian officials blamed the United States and Israel, saying they were supporting the Syrian rebels and Sunni extremist forces in the region. 

“They have launched a war between Shiites and Sunnis,” Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Sunday. “They plant bombs in Pakistan and Iraq, and recently the Zionist regime has hit Syria. We should be careful about colonizers and Israel.” 

Iran’s ideological narrative is that there are no real conflicts between the sects, but that Western powers and Iran’s enemies in the region deliberately mislead certain Muslim groups. Its leaders blame ultraconservative Wahhabis and Salafists, who they say are backed by the United States and Israel, through their regional allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 

“This Syrian so-called front, Al Nusra, is the symbol of Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” said Mojtaba Bigdeli, a former leader of a Shiite pressure group. “We respect Sunni shrines. We do not desecrate them. We may form self-sacrifice battalions to react to the Wahhabis and Salafists in Syria. For sure we will not remain silent.”

Any regular consumer of the news will have to acknowledge that the Iranian "ideological narrative" is more consistent than the one coming from the United States government. The United States says it acts in support of popular democracy and human rights, but then it tacitly approves a brutal crackdown on Arab Spring activists in Bahrain, not to mention decades of occupation by Israel in the West Bank; its chief allies in the Persian Gulf region are among the most despotic, unegalitarian states on the planet.

What's the rationale for aiding rebel groups in Syria? -- Freedom? Democracy? There are few secular fighters left in the Syrian opposition. So the United States is on the brink of arming the very people we've been engaging in global warfare since 9/11. It's crazy. The U.S. must think that through its gulf state allies it can control the Al Qaeda types. But time and again this has proven to be folly. The desecration of Hijr bin Adi al-Kindi's shrine is the latest example.

Predictably, the United States is sticking to its flimsy story that it is the Assad government not the opposition that is responsible for the use of nerve gas. No proof is supplied, just bald assertion; that and a whispering campaign has begun against Carla Del Ponte. This from today's frontpage story, "White House Holds Firm on Cautious Path in Syria Crisis," by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt:

The assertion that there is evidence suggesting the rebels have used sarin was made by Carla Del Ponte, a former chief prosecutor for international criminal tribunals that investigated Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia who is now serving on a commission looking into human rights abuses in Syria. 

But that commission later issued a statement clarifying that it had not reached a conclusion about which side used the gas, and the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, added the administration’s doubts. 

“We are highly skeptical of the suggestion that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons,” Mr. Carney said. “We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position.” 

A senior State Department official told reporters that the United States took Ms. Del Ponte’s allegations seriously, but said of the rebels, “We have no information that they have either the capability or the intent to deploy or use such weapons.” 

Another senior official noted that Ms. Del Ponte was not a member of another United Nations panel that is investigating chemical weapons.

With the rebels' desecration of Shiite shrines threatening a huge expansion of the war, I'm not hopeful that Obama is going to do the right thing. At a certain point, when the warhawks get amped up and Israeli bombs are falling, there's not much (apparently) that even POTUS can do.