Republicans Beat the Retreat back to Paul Ryan + Free Syrian Army Implicated in Massacre

There is some confusion this morning about the possibility of a deal being reached between Republicans and Democrats on raising the debt ceiling. Conflicting reports from yesterday had Obama willing to sign off on a clean bill lifting the debt ceiling until November 22 without ending the government shutdown. As it turns out this was not the case. The Democratic position, reaffirmed by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, is that the government shutdown must end as well. Whether the GOP can get any deal through its caucus in the House is another question entirely.

All the to and fro yesterday of Democrats and Republicans meeting separately with Obama tended to obscure the real news of the last 48 hours -- the Tea Party demand that Obamacare be de-funded as the price to re-open government and lift the debt ceiling is now off the table. It is done, broadly acknowledged as a failure. A good story that captures the prevailing wisdom that the shuttering of government to coincide with the October 1 opening of the online health insurance exchanges has backfired is the Eric Lipton and Nick Confessore "Kochs and Other Conservatives Split Over Strategy on Health Law":

Opponents of the approach are arguing that conservatives would have been better served by trying to force an overall reduction in federal spending and tying that effort to the debt ceiling fight, a step the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity urged this week. Specifically, the group argues that stopping the health care plan should be a years-long effort to marshal what it says will be growing public animosity toward the law. That will help elect Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, which will repeal it.

Conservatives are tossing recriminations back and forth as they beat a retreat back to fallen angel Paul Ryan and an elusive grand bargain on the budget.

I slightly misspoke yesterday when I assumed that the basis for Ryan's budget proposal offered in exchange for raising the debt ceiling was his 2012 The Path to Prosperity block granting of Medicaid and privatizing of Medicare. Chastened from his shellacking in last year's presidential election Ryan's budget prescriptions are apparently more modest and focused. This is from Jonathan Weisman's "Ryan Is Again in the Forefront for the G.O.P.":

An opinion piece [Ryan] wrote in The Wall Street Journal this week laid out what has now become the House Republican plan: a debt ceiling increase tied to changes to Medicare and Medigap plans that would save more than enough money to ease some of the across-the-board cuts to domestic and defense programs; a fast track for the comprehensive simplification of the tax code; and a demand for immediate, serious and structured negotiations with the White House and Democratic Senate. 

The fact that Mr. Ryan’s plan quite obviously made no mention of the health care law as a bargaining chip quickly drew him scorn from some on the right, but to Democrats and more moderate Republicans, the sidelining of the health care fight immediately gave the plan credibility. 

He marketed his idea on Wednesday to the House’s hard-line conservatives in the Republican Study Committee, getting enough favorable reaction to pull in the Republican leadership. On Thursday, after Mr. Boehner presented it to the full Republican conference, it became the official Republican position. As Mr. Boehner laid it out to the public, Mr. Ryan stood silently behind him. 

On Friday, he will take his message to the Values Voters Summit, a meeting of social conservatives. But according to an advance text of his remarks, he will add words of caution: “This president, he won’t agree to everything we need to do. A budget agreement — with this president and this Senate — it won’t solve all of our problems. But I hope it’s a start. I hope we can get a down payment on our debt.” 

Republicans and Democrats said Thursday that the success or failure of this new path forward will rest on Mr. Ryan’s shoulders. Republicans hope that with Mr. Ryan leading the charge, Washington will finally grapple with the true drivers of the federal budget deficit: entitlement programs like Medicare that are swelling as the population ages. Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said conversations between Mr. Ryan and the senators he will need on his side had already begun. 

Democrats, closely examining the outlines of the Ryan plan, say he is showing a new modesty and a narrower vision than the one rejected by American voters in the 2012 presidential campaign. Back then, and even earlier this year, Mr. Ryan championed converting Medicare into a voucherlike program in which beneficiaries would be given fixed premium subsidies they would use to buy private health insurance. 

Now he is talking about means-testing Medicare to make richer beneficiaries pick up more of the tab and ensuring that taxpayers do not subsidize the private Medigap plans purchased by upper-income recipients to augment Medicare coverage. Versions of both of those proposals are in Mr. Obama’s budget for the current fiscal year.

It is hard to imagine that means-testing Medicare is going to mollify the fire eaters in the Tea Party caucus; there are not many realists in its ranks. The question is whether the Tea Party still has enough juice, now that conventional wisdom has coalesced around the idea that the shutdown and debt ceiling standoff has been an unmitigated disaster, to torpedo a deal based on Ryan's plan.

An important story worth mentioning is Human Rights Watch's report concluding that Syrian rebels committed "crimes against humanity" in an August 4 massacre of 190 civilians in Latakia province. Anne Barnard reports in today's New York Times that the Western-backed Free Syrian Army is implicated in the massacre and could be guilty of war crimes:

[A]t least 20 groups took part in the fighting, the report says, including some affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose-knit collection of mainly Syrian rebel forces the council is trying to organize. 

And in a video filmed nearby during the operation, Gen. Salim Idris, who leads the military council, is seen insisting that his forces played a leading role, in statements responding to criticism from Islamist groups that his fighters were hanging back. The report said it was unclear whether forces linked to General Idris took part in the initial Aug. 4 attack, when forensic evidence suggests most of the civilians were killed. But it also said that anyone continuing to coordinate with such groups could be complicit in war crimes. 

The Human Rights Watch report accuses the five leading fighting groups of crimes against humanity; names several private donors in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf countries as financiers of the operation; blames Turkey for allowing the fighters to use its territory; and calls for an arms embargo against the five groups, adding to its previous calls for such an embargo against the Syrian government. 

“Unified action by the international community is really long overdue when it comes to trying to deter these abuses and violations,” Ms. Fakih said, recommending that war crimes in Syria be referred to the International Criminal Court, which could investigate all parties.

U.S. Still at Work on No-Fly Zone Despite Rise of Al Qaeda in Syria

It's important to recall that several months ago there were reports in the press predicting that an American-led no-fly zone was in the works for parts of Syria and might be up and running as soon as summer's end. Lest we forget, Thom Shanker, reporting from Tel Aviv, has a story headlined "Syrian War Shapes Trip by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" about Joint Chiefs head Martin Dempsey's junket to the Middle East:

The chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, said his talks in Jordan would include an assessment of whether American surveillance aircraft or collaboration on other border-control techniques could help the Jordanians, whose country is the emergency home to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees — and, increasingly, a route for black-market weapons transported both ways across the Syrian frontier. 

Syria has accused Jordan of acting as a transit point for weapons supplied to Syrian rebels, an accusation Jordan has denied. In recent days, the Jordanian authorities have detained suspected smugglers, including Syrians, accused of attempting to bring antitank missiles, surface-to-air missiles, assault rifles and other arms from Syria into Jordan — possibly part of an attempt by jihadists in Syria to foment unrest in Jordan as well. 

The Pentagon already has deployed air-defense missile batteries in Jordan, along with crewed F-16s to train alongside the Jordanian Air Force in patrolling Jordan’s border and airspace. A few hundred American military planners, including communications experts and logisticians, also are in Jordan.

American war plans roll along according to schedule. The only wrinkle has been the ascension over the last six months of Al Qaeda linked jihadis. They now constitute the main rebel fighting force in Syria. That's why Free Syrian Army General Salim Idris's "me too" photo op in Bashar al-Assad's Alawite home territory of Latakia province smacks of desperation. The push to occupy villages in Latakia was reported last week as being an ISIS initiative. Idris wants to show his paymasters that he's on the job.

Since Al Qaeda and its affiliates are the sworn enemy of the United States, a foe that we have been locked in existential battle with for over a decade, one that has reconfigured our society into a surveillance state and justified wholesale spying on the homeland, you would think that the ascension of Al Qaeda jihadis as the dominant opposition military force in Syria controlling swaths of territory and its resources would prompt the Obama administration to immediately sue for peace with the Syrian government. But you would think wrong. The only change made by the U.S. so far is a rhetorical one. Whereas before it ignored the presence of jihadis, now it is acknowledging the threat they pose, particularly to Syria's chemical weapons stockpile, and using it as a justification to continue its military planning for control of Syria. General Dempsey laments the rise of radical Islamists while at the same time rationalizing coordination with them:

“I am very concerned about the radical element of the opposition, and I am concerned about the potential that extremist ideologies will hijack what started out to be a popular movement to overthrow an oppressive regime,” he said. 

He acknowledged that radical militias, which assumed an ascendant role in the civil war about six months ago, remained a powerful force with some of the best fighters on the rebel side. But in the last six months, he said, the United States has increased its ability to identify moderate opposition leaders, and to begin communicating with them in substantive ways. 

Even so, he acknowledged that battlefield necessity may require radical and moderate militias to cooperate for tactical gains against the Assad government — a convergence that would complicate American and allied policy making.

“It doesn’t surprise me that from time to time they collaborate with each other,” he said. “What we have to be alert for are opportunities to convince the more moderate aspects of the opposition that Syria will be a far better place if the moderate opposition dominates in the end game.”

C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt have a story this morning, "Arms Shipments Seen From Sudan to Syria Rebels," outlining an arms pipeline to rebels that flows from Sudan via Ukrainian commercial air transport to Turkey thanks to funds supplied by Qatar. Sudan denies involvement because it receives military and technical assistance from Iran and China, stalwart allies of the Syrian government.

Gray Lady Discovers Reality of Syrian Civil War

The newspaper of record is finally trying to get atop of the Syrian civil war story. Ben Hubbard, who has been reporting from Cairo on the coup in Egypt, spells Beirut Bureau Chief Anne Barnard and provides a frontpage story, "Momentum Shifts in Syria, Bolstering Assad’s Position," that appears top of the fold right-hand side of this morning's New York Times national edition. In it, Hubbard gives a bird's-eye view of developments that have been well underway for several weeks but have been given short shrift by Barnard; the long and short of which is that the rebels are coming apart at the seams -- despised by local populations that they're purportedly liberating, fighting among themselves and distrusted by their state benefactors -- and that the Syrian government is steadily consolidating its territory on the battlefield.

To be sure, Hubbard doesn't abandon the Gray Lady's anti-Assad bias; but he does curb its enthusiasm for the rebels (Barnard consistently reports on the rebels through the rose-colored glasses of the Arab Spring). There are some choice passages:

Even fighters who had hoped that Mr. Assad would end up deposed, dead, jailed or exiled like other autocrats singled out in the Arab Spring uprisings have begun to acknowledge the emerging reality. 

“If the revolution continues like this, the people will revolt against us,” said a rebel commander from the central city of Homs, where Mr. Assad’s forces have made gains in recent days. 

The commander, who wanted only his first name, Ahmed, used to protect his family, criticized his fellow rebels for putting the interests of their brigades ahead of the wider anti-Assad struggle and accused them of hoarding powerful weapons or selling them for a profit. That lack of unity has prolonged the war and made their mission harder, he said. 

“If a regular Syrian comes and asks me what we have given him, I don’t know what to say,” Ahmed said.

Hubbard quotes Free Syrian Army leader General Salim Idris basically tossing in the sponge, saying the West wants to maintain al-Assad in power:

“They do not want the fall of this regime; that is why they are not helping,” said Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the Free Syrian Army, a loosely knit umbrella group that has been soliciting aid and that is supposed to funnel it to vetted groups while keeping it from extremists. 

General Idris accused the West of delaying with endless meetings, summits and requests for new “guarantees” that extremists would not get arms, and said this left the rebels at a huge disadvantage against Mr. Assad’s forces.

The reporting of the Times from Egypt has always been much stronger than the coverage of Syria, which is a testament to David Kirkpatrick. Barnard's reporting seems to follow the basic contours of the official position of the U.S. government. And while Hubbard's article is a welcome improvement, he does make one glaring omission. In recounting state support of the rebels, he mentions Saudi Arabia and Qatar; but he fails to mention the role the Central Intelligence Agency has played in providing logistical support as well as the rebel training base it runs in Jordan.

Hubbard, writing with Hwaida Saad, also has a story about yesterday's murder of al-Assad supporter Mohammed Darrar Jammo in southern Lebanon and the battle between the Wahhabis and the Kurds in the Syrian city of Ras al-Ain:

Along another Syrian border, fighting among Syrian rebels, extremist groups and Kurdish militias killed 29 fighters in Syria and at least one civilian in Turkey.

The clashes in the Syrian city of Ras al-Ain pitted Syrian rebels and extremists linked to Al Qaeda against Kurdish militias that have used the chaos of the civil war to push for greater autonomy.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict from Britain through a network of contacts on the ground, said the clashes began Tuesday when extremist fighters attacked a Kurdish patrol and took a Turkish militiaman captive.

On Wednesday, Kurdish fighters seized control of most of the town and the nearby border crossing with Turkey as fighting spread to nearby areas, the observatory said, adding that at least 29 combatants had been killed since Tuesday, 10 of them Kurds.

Reporting from London, Alan Cowell has more bad news for the Syrian opposition in his story "Britain Said to Step Back From Push to Arm Syrian Rebels":

After leading a determined push with France to remove legal hindrances to arming Syria’s rebels, Britain is apparently signaling a more cautious approach, even as British newspaper reports say Prime Minister David Cameron has retreated from the idea altogether.

The car bombs and mortar attacks will continue as the SAA continues operations. But at this point it appears the Syrian government has won the civil war.

West Likely to Arm Syrian Opposition

This morning's New York Times reads like a broadside for Western intervention on the side of the rebels in the Syrian civil war. First, there is C.J. Chivers' frontpage story, "Starved for Arms, Syria Rebels Make Their Own," which describes the makeshift bomb manufacturing supply line set up by the opposition. Fashioning mortars out of a sections of the main gun scavenged from government T-72 tanks, concocting RDX -- a plastic explosive -- from recipes taken off the Internet, cracking open old Soviet aircraft bombs that failed to detonate in order to extract the TNT mix inside, the rebel message is clear, "Give us real weapons and we'll win this war." 

Chivers concludes his piece with the following two paragraphs:

On a front in the arid farmland north of Hama, Khaled Muhammed Addibis, a rebel commander, pointed to a stack of rockets his fighters had tried to fire the previous day. They had failed to launch. Others had veered far off-target in flight. And none had reached their expected range. 

“All we need is effective weapons,” he said. “Effective weapons. Nothing else.”

So that's the first point in the pro-intervention broadside: let's at least get the opposition antitank and antiaircraft weapons. Next up is the story from Mark Mazzetti and Michael R. Gordon, "Syrian Forces Seen Stepping Up Air Attacks on Rebels," which can be read as a hawkish wish for a Western enforced no-fly zone. As Obama officials brute military options, intelligence reports are circulating which point to Syrian government air power as the source of rebels' woes and Assad's renewed momentum.

UK foreign secretary William Hague appeared yesterday with Secretary of State John Kerry to engage in "bosspeak" and decry the Assad regime:

“The regime appears to be preparing new assaults, endangering the lives and safety of hundreds of thousands of Syrians who are already in desperate need,” said Mr. Hague, who added that the brutality of its recent attacks “beggars belief.”

Hague says no effort is being spared to get the opposition and the Syrian government to the negotiating table. But everyone knows that this is a farce. It is the opposition that refuses to attend any peace conference. As Mazzetti and Gordon point out:

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hague emphasized that they remained committed to a political solution, though the prospects of the international conference, which was first announced in Moscow more than a month ago, have faded. General Idris had said he would not attend until the rebels received fresh arms and ammunition and their leverage in a potential peace conference was improved.

Kerry and Hague were asked about the viability of the opposition, but they responded with "bosspeak," saying Western energies were focused on a "political solution." This was repeated to the point of inducing nausea. Both Kerry and Hague blame everything on Assad and Hezbollah.

Not a word was mentioned about the massacre of Shiites in Hatlah by Al Nusra Front fighters. This is covered by Hania Mourtada and Anne Barnard in "Dozens of Shiites Reported Killed in Raid by Syria Rebels." A useful synopsis of the Syrian civil war up until now is delivered in four paragraphs:

The Syrian conflict began as a popular uprising demanding political rights, but gradually has taken on a more sectarian tone. As the conflict became militarized, with the government cracking down on demonstrators, some of its opponents, mostly Sunni army defectors and others, took up arms. 

Sunni jihadists from across the region have also joined the fight, and extremist groups have been able to count on financing from like-minded private donors, making them increasingly influential on the battlefield. 

Shiite fighters from Lebanon and Iraq have also entered Syria to defend Shiite shrines and fight alongside a government they see as protecting their interests. 

Sectarian tensions grew in recent weeks as Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group, fought a full-scale battle in Syria, helping the government to recapture the town of Qusayr last week. Syrian rebels fired rockets at Shiite neighborhoods in retaliation.

David Jolly reports this morning in "Syrian Death Toll Approaches 93,000, U.N. Says" that Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, is saying that 92,901 killings have been documented in Syria through the end of April.

The United Nations study was based on reports of 263,055 killings. Any reported killing that did not fully identify the victim by name, date and the location of death was excluded to avoid the possibility of duplication.

“This extremely high rate of killings, month after month, reflects the drastically deteriorating pattern of the conflict over the past year,” Ms. Pillay said in the statement, and “civilians are bearing the brunt of widespread, violent and often indiscriminate attacks.”

Ms. Pillay called for “an immediate cease-fire,” saying: “Nobody is gaining anything from this senseless carnage.”

She also urged the international community to help broker an end to the conflict, saying: “The only answer is a negotiated political solution. Tragically, shamefully, nothing will restore the 93,000 or more individual lives already lost.”

From today's stories it appears that the West will arm the Syrian opposition.War is here to stay.