Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, whose country has been one of the most open backers of the anti-Assad rebels, said that supplying them with weapons was the only way to resolve the conflict.
"Force is necessary to achieve justice. And the provision of weapons is the only way to achieve peace in Syria's case," Sheikh Hamad told ministers at the start of the talks.
"We cannot wait due to disagreement among Security Council members over finding a solution to the problem," he said. He also called on Lebanon's government to halt intervention by Lebanese factions in the neighboring conflict.When in doubt use force. The rationale is anti-rational. The rule of law is tossed out in favor of the law of the jungle. Might equals right. We all know how this ends. It's not going to be pretty. But leaders in the West and the Gulf Arab monarchies must feel they will be insulated from the catastrophic results of their decisions.
C.J. Chivers, along with Eric Scmitt and Mark Mazzetti, has a frontpage story that outlines how the Libyan weapons pipeline to the rebels works. Arms once stockpiled by Qaddafi are transported from Libya by Qatari military cargo plane to Turkey where they cross the border into Syria. The Central Intelligence Agency provides logistical support. This has been the primary pipeline up until now. But since the United States announced last week its intention to begin providing military aid, the floodgates are already begin to crank open. Saudi Arabia promptly shipped antitank guns to rebels fighting in Aleppo.
Let's not forget that this deluge of weaponry into an unstable environment was justified by the Obama administration based on U.S. intelligence that Syrian government forces used sarin gas. Colum Lynch and Joby Warrick reported yesterday in the Washington Post that such claims are unsupportable:
Jean Pascal Zanders, who until recently was a research fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, said he has scoured the Internet for photographs, video and news reports documenting alleged nerve agent attacks in Syria. What he has seen has made him a skeptic.
Few of the photographs, Zanders said, have borne the trademark symptoms of a chemical weapons attack. In a paper he presented last week to the E.U. Non-Proliferation Consortium, he compared photographs documenting Iraq's 1998 chemical weapons attack against Kurds in the town of Halabja.
The Halabja victims appeared to have died instantaneously from chemical agents, he said, and their bodies showed tell-tale signs of exposure to sarin: blue lips and fingertips caused by suffocation and a pink hue brought on by excessive sweating and high blood pressure. "No press reports from Syria refer to those descriptions, which is one of the reasons why I am skeptical about those reports," he said.
Zanders said the problem with the U.S., British and French evidence is that it cannot be tested by independent scientists. Some of the published reports of chemical weapons use "make certain alarm bells ring," he said, but it is impossible to reach a definitive conclusion on the basis of what governments have put forward. "We don't have the barest of information. There is not even a fact sheet documenting the samples," he said. "This is an immensely political process, and there is no way of challenging the findings."Anne Barnard has a good story today about Hermel, the Shiite Bekaa Valley town in Lebanon that has suffered since Hezbollah stepped up its defense of Syria. An interesting item that Barnard reveals is that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been working actively to tamp down sectarian strife. Keep that in mind the next time you read about a state-supported Sunni cleric issuing a fatwa for jihad against Syria.
On the other hand, some followers chafe when the party urges restraint and reconciliation and forbids them to attack rebels and their supporters in the Lebanese Sunni village of Arsal across the valley. In the past week, the son of a Sunni leader from Arsal was killed near Hermel, and four Shiites were killed near Arsal, including two from the powerful Jaafari tribe.
Mohammed Jaafar, a tribe member, said that the family was refraining from traditional revenge killings at Hezbollah’s request — for now.
“We won’t stay silent over our sons’ blood,” he said.
Even though Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, forbade celebratory gunfire in a recent speech, as the funeral procession passed on Wednesday, relatives of the dead fighter honored him with barrages of gunfire. Asked why, the Hezbollah supporter said it was impossible to contain people’s emotions — and, eventually their demands.
“I told Sayyed Hassan myself, there is a point at which we can’t control the people,” he said. “If we could, then people from Arsal wouldn’t have been killed, nor the Jaafari people.”
After the funeral, he awaited a meeting with a sheik from Arsal, part of a flurry of talks that aims to keep tensions low. Hezbollah, according to multiple Hermel residents and Sunnis visiting from Syria who do not support the uprising, has worked behind the scenes to keep Sunnis safe in Shiite-majority villages on both sides of the border, once even paying compensation to Shiites who wanted to take revenge on antigovernment Sunnis they said destroyed their homes.
But the Hezbollah supporter said he believed the rebels had not reciprocated. “That’s what hurts,” he said.The United States continues to foment discord. You reap what you sow. Isn't that what the Good Book says?
