Ghouta Redux and the Coming Western Invasion of Libya

There is little reason to expect that the "cessation of hostilities" in Syria, agreed to by the United States and Russia, which is to go into effect on Saturday, will be anymore successful than the Munich agreement of the week before last. The main reason is that both ceasefires are based on the fiction that there is a clear dividing line between the U.S./Saudi-backed forces on the one hand and those of Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra on the other. The U.S.-Russian truce applies to neither Nusra nor ISIS; hence, the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian and Iranian allies can bomb both Salafist groups. And that is where the problem lies: U.S./Saudi forces are largely indistinguishable from Nusra on the battlefield. So while Russia and Syria can interpret bombing Nusra as in compliance with the truce, the Saudis and their neocon backers in the U.S. will cry foul. In other words, nothing will have changed.

There is an interesting story in today's paper by Celestine Bohlen, "A Turning Point for Syrian War, and U.S. Credibility." French foreign minister Laurent Faubius, having recently resigned his post, is blaming Obama for destroying the Pax Americana global order by failing to bomb Damascus to smithereens following the false flag Ghouta sarin attack of August 2013. Fabius blames everything that followed -- Russia's annexation of Crimea, the rise of ISIS, the refugee crisis in Europe -- on Obama's fecklessness.

This keening over the lost opportunity of Ghouta is nothing new. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the national security power elite when Obama decided to go to Congress to get authorization to illegally bomb Syria, a political exigency for the Noble laureate who owed his presidency to not having supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But Ghouta has recently reappeared as the key moment that destroyed the status quo, and it is hardening into settled opinion. As Bohlen explains,

Charges of American “passivity” have been a common theme of late at international conferences, where diplomats, foreign policy analysts and journalists play what the French newspaper Le Monde called the “blame game” for the catastrophic situation in Syria. 

For his part, Mr. Fabius, a former prime minister who left the Foreign Ministry to head the French Constitutional Council, hasn’t hesitated to point the finger at various targets. He has accused Mr. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria of “brutality,” Iran and Russia of “complicity,” and the United States of “ambiguity.” 

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s perceived lack of follow-through in Syria is oft-repeated in Paris; what’s new is that a former foreign minister, among others, is calling the United States’ decision in 2013 a world-changing event. 

François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank based in London, compared the moment to the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, an event seen in hindsight as helping to set the stage for World War I. 

Similarly, Mr. Obama’s reversal in 2013 “is one of those turning points in history where you see the power shift,” Mr. Heisbourg said in an interview. 

By refusing to enforce the red line, Mr. Obama did “enormous, perhaps irretrievable” damage to American credibility, Mr. Heisbourg said. 

“He did it because he didn’t want to do the strikes,” Mr. Heisbourg added. “He was caught in flagrante committing a supreme act of fecklessness.” 

According to both Mr. Heisbourg and, it seems, Mr. Fabius, there were global consequences to Mr. Obama’s inaction, most notably in Russia’s annexation of Crimea the following year, even though Moscow in its public rhetoric continues to accuse Washington of throwing its weight around in an imperial manner. 

Mr. Heisbourg said the “fecklessness” of 2013 had been recognized and interpreted in numerous capitals, not just Paris, as a low point for American power and influence.

“This is not just about the irritated French,” he said. “It goes much deeper.”

“The next U.S. president is going to have to demonstrate early on — in circumstances that he or she would have preferred to avoid — that this was an Obama moment, not an America moment,” he said. 

Although Mr. Fabius expressed regret that “the world didn’t follow France’s position” and punish Mr. Assad for using chemical weapons, others are unconvinced that intervention would have changed the course of the Syrian civil war. In fact, it has been noted in the press that Mr. Fabius’s parting shot at the United States may have been an attempt to deflect criticism of France’s own diplomatic failures in the region. 

Western intervention in Libya, led by France and Britain, has created only greater instability there, while the war in Yemen, waged by Middle Eastern proxies with no overt Western involvement, continues unabated, suggesting no easy answers anywhere in the region.

First, the mainstream press, following the six-month period when the issue of who was actually responsible for the sarin attack was hotly debated, a debate that was won by The London Review of Books when it published Seymour Hersh's "Whose Sarin?" -- evidence points to Nusra not the Syrian government -- blithely went about its business as a broadsheet for Western intelligence services and kept repeating the now-debunked claim that Assad was to blame for the chemical attack.

Next, there is no doubt, as the red-bold quote above makes clear, that the next U.S. president is going to have to atone for Obama's "passivity" by committing to yet another war theater. This will be Libya. Moves are already being made. Read Eric Schmitt's frontpager from yesterday, "U.S. Scrambles to Contain Growing ISIS Threat in Libya." Afghanistan is a lost cause. Russia is in Syria; so the U.S. can't throw down there. Iraq is a charnel house and a massive re-invasion would be politically unpopular in the homeland. Libya is ready-made; plus, it has huge oil reserves. Hillary will take us there for sure, as would Trump, and probably even Sanders. Perpetual war is here to stay. The new dispensation should be called Bellum Americana.

Iran Nuclear Talks: The Real Goal is to Keep Talking

A safe bet is that some sort of partial agreement or outline of principles is going to emerge from Geneva before the Monday deadline for the P5+1 talks with Iran on its nuclear program. 

A working framework will allow talks to continue. I believe this the raison d'etre of the P5+1 process. It is not to arrive at a final agreement because once that happens the U.S. Congress, serving at the behest of neocons and the state of Israel, will plunge in its tusked snout and tear apart any accord; and the same can be said for Iran. As Thomas Erdbrink notes  in "A Nuclear Deal Is Likely to Hit Hurdles in Iran":

In Iran, the final decision on a nuclear deal lies with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. And if history is an accurate guide, the real debate over an accord, should one be reached, will not begin to unfold until after it is announced. When that debate gets underway, the voices of the hard-liners — the clerics, Revolutionary Guards commanders, conservative lawmakers and others who are by and large closest to the supreme leader — will be raised against any compromise on Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

There is no terra firma here. That becomes clear after reading Michael Gordon's excellent recapitulation, "U.S. Lays Out Limits It Seeks in Iran Nuclear Talks," of the salient details of the ongoing negotiations in Geneva. What one comes away with is a strong sense that the deal being hammered out is an elaborate ruse, a classic Hitchcockian MacGuffin, whose purpose is to keep the narrative moving and nations bargaining.

There are too many variables and arbitrary imperatives and artificial benchmarks. The key measurement appears to be an one-year minimum for nuclear "breakout" for Iran. The U.S. assumes, I guess, that Iran has already secretly solved all the difficult technical issues of fashioning a trigger for a nuclear device. So the U.S. bargaining position is predicated on limiting that which it thinks it can measure -- the amount of fissile uranium in Iran's possession and Iran's ability to produce that uranium.

Negotiations therefore revolve around how to reduce Iran's stockpile of fissile uranium and its centrifuges. As Gordon compactly explains:

The United States long ago dropped the goal of eliminating Iran’s enrichment ability, a demand that Israel has long insisted was the surest way to guarantee Iran did not maintain an option to pursue the development of nuclear arms.

So the negotiations have been focused on measures that would constrain Iran’s ability to quickly produce a nuclear bomb but allow it the ability to maintain what Iran insists is a peaceful program of nuclear power and research. Shortly after arriving here Thursday night to join the talks, Mr. Kerry met for more than two hours with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, and Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s envoy to the Iran talks. But there was no word on whether they had made any headway. 

One critical question is how many and what type of centrifuges Iran will be allowed to keep to continue enriching uranium. Another question is what happens to the nuclear material Iran already possesses, which could be used in making a bomb. A third question is what kind of measures can be taken to limit Iran’s ability to produce plutonium, which can also be used in producing a nuclear weapon. Affecting all of these issues is the length of time an accord would be in effect. 

At the same time, the Western and Iranian negotiators must agree on a schedule for suspending or lifting sanctions, Iran’s goal in the talks, while preserving the West’s leverage in case the accord begins to fray. 

Iran has nearly 10,000 operational centrifuges, which Iran insists will be used to make fuel for civilian reactors. But given Iran’s current abilities, Mr. Kerry has said that it would not take Iran long to produce enough enriched material for a bomb if it abandoned the temporary freeze it had been observing while talks are underway.

“I think it’s public knowledge today that we’re operating with a time period for a so-called ‘breakout’ of about two months,” Mr. Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April. 

It would take far longer for Iran to take a bomb’s worth of fissile material, which can sustain a chain reaction, and fashion it into a weapon that could be delivered by a plane or missile. But since such work might be hard to detect and would be beyond the scope of an agreement, the breakout time to produce fissile material for a weapon has become an important indicator of Iran’s intentions.

“Enrichment time needs to be pushed to a year,” said Gary Samore, a former senior National Security Council official and president of an advocacy group called United Against Nuclear Iran. “This is what they need to have in order to sell the deal to Congress and U.S. allies.” 

To achieve an adequate breakout time, American and other international negotiators initially proposed establishing a 1,500 limit on the number of basic centrifuges Iran would be allowed to operate while banning the use of more advanced centrifuges.

Iran, however, has steadfastly refused to agree to a major reduction in centrifuges, although recently some Iranians have hinted that the number could be set at 8,000. 

More recently, negotiators have been exploring a formula in which Iran could have as many as 4,500 first-generation centrifuges if it also agreed to ship much of its low-enriched uranium to Russia or take other offsetting steps. For a considerable fee, Russia would convert the fuel into rods that would be burned in Iran’s lone operating commercial power reactor. 

Some combination of moving Iranian stockpiles of fissile uranium to Russia for reprocessing and reducing the number of Iranian centrifuges, but not so steeply as the U.S. wants, is seen as a credible foundation for a working agreement.

But knottier problems lie with the kind of inspection regimen Iran will countenance and the timeline of any agreement:

A major stumbling block is the question of how long an agreement should last. Iran has argued that it could be seven years or even less. That, Iranian officials say, would enable Iran to install tens of thousands of new centrifuges to enrich its own uranium after a Russian contract to supply nuclear fuel for the reactor at Bushehr, Iran, expires in 2021. 

But an agreement that would shrink Iran’s network of centrifuges only to see it expand exponentially within a decade is a nonstarter for the United States. 

“I would say about 15 years,” said Robert J. Einhorn, a former senior State Department official. “There has to be a sustained track record of scrupulous Iranian implementation of a deal before the international community will have confidence that the program is strictly peaceful.”

Kerry stopped off in Paris on his way to Geneva; he compared notes with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius, who has played the role of bad cop in the P5+1 talks, as well as Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.

The larger reality is that if talks were to end without any agreement, the Saudis and Israelis would feel compelled to mount an assault on Iran, which, given the war with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, would likely prove to be catastrophically destabilizing. Kerry is lining up his ducks to make sure the P5+1 process doesn't crater. He can sell the fact that maintaining the Geneva talks keeps Iranian centrifuges from spinning,

The Saudis and Israelis can live with this knowing in two years it will either be a warhawk neocon Hillary in the White House or some even more bellicose Republican. Iran can be smashed then.

Warhawks on the Ropes

The warhawks were dealt two enormous blows yesterday. First, several polls were published showing a super-majority of respondents opposed to an attack on Syria. Pew Research Center, Reuters/Ipsos and New York Times/CBS News had surprisingly similar results, the most noteworthy of which is that opposition to a United States military strike has actually grown in September despite the Western media almost unanimously falling in line behind the Obama administration's tendentious case for war. This from yesterday's Reuters story by Mark Felsenthal:

Americans' opposition to a U.S. military strike against Syria is increasing as they learn more about the Arab nation's alleged use of chemical weapons, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll that shows the challenge President Barack Obama faces in seeking congressional approval for military action. 

The poll, conducted September 5 to 9, indicated that 63 percent of Americans opposed intervening in Syria, up from 53 percent in a survey that ended August 30. That was a week after the August 21 chemical attack in a Damascus suburb that U.S. officials say killed more than 1,400 adults and children. 

Meanwhile, support for a U.S. intervention in Syria has declined, the poll found. About 16 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should get involved - down from 20 percent on August 30.

And even if it's proven that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's troops used chemical weapons against fellow Syrians, only 26 percent of Americans said the United States should intervene. About 52 percent said the U.S. military should not get involved in such a circumstance, up from 44 percent on August 30.

The story in the New York Times by Mark Landler and Megan Thee-Brenan is an amazing testament to the public's distaste for war and its wariness of the siren call of the humanitarian bombers:

The poll underscores a steady shift in public opinion about the proper American role in the world, as fatigue from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has made people less open to intervening in the world’s trouble spots and more preoccupied with economic travails at home. 

In the Syrian crisis, 6 in 10 Americans oppose airstrikes, according to the poll, with similar majorities saying they fear military action could enmesh the United States in another long engagement in the Middle East and would increase the terrorist threat to Americans. 

But the antipathy to foreign engagement extends beyond the current crisis. Sixty-two percent of the people polled said the United States should not take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, while only 34 percent said it should. In April 2003, a month after American troops marched into Iraq, 48 percent favored a leading role, while 43 percent opposed it. 

When asked whether the United States should intervene to turn dictatorships into democracies, 72 percent said no while only 15 percent said yes. That is the highest level of opposition in a decade of polling on this question. At the start of the Iraq war, 48 percent favored staying out and 29 percent favored getting involved. 

“A lot of people bought the idea that if we create democracy in the Middle East, the terrorists would stop coming,” said Walter Russell Mead, a professor of humanities and foreign policy at Bard College. “But that conflation has disappeared, and that makes it harder to gin up the popular support for foreign military intervention.”

The depth of this repudiation should not be understated, and I'm sure it has the elites who run the show quite concerned. The Kosovo model of skirting international law in the name of policing self-defined "crimes against humanity," what has come to be known as the "responsibility to protect" initiative in the United Nations, is now completely rejected. Even though people accepted Obama administration allegations of Assad regime chemical weapons use, they do not feel this justifies even a limited intervention, and they're also opposed to arming the rebels:

The resistance to getting involved in Syria is deep. While 75 percent of people think that Mr. Assad’s forces used chemical weapons, 74 percent say they oppose supplying rebel forces in Syria with conventional arms. The Obama administration reluctantly adopted that policy on a covert basis in June after it concluded that Syrian forces had used chemical weapons on a smaller scale in previous attacks.

The depth of the repudiation for governing elites -- in the media, in government, in the think tank foreign policy establishment -- is immense. The rulers need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how play their "Great Game" peacefully. This of course will not happen.

Which brings us to enormous blow #2 suffered by the warhawks yesterday -- Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov's proposal, following a John Kerry quip at a news conference in Britain yesterday, for Syria to give over its chemical weapons to the international community. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon embraced the plan, as did China. Though the response in the West has been tepid, the only outright rejection has come from the Syrian opposition (which is not endearing them to the anti-war public). What we need to worry about now is the French getting out front of the Russians in the Security Council with a proposal loaded down with "poison pills." This from Alan Cowell's "France to Seek U.N. Backing for Russian Plan on Syrian Chemical Arsenal":

In Paris, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the French approach to the Security Council would be made under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for an array of action, including military, to restore peace and would urge the Syrians to accept that their chemical stockpiles would be dismantled. 

He also said he expected a “nearly immediate” commitment from the Syrian authorities and added that Russia had information about the chemical weapons stockpile amassed by the Syrian authorities. Mr. Fabius said that he hoped the Security Council would approve a tough resolution after months of efforts by China and Russia to thwart Western action at the United Nations. 

The French proposal will call for Syria to allow inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to oversee the destruction of chemical weapons in the country and will require that Syria become a member of the organization. It is one of five states that have not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international convention banning the use and stockpiling of chemical arms and the materials required in their production. 

“Extremely serious consequences” would be planned for any deviation from the obligations of the resolution, Mr. Fabius said, though he remained cautious about the prospect of the French proposal being adopted. Russia, a firm ally of Mr. Assad and permanent member of the Security Council, has vetoed three Security Council resolutions on Syria since the start of the conflict. 

“It is upon the acceptance of these precise conditions that we will judge the credibility of the intentions that were expressed yesterday,” Mr. Fabius said.

The danger here is that we will repeat the Iraq scenario. Weapons inspections will be sensationalized and politicized and then, despite any proof of noncompliance, the United States, relying on bogus intelligence, will claim they are a enforcing Security Council resolution, and it will be bombs away.

But that was over a decade ago. The public is engaged now on this issue. Bellicose elites will have to concoct another nefarious scheme to shift opinion. Don't rule out another spectacular attack on the homeland a la 9/11. But for now, the warmongers are on their heels.