Significant Moves Underway to Hasten Peace Deal on Syria

Serious -- seemingly serious, at least -- moves are underway by the big players in Syria's nearly five-year-old war. Kerry was in Moscow last night meeting with Lavrov and Putin. The discussion, as reported by the "newspaper of record" (in separate stories by Andrew Kramer and Ben Hubbard), centered on what opposition groups will be allowed to attend peace talks in New York at the end of this week.

Last week the Saudis convened their own conference of the opposition in Riyadh. ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra weren't invited, but neither were the Syrian Kurds, the only truly consistent anti-jihadi secular fighting force. Things basically fell apart when Ahrar al-Sham dropped out. The main non-ISIS anti-Assad fighting force is the "Army of Conquest," made up predominantly of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham units. Without the principal components of the Army of Conquest participating in the talks, it is hard to imagine a substantive peace deal emerging from the ongoing Geneva process. The Saudi conference did not help matters by reiterating the "Assad Must Go" mantra as a precondition for negotiations, which Kerry was careful to disavow in Moscow.

Something is definitely shifting. Obama appeared at the Pentagon on Monday and called out the Turks, Saudis and other members of the GCC. If the waves of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa didn't cause a change in course, Paris and San Bernardino certainly have. The French neoliberal center dodged a bullet with Le Pen's underwhelming performance in the second round of regional elections. But Trump is surging.

A once somnambulant but now stirring electorate, combined with Russian gains on the ground in Syria, have highlighted the massive failure of the West's anti-ISIS military campaign. The original promise made last year was that Mosul would be liberated by the end of 2015. When that was met with howls of derision, the time table was sped up to the spring. Now it is apparent that not even the December date will be met.

And what has to be troubling for the United States is that its New Cold War, based as it is on the February 2014 coup in Kiev, is beginning to lose its luster in the capitals of Europe. Italy delayed the renewal of the EU's economic sanctions against Russia.

The goal has always been regime change in Syria. The stakes increased when Obama pushed through the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran. In order to gain the support of his allies among the sheikhs, Obama had to recommit to taking out Assad; that is being pursued by the old routine of employing jihadist proxies. Now that the jihadist proxy war is creating destabilizing blow back in the West, Obama is hoping that once again a deal can be hatched with Russia.

It is too late probably to prevent Syria from going the way of Libya. But maybe Europe and most of Iraq can be salvaged.

Terrorism in Paris, Colorado Springs and Libya

For a good overview of the shortcomings of any agreement likely to emerge from the climate conference taking place in Paris this week, what is being called COP21, consult Andreas Malm's "Our Fight for Survival."

One of the items in Malm's essay that jumped out at me was the duplicity of the French government in banning the large climate justice protests but leaving in place the big gatherings for shopping and sporting events:

Although it is not nearly as large or powerful as it needs to be, the climate movement today is a force to be reckoned with, a sprawling tent of groups capable of scoring such victories as pushing Shell out of the Arctic and killing the Keystone XL pipeline. 

It is that force that has now been taken off the streets of Paris. 

Why? Security concerns in the wake of the terror are at most secondary. If the French state wanted to safeguard the demonstrations — thereby guaranteeing the type of freedom for which it claims to be waging war — it could have offered reinforced protection or even searched participants at assembly points (a commonplace in countries truly plagued by terror). 

As Naomi Klein has pointed out, the French state of emergency applies blatant double standards: the Christmas market at Champs Elysées — masses thronging the avenue to do their shopping — retains a green light, as do soccer matches, even though one was an actual target on November 13. The government’s priorities are evident.

COP21 begins today. But yesterday French police clamped down hard on demonstrators, even indulging in house arrests for prominent climate justice activists, as Sewell Chan reports in "France Uses Sweeping Powers to Curb Climate Protests, but Clashes Erupt":

PARIS — The French government is using the sweeping emergency powers it gained after the Paris terrorist attacks to clamp down on any possible disruption to the two-week global climate conference that starts on Monday, limiting public demonstrations, beefing up security and placing two dozen environmental activists under house arrest. 

The efforts to restrict protests — as world leaders arrived to reach an international deal to contain global warming — were not entirely successful; 174 people were taken into custody on Sunday after demonstrators clashed with the police in the historic Place de la République.

The police, in full riot gear, used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse the demonstrators, some of whom grabbed flowers and other remembrances that had been left at a tribute to the 130 people killed in the attacks and hurled them at officers. Some demonstrators chanted: “State of emergency, police state. You can’t take away our right to demonstrate!”

Twenty-four environmental activists were put under house arrest in the past few days, as the French prepared to host the long-anticipated talks.

***

Juliette Rousseau, the head of Coalition Climat 21, an umbrella group for environmental activists, said the authorities had searched homes and seized computers and other equipment belonging to activists who have no connection to terrorism. 

“There’s clearly an environment to keep activists out,” she said. “The state of emergency is clearly targeting activist movements. This is not justified. These people under house arrest, they don’t have any kind of criminal record.” 

She added: “The impression we have is that there is this conference taking place in a sealed-up space, and meanwhile people in civil society are being asphyxiated.”

This is how it works. Jihadist terrorists, espousing an ideology identical to the West's allies among the Gulf monarchies in the Middle East, are used as bogeymen to justify a crackdown on secular, leftist activists.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is all part of a plan. And if you want to avoid the taint of being labeled a "conspiracy theorist" in arguing that jihadist terrorism is actively supported by the West in order to destabilize targeted states at the same time it enables the expansion of domestic surveillance and police powers, then why not settle on the hypothesis that Western capitalist democracies, operating on a "pay-to-play" scheme as they do, are riven by contradictions, and these contradictions lead to perpetual war and a concomitant loss of liberty.

The irony of Obama assuring the citizenry last Wednesday that there were no credible immediate threats of terrorism to the homeland only to have a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs shot up in a murderous rampage should be quite clear. The U.S. has its own homegrown terrorists; some forms of murderous violence have a quasi-official sanction. The GOP has long had a pact with right-to-life absolutists. Colorado Springs is the direct result of the undercover videos of Planned Parenthood staff discussing the acquisition of fetal tissue with actors hired by the anti-abortion group The Center for Medical Progress. The videos were vetted by Republican Congressmen prior to their public release.

Yes, the U.S. has its own religious fundamentalist terror network. To get a sense how the global jihadist network du jour functions read "ISIS’ Grip on Libyan City Gives It a Fallback Option" by David Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt. Islamic State is moving the caliphate to the Mediterranean coast of Libya:

The Islamic State has already established exclusive control of more than 150 miles of Mediterranean coastline near Surt, from the town of Abugrein in the west to Nawfaliya in the east. The militias from the nearby city of Misurata that once vowed to expel the group completely have all retreated. Only a few checkpoints manned by one or two militiamen guard the edge of the Islamic State’s turf, where its fighters come and go as they please.

***

“A great exodus of the Islamic State leadership in Syria and Iraq is now establishing itself in Libya,” said Omar Adam, 34, the commander of a prominent militia based in Misurata. 

The group in Surt has also begun imposing the parent organization’s harsh version of Islamic law on the city, enforcing veils for all women, banning music and cigarettes, and closing shops during prayers, residents and recent visitors said. The group carried out at least four crucifixions in August. 

Last month the group held its first two public beheadings, killing two men accused of sorcery, according to prison inmates who knew the men and a Surt resident who said he had witnessed the killings.

One comes away from this lengthy piece with the understanding that Islamic State is a mercenary organization with Saudi and Iraqi leadership:

The fighters and guards in Surt all bowed to a Saudi administrator, or “wali,” who had been sent by the Islamic State to preside over the city. (A former Surt City Council member now in exile in Misurata said the Islamic State periodically rotates in new administrators, who typically are from the Persian Gulf.) Whenever drones were heard flying overhead, guards would run to the Saudi, take away his cellphone, and hurry him away to safety, the truck drivers said, suggesting that the Islamic State considered him important enough to be a target of American airstrikes.

Multinational terrorism networks are by definition not indigenous. They usually rely on some form of state sponsorship. Tomorrow we'll look at the recent focus in the Western press on the abhorrent totalitarian nature of the Gulf sheikhdoms that have so much sway in the U.S. and Europe.

Centcom Investigation into Cooking Intelligence on ISIS has Potential to Bring Down the U.S. Warfare State

The cooking of intelligence coming out of Centcom has the potential to be a bombshell so huge it will destroy the current foundation of the perpetual warfare state, what used to be referred to as the Global War on Terror. Of course Obama is in full cover-up mode, as Michael Shear reports in "Obama Orders Inquiry Into Intelligence on ISIS":

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — President Obama said on Sunday that he had ordered his senior defense officials to find out whether intelligence reports had been altered to reflect a more optimistic assessment of the American military campaign against the Islamic State. 

Speaking at a news conference in Malaysia at the end of a 10-day overseas trip, Mr. Obama said he expected the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate allegations that significant changes were made to reports from analysts at the United States Central Command, known as Centcom.

“I don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on in Centcom,” Mr. Obama said. “What I do know is my expectation — which is the highest fidelity to facts, data, the truth.”

Mr. Obama was responding to a report in The New York Times on Sunday that described the internal Pentagon investigation. Some analysts in the Defense Department say their supervisors revised their conclusions about some of the military’s failures before finalizing the reports.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon has expanded its investigation into the allegations and has seized a large trove of emails and documents as it examines the claims. The president said altering reports to make them more optimistic would be contrary to his wishes.

If the inspector general of the Department of Defense is already conducting an investigation, Obama's statement that he is ordering his senior people to get to the bottom of it is meaningless, hollow grandstanding.

What is obvious is that ISIS has been studiously ignored by the Obama administration from the outset. All one need do is go back and read the coverage from the days when ISIS took Mosul at the end of spring last year. The U.S. man in Baghdad at the time, Brett McGurt (elevated to a new position recently, Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL), spent more time hectoring Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki to relinquish power than he did dealing with the rise of the caliphate, an enormous launch pad for jihadist terrorist attacks on the West.

The cover story at the time was that al-Maliki had to go in order to build trust with Iraqi Sunni who supposedly were fueling the ISIS conflagration. So al-Maliki went and ISIS gobbled up even more territory.

It is a favorite canard of the West that the jihadist efflorescence in Iraq and Syria is homegrown. It is not. It is a foreign import that is attributable to many of the key members of the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, a classic subterfuge where an enemy is created and supported in order to destabilize an area and then penetrate it with your superior military force.

As for the potential godhead bombshell that is the Pentagon inspector general's investigation, here is what Matt Apuzzo, Mark Mazzetti and Michael Schmidt had to say yesterday in "Pentagon Expands Inquiry Into Intelligence on ISIS Surge":

The attacks in Paris last week were a deadly demonstration that the Islamic State, once a group of militants focused on seizing territory in Iraq and Syria, has broadened its focus to attack the West. The electronic files seized in the Pentagon investigation tell the story of the group’s rise, as seen through the eyes of Centcom, which oversees military operations across the Middle East.

The exact content of those documents is unclear and may not become public because so much of the information is classified. But military officials have told Congress that some of those emails and documents may have been deleted before they had to be turned over to investigators, according to a senior congressional official, who requested anonymity to speak about the ongoing inquiry. Current and former officials have separately made similar claims, on condition of anonymity, to The New York Times. Although lawmakers are demanding answers about those claims, it is not clear that the inspector general has been able to verify them. A spokeswoman for the inspector general declined to comment.

Staff members at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are also poring over years of Centcom intelligence reports and comparing them to assessments from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others. The committee is not just examining reports about Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State, but also about Afghanistan and other areas under Centcom’s purview. The insurrection inside Centcom is an important chapter in the story of how the United States responded to the growing threat from the Islamic State. This past summer, a group of Centcom analysts took concerns about their superiors to the inspector general, saying they had evidence that senior officials had changed intelligence assessments to overstate the progress of American airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

***

That investigation was prompted by complaints this past summer from Centcom’s longtime Iraq experts, led by Gregory Hooker, the senior Iraq analyst. In some ways, the team’s criticisms mirror those of a decade ago, when Mr. Hooker wrote a research paper saying the Bush administration, over many analysts’ objections, advocated a small force in Iraq and spent little time planning for what would follow the invasion. 

Lawmakers originally said that the Centcom investigation would be completed in weeks. But Pentagon investigators have found the work painstaking and it could span months. In addition to determining whether changes were made to intelligence reports — and if so, who ordered them — the investigators, like the staff members of the House intelligence committee, are studying reports from other intelligence agencies produced at the time to determine what was actually occurring in Iraq and Syria when the reports were written.

The creation of multiple investigations in Congress, one in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and one in the House Armed Services Committee, is not necessarily a good sign. It means that the issue of doctoring intelligence for war purposes will be obscured as the fog machinery of the duopoly is cranked into high gear.

What did those deleted emails say? Certainly investigators have the technology to retrieve them. The issue is whether they really want to. My guess is that there is some rather frank "sports talk" about how the Turks and the Saudis are running ISIS, and how the U.S. was lending a hand.

Why else purposely inflate the effectiveness of airstrikes against ISIS? The only benign explanation I can think of is that senior Pentagon brass didn't want their boss in the Oval Office to feel any heat to ratchet up a response to a formidable adversary.

But on closer inspection this excuse makes no sense, particularly after ISIS took Palmyra and Ramadi this past May, because eventually the "facts on the ground" will out and a reckoning must be had.

The only explanation that makes any sense is that the intelligence was rewritten because the objectives of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are the same as the U.S. and its main allies in the region -- to weaken Iran and the governments aligned with Iran. The U.S. wants to be seen as fighting effectively against Islamic terrorism, at the same time it is using Wahhabi jihadists to achieve its geopolitical goals. It is the classic Ring of Gyges scenario that spurs Socrates on his discourse about the Good in Plato's Republic, as well as much of the action in Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the idea that the optimal position for a man is to have the reputation for moral rectitude but also to be equipped with a special ring that makes him invisible so he can steal and desecrate at will.

This is what the U.S. and its allies are trying to pull off, a Ring of Gyges scenario. Hopefully, enough truth will come out of the Centcom investigation that the invisible will be made visible. I am not too optimistic though. The Unites States is a warfare nation. Anything so big that it could threaten a nation's essence will be assiduously and ruthlessly crushed.

****

I am out of town for the holiday. Look for a post this Friday.

Kamel Daoud's "Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It"

The best, most to-the-point statement I've read about the West's Global War on Terror; it is all built on a lie, or as Kamel Daoud says in "Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It," the denial that Saudi Arabia is exporting jihad en masse. To its credit The New York Times is publishing Daoud's essay.

If you read the newspapers every day, it is a marvel to behold, this mainstream conspiracy to occlude the obvious. Yet, as Tag Team reminded us, "Whoomp! There It Is." I ask people all the time -- people at work, people at the grocery store -- what they think about the mess we have wrought in the Middle East, and no one singles out al-Saud for blame. Usually, it is, "Oh, they've been killing each other over there for thousands of years," or "That Assad is a brute." Propaganda works. But what you will read below is the unvarnished truth.

Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It

By Kamel Daoud

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it. 

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns. 

One might counter: Isn’t Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime. 

One has to live in the Muslim world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious television channels on society by accessing its weak links: households, women, rural areas. Islamist culture is widespread in many countries — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania. There are thousands of Islamist newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government’s laws and on the rituals of a society they deem to be contaminated. 

It is worth reading certain Islamist newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris. The West is cast as a land of “infidels.” The attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam. Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews. The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant to seduce the masses. Such talk spreads in the social spaces below, while up above, political leaders send their condolences to France and denounce a crime against humanity. This totally schizophrenic situation parallels the West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia.

All of which leaves one skeptical of Western democracies’ thunderous declarations regarding the necessity of fighting terrorism. Their war can only be myopic, for it targets the effect rather than the cause. Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when the influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its immense editorial industry remains intact?

Is curing the disease therefore a simple matter? Hardly. Saudi Arabia remains an ally of the West in the many chess games playing out in the Middle East. It is preferred to Iran, that gray Daesh. And there’s the trap. Denial creates the illusion of equilibrium. Jihadism is denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives. 

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books. 

The attacks in Paris have exposed this contradiction again, but as happened after 9/11, it risks being erased from our analyses and our consciences.

U.S. Position on Syria Becoming Untenable: How Long Can Obama Keep the Spotlight from Shining on Saudi Arabia?

How do you publish a lengthy feature on the growth of ISIS, as the Gray Lady does today with Ian Fisher's "In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame," and barely -- maybe once or twice in passing -- mention Saudi Arabia?

It is ludicrous, but it goes directly to the heart of the U.S. position on the war in Syria. Obama is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. On the one side, he has repeatedly dismissed the seriousness of Islamic State, insisting the caliphate is an epiphenomenon of Assad's brutally; that once Assad is ushered off the stage, then the dove of peace will descend and all will set about to the righteous path. On the other side, Obama has warned of toppling the Syrian government militarily, for chaos a la Libya will reign in the absence of Baathist rule.

So what you have is a policy of slow-motion regime change where the U.S. is facilitating as best it can, according to the wishes of its partners in the GCC, a victory of jihadist forces over the Syrian government, while simultaneously hoping that the situation doesn't get too out of control.

But the situation is clearly out of control and it has been for years. It is only when a European capital city comes under assault that most people in the West suddenly appear to have arisen from slumber and started to demand answers. Of course prior to Paris, there was Beirut, Sharm el Sheikh, Ankara, etc., not to mention the huge influx of refugees to Europe from the greater Middle East.

That's why on Monday Obama was riddled with skeptical questions from reporters at the G20 conference in Turkey. In that appearance before the press (Michael Shear and Peter Baker,
"Obama Says Strategy to Fight ISIS Will Succeed") Obama contradicted his CIA chief John Brennan by saying that the Paris terror attack was not all that sophisticated but more a product of ideology, before reasserting the canard that ISIS flourished in the vacuum created by the war in Syria:

At his news conference here, Mr. Obama sounded weary as he repeatedly rejected criticism of his yearlong strategy. Wrapping up 48 hours of diplomacy in this Turkish resort community on the Mediterranean Sea, the president seemed frustrated by second-guessing and twice chided reporters for asking the same question in slightly different ways. 

He denied underestimating the Islamic State, saying that the group’s attacks have not been particularly sophisticated. “If you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people,” he said. “That’s one of the challenges of terrorism. It’s not their sophistication or the particular weaponry that they possess. But it is the ideology they carry with them and their willingness to die.” [But whose ideology is it? It is Saudi Wahhabism.]

***

In the end, he said, the strategy will choke off the Islamic State’s financing, cut off its supply lines and reinforcements and make it harder to hold territory. Along with a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war that provided a vacuum for the Islamic State to fill, “that ultimately is going to be what’s going to make a difference,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “and it’s going to take some time.” 

But who created that vacuum of war? The U.S. and its allies did.

If you want a "man on a galloping horse" perspective on the war in Syria, straight with no bullshit, consult Abel Bari Atwan's interview yesterday on Democracy Now!:

You know, Saudi Arabia is the origin of radicalism, Islamic radicalism, in the Middle East and the whole world and the whole Islamic world. Why? Because al-Qaeda ideology—sorry, Islamic State ideology is the same Wahhabi ideology which adopted by the Saudi kingdom. This is—you know, they go back to the time of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 1704, you know, so they are doing—doing exactly the same. They are doing in Syria and Iraq this brutality, this savagery, the Wahhabism of the Saudi regime in 1705 and ’06, when they actually invaded Karbala and Najaf. They committed the same massacres.

So, Saudi Arabia, actually, now, they are—they are, actually, with Qatar and with Turkey. They have some sort of alliance. And they started the problem in Syria. They poured billions in Syria, hoping to topple the Assad regime for personal revenge, not for political means, not for actually, you know, a strategic move from their side. They just want to take revenge, personal revenge, because Assad insulted them in a way or another, and also because they thought that they can topple him in a few weeks, few months maximum. So they poured billions of weapons. And also, they encouraged a hundred—sorry, tens of thousands of volunteers to go through Turkey to Syria to fight against the Assad regime.

I would add that the Saudis and Turks have strategic objectives. They want to make sure after the deal with the West on its nuclear program that the Iranians do not have stable allies in Iraq and Syria. 

Despite Syrian Ceasefire Proposal, U.S. Still Insists "Assad Must Go"

Kerry is in Paris today (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Cease-Fire and Political Transition in Syria Crucial to Defeating ISIS, Kerry Says") talking up the ceasefire deal arrived at in Geneva. But the U.S. secretary of state has not ceased chanting the Saudi mantra of "Assad Must Go," and he persists in blaming the Syrian government for the rise of ISIS (some kind of chutzpah):

PARIS — The United States, France and Russia must step up their coordination in striking the Islamic State in Syria after the Paris terrorist attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday, but he insisted that cooperation cannot begin until there is a cease-fire and a political transition. 

Mr. Kerry expressed optimism that a shift in Syria could come within weeks now that the United States and more than a dozen other nations, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, have agreed to a framework to end the crisis there. 

That will depend, he said, on the ability of Syrian opposition groups to organize and negotiate with the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and cooperation from Russia and Iran to ease the transition. 

“Now, all we need is the beginning of the political process, and the cease-fire goes in place – that’s a gigantic step,” he said in an interview with reporters who were traveling with him. 

Mr. Kerry also met with President François Hollande of France on Tuesday to discuss how to intensify pressure against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or the Arabic acronym Daesh. 

“If we can get that done, that opens up the aperture for a whole bunch of things,” Mr. Kerry said of a cease-fire in the four-year civil war. “So we’re weeks away, conceivably, from the possibility of a big transition for Syria.” 

The more quickly the political changes occur, he added, “the faster the violence can taper down and we can isolate Daesh and al Nusra, and begin to do what our strategy has always set out to do.” 

Although American and Russian forces are sharing limited information in their military campaigns, they are not fully coordinating their efforts against the Islamic State. France is also hitting Islamic State targets in Syria. 

United States officials fear that any information they shared with Moscow about American-supported opposition groups would be used by the Russians or Mr. Assad to target them.  [U.S. won't share intelligence on the groups it is backing because this would reveal that the West is backing jihadist groups very similar to ISIS; fighters move back and forth between the various Islamist factions based on who is paying top dollar.]

Once the political process is on track, Mr. Kerry said, the United States and Russia could begin to “cooperate on the broader scale, which we can’t do until we have some definition.” 

Mr. Kerry’s diplomatic effort faces long odds in the multisided conflict in Syria, which has become a proxy war, and it was not clear whether his ambitious timetable is feasible.
Although the United States has said Mr. Assad must leave office as part of any solution to the conflict in Syria, he has the support of Russia and Iran, and Iran’s deputy foreign minister reiterated that point on Monday. 

But Kerry said on Tuesday that it would be impossible to defeat the Islamic State without the departure of Mr. Assad. 

“He’s complicit in the rise of Daesh, and therefore, as long as Assad is there, you cannot fully go get rid of this phenomenon,” Mr. Kerry said.

In other words, nothing much has changed. Hope has been expressed that the impromptu Putin-Obama powwow at the G20 conference in Turkey might lead to increased coordination between Russia and the U.S. But as of yet we have no real proof of any rapprochement. There is some evidence that the French and Russians are working more closely. According to Foreign Policy's "Situation Report" this morning, French and Russian planes are both bombing Raqqa. This takes coordination I would imagine:

Amid new reports that Russian cruise missiles and long range bombers hit the Syrian city of Raqqa late Monday night, (there’s video of one of the missiles streaking across the Syrian sky), French warplanes also pounded the Islamic State’s capital for the second straight night, launching 10 fighter jets from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

So while the U.S. is parroting the line that ISIS (and therefore the terror attacks on Paris) is Assad's fault, there is some proof that France is beginning to gravitate to the Russian camp.

Yesterday's "Situation Report" contained an interesting synopsis of the spin on Paris:

Forty-nine Syrian rebel groups issued a joint statement on Friday condemning the attacks "that oppose the heavenly laws and the human values," according to a translation published by SITE Intel Group. The rebel groups asked the international community to align against the Assad regime, which it labeled the source of the Islamic State's persistence.

On the other side of the Syrian conflict, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani decried the Paris attack, with Putin urging France to join with Russia in forming an international coalition in Syria. Hezbollah, which is fighting in Syria alongside Russia and Iran on the side of the Assad regime, also issued a statement, referencing the recent attacks against a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut by the Islamic State.

The 49 Syrian rebel groups are chock full of Islamic fundamentalists, many of whom agree wholeheartedly with the Islamic State even if they quibble with the immediate tactics of kamikaze Kalashnikov attacks on rock concerts. These are the rebel groups the U.S. is aligned with, the ones it will be difficult for Kerry to airbrush come time for them to participate in a transition government.

After Paris: A Few Hopeful Signs but Overall Business as Usual

There are indications this morning that the Friday assault on Paris by Islamic State hit teams that murdered 129 might actually prompt a shift by the West. Ever since Mosul fell at the end of spring 2014, the West, led by the United States, has been engaged in largely cosmetic attacks on ISIS as the jihadist offshoot of Al Qaeda pursued goals identical to the West, namely, regime change in Iraq and Syria. The collapse of the Iraqi Army was used to oust Nouri al-Maliki, but Bashar al-Assad has not proven so easy to dislodge.

Beginning early last month with Russia's active militarily involvement against the potpourri of jihadist groups operating in Syria, many with the direct support of Western intelligence services and GCC funding, the war in Syria began to shift. Islamic State struck back by blowing up a Russian charter jet in the Sinai two weeks ago, followed by a suicide bombing in a Beirut neighborhood, capped off by the assault on Paris on Friday.

Indications that this ISIS assault on a Western capital city has elicited a move away from the cosmetic to the substantive in the war against the caliphate are contained in two stories this morning: "France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks," by Alissa Rubin and Anne Barnard, and "U.S. Warplanes Strike ISIS Oil Trucks in Syria," by Michael Gordon.

First, Michael Gordon's story. Many commentators have pointed out that if the U.S. were truly serious about knocking out the caliphate it would go after its black-market oil pipeline. As Pepe Escobar argued ten-days ago in "What's the Big Deal Between the Russians and the Saudis?":

Meanwhile, fomenting all sorts of wild speculation, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh still manages to collect as much as $50 million a month from selling crude from oilfields it controls across “Syraq”, according to the best Iraq-based estimates. 

The fact that this mini-oil caliphate is able to bring in equipment and technical experts from “abroad” to keep its energy sector running beggars belief. “Abroad” in this context means essentially Turkey – engineers plus equipment for extraction, refinement, transport and energy production. 

One of the reasons this is happening is that the US-led Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO) – which includes Saudi Arabia and Turkey – is actually bombing the Syrian state energy infrastructure, not the mini oil-Caliphate domains. So we have the proverbial “international actors” in the region de facto aiding ISIS/ISIL/Daesh to sell crude to smugglers for as low as $10 a barrel.

Or as John Newsinger points out in a footnote to his "Wars Past and Wars to Come" in the latest Monthly Review:

The U.S. fight against Islamic State is compromised by the covert support that America’s allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, continue to provide for that regime. When considering IS it is worth adopting the old adage of following the money. Who is helping produce, sell and distribute the Islamic State’s oil? It is certain that Western intelligence agencies know the answer to this question, but obviously those assisting IS are too important to be named, let alone be sanctioned for their actions.

Now, according to Gordon, the U.S. has finally decided to target the Islamic State's oil:

ISTANBUL — Intensifying pressure on the Islamic State, United States warplanes for the first time attacked hundreds of trucks on Monday that the extremist group has been using to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria, American officials said.

According to an initial assessment, 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area in eastern Syria that is controlled by the Islamic State.
The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey. 

Plans for the strike were developed well before the terrorist attacks in and around Paris on Friday, officials familiar with the operation said, part of a broader operation to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to generate revenue to support its military operations and govern its territory. 

American officials have long been frustrated by ability of ISIS to generate tens of million of dollars a month by producing and exporting oil.

To disrupt that source of revenue, American officials said last week that the United States had sharply stepped up its airstrikes against infrastructure that allows ISIS to pump oil in Syria. 

Until Monday, the United States had refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact. 

The new campaign is called Tidal Wave II. It is named after the World War II effort to counter Nazi Germany by striking Romania’s oil industry. Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, who in September assumed command of the international coalition’s campaign in Iraq and Syria, suggested the name. 

To reduce the risk of harming civilians, two F-15 warplanes dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles, and strafing runs were conducted to reinforce the message.

Don't believe the window-dressing about concern for civilian casualties. Just ask the survivors from the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. The U.S. and its allies obviously wanted to maintain the viability of the caliphate as a way to pressure the governments of Iraq and Syria.

My concern is that these airstrikes on the oil-tanker trucks are going to be a PR one-off, evidence of good faith for the voters back home who are paying attention. Kerry's statement coming out of the negotiations in Geneva stick to the "It's All Assad's Fault" script, which is the same one that got us ISIS to begin with. According to Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "Attacks in Paris Add Urgency to Talks on Ending Syria War":

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov sparred openly over the fate of Mr. Assad, a central question in any final agreement. 

The United States, along with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, believes Mr. Assad must go as part of any final settlement, and Mr. Kerry described him on Saturday as an enabler of the Islamic State and a “magnet” for foreign fighters who are spreading terror through the region and beyond. 

“This war won’t end — this war can’t end — as long as Bashar al-Assad is there,” he said. [Clear statement that there will be more terror attacks like Friday's in Paris.] 

But Russia has been a strong Assad supporter, and Mr. Lavrov argued that the conflict in Syria goes far beyond him, noting that past crises in Iraq and Libya only worsened with the ouster of their leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi. 

“I cannot agree, therefore, with the logic that Assad is the cause for everything,” Mr. Lavrov said to Mr. Kerry, seated with him in a hotel ballroom for the news conference. “The Paris attacks have shown, alongside with ISIS claiming responsibility for it, that it doesn’t matter if you are for Assad or against him; ISIS is your enemy, so it’s not about Assad.” 

Also left unresolved was the critical question of which groups would be considered terrorist organizations and which legitimate members of the opposition would be included in the political transition talks, an issue that the diplomats agreed to work on in the days ahead.

Not good. Yet in the Rubin and Barnard story about French airstrikes on the caliphate's capital of Raqqa, there is some hopeful news that the West is finally getting serious:

There is a growing focus on both reducing the Islamic State’s territory and its financing, said French government officials and experts. 

“We need to push the organization away from its territories,” said Jean Charles Brisard, a terrorism expert, who worked in the French government and now is the chairman for the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, a Paris-based research group. 

“Most of its resources are from the territory, so we have to push it away from its resources in Syria and Iraq and that means going in on the ground with a regional power,” he said.

The United States currently has soldiers on the ground in Iraq working with Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to dislodge the Islamic State. France has not yet said whether it will adopt a similar course. 

On Sunday, Mr. Hollande met his predecessor and rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, at the Élysée Palace. Afterward, Mr. Sarkozy urged decisive action against the Islamic State — a position Mr. Hollande has also taken. 

“We need everybody in order to exterminate Daesh,” Mr. Sarkozy told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

We'll see. A danger here is this "going in on the ground with a regional power" could be the green light that Erdogan has been looking for all along -- a buffer zone in northern Syria. Erdogan is going to get his billions and his special session in Brussels for Turkey. He has been playing his cards like a poker shark.

So despite hints here and there of a shift, it looks like business as usual. It is going to take a shift in Europe away from the United States and closer to Russia and China to bring about real change. That is not going to happen unless there is a cracking of the European Union. Something that "business as usual" is rapidly bringing about. Look for Marine Le Pen in 2017.