What Putin Really Said Today

Several times this morning I've seen references to a Reuters story ("Putin says Russian, U.S. intelligence agencies should restore ties") about Putin's address today to the Federal Security Service (FSB) board. But this is all the story says so far (Reuters usually updates its dispatches throughout the day):

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday it was in the interests of both Russia and the United States to restore communications between their respective intelligence agencies.

"It's in everyone's interest to resume dialogue between the intelligence agencies of the United States and other members of NATO," Putin said, addressing Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).

"It's absolutely clear that in the area of counter-terrorism all relevant governments and international groups should work together."

(Reporting by Jack Stubbs; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

There is a fuller account on the President of Russia website. You'll notice that what Putin said about restoring ties between the U.S. deep state ("intelligence agencies") and NATO was preceded by a largely unassailable account of NATO expansionism and a reminder that at last year's summit in Warsaw Russian containment was spelled out as the raison d'être of the alliance for the first time since 1989:

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon.

These annual FSB Board meetings give us a chance to meet and not only thoroughly analyse and review the results of the agency’s work over the period, but also to discuss at length all important national security issues in general and outline the priorities for the immediate future and the longer-term.

The FSB plays a key part in protecting our constitutional order and our country’s sovereignty, and in protecting our people from threats at home and abroad.

Let me say from the start that last year’s results were positive and show good development. This concerns your work to counter terrorism and extremism, a series of successful counterintelligence operations, your efforts to combat economic crime, and other areas.

You ensured a high standard of security for major public events, including the State Duma election and regional and local elections.

I would like to thank both the executives and staff for their conscientious attitude towards their work and their timely and efficient performance of their duties.

At the same time, demands on the quality and results of your work grow constantly. The global situation has not become any more stable or better over the past year. On the contrary, many existing threats and challenges have only become more acute.

Military-political and economic rivalry between global and regional policy makers and between individual countries has increased. We see bloody conflicts continue in a number of countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. International terrorist groups, essentially terrorist armies, receiving tacit and sometimes even open support from some countries, take active part in these conflicts.

At the NATO summit last July in Warsaw, Russia was declared the main threat to the alliance for the first time since 1989, and NATO officially proclaimed containing Russia its new mission. It is with this aim that NATO continues its expansion. This expansion was already underway earlier, but now they believe they have more serious reasons for doing so. They have stepped up the deployment of strategic and conventional arms beyond the national borders of the principal NATO member states.

They are provoking us constantly and are trying to draw us into confrontation. We see continued attempts to interfere in our internal affairs in a bid to destabilise the social and political situation in Russia itself.

We also see the recent serious flare-up in southeast Ukraine. This escalation pursues the clear aim of preventing the Minsk Agreements from going ahead. The current Ukrainian authorities are obviously not seeking a peaceful solution to this very complex problem and have decided to opt for the use of force instead. What is more, they speak openly about organising sabotage and terrorism, particularly in Russia. Obviously, this is a matter of great concern.

The events and circumstances I have mentioned require our security and intelligence services, especially the Federal Security Service, to concentrate their utmost attention and effort on the paramount task of fighting terrorism.

We have already seen that our intelligence services dealt some serious blows to terrorists and their accomplices. Last year’s results confirm this: the number of terrorism related crimes has decreased.

Preventive work has also brought results. The FSB and other security agencies, with the National Antiterrorist Committee acting as coordinator, prevented 45 terrorism related crimes, including 16 planned terrorist attacks. You deserve special gratitude for this.

You need to continue your active efforts to identify and block terrorist groups’ activity, eliminate their financial base, prevent the activities of their emissaries from abroad and their dangerous activity on the internet, and take into account in this work Russian and international experience in this area.

The murder of our ambassador to Turkey was a terrible crime that particularly highlighted the need to protect our citizens and missions abroad. I ask you to work together with the Foreign Ministry and the Foreign Intelligence Service to take additional measures to ensure their safety.

You must also work to take our counterterrorism cooperation with partners abroad to a new level, despite the difficulties that we see in various areas of international life. It is a priority, of course, to intensify work with our partners in organisations such as the UN, the CSTO, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

It is in our common interests to restore dialogue with the US intelligence services and with other NATO member countries. It is not our fault that these ties were broken off and are not developing. It is very clear that all responsible countries and international groups should work together on counterterrorism, because even simply exchanging information on terrorists’ financing channels and sources and on people involved in or suspected of links with terrorism can substantially improve the results of our common efforts.

Our priorities include firmly suppressing extremism. Security methods must go hand-in-hand with constant prevention work. It is essential to prevent extremism from drawing young people into its criminal networks, and to form an overall firm rejection of nationalism, xenophobia, and aggressive radicalism. In this context, of great importance is open dialogue with civil society institutions and representatives of Russia’s traditional religions.

It looks like we're at the beginning of a period of deep state turbulence the likes of which we haven't seen since Watergate.

Rebels Unravel

The blowback from the fatwas issued by Sunni clerics has begun. A commander of the Free Syrian Army, Kamal Hamami, was killed in Latakia province bordering Turkey in northern Syria by members of the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. Reuters has the story, "New front opens in Syria as rebels say al Qaeda attack means war":

Louay Mekdad, FSA Supreme Command Political Coordinator, said Abu Ayman al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State's Emir of the coastal region, personally shot dead Hamami and his brother at the roadblock. 

The FSA has been trying to build a logistics network and reinforce its presence across Syria as the U.S. administration considers sending weapons, in part to present a bulwark against units it considers "terrorist organizations." 

But with funding from Gulf-based individuals, Islamist brigades have taken a leading role in rebel-held regions of Syria, filling the vacuum of power by setting up religious courts and governance bodies. 

The FSA -- a mixture of loosely-affiliated brigades -- is accused by locals of looting and has not been able to present a unified front to sideline hardline units who favor an Islamic caliphate over pluralist democracy. 

Some frustrated FSA fighters say they have joined Islamist groups and moderate and hardline fighters sometimes buy and sell weapons from each other. 

The anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said the FSA and the Islamic State have had violent exchanges in several areas of Syria over the past few weeks, showing growing antagonism between Assad's foes. 

"Last Friday, the Islamic State killed an FSA rebel in Idlib province and cut his head off. There have been attacks in many provinces," the Observatory's leader Rami Abdelrahman said.

There is a civil war within the civil war. You have the looters of the FSA fighting against the jihadis of Al Nusra Front recently rebranded or merged, depending on how you look at it, with Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. This was the obvious outcome of pursuing contradictory policies. The West has an enormous security apparatus to combat Al Qaeda, yet we were willing to facilitate our Gulf Arab allies in fomenting jihad against Syria. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences.

Colum Lynch, writing in Foreign Policy, reports on European concerns over radicalized Sunni fighters returning from Syria to create problems in their home countries on the continent. It is as if the desire to topple al-Assad erased everything that was learned from exporting jihad to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Or maybe the failed-state model of Afghanistan is actually the desired outcome. It does guarantee perpetual war.

Syrian Peace Conference Likely Won't Take Place Until September, If Then

Today is the second day in a row that the New York Times national edition has no coverage of Syria. Events in Egypt, with a showdown now between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military looming large, have crowded out coverage of the civil war.

Reuters has a story which is built around a rebel video threatening two Shiite villages, Nubl and Zahra, near Aleppo. SANA reports a terror bombing in Damascus as the SAA grinds away in Homs.

Online Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times has a story about the status of the peace conference. Now September is being spoken of as a possible date. The story is a useful recapitulation of the bargaining positions of the United States and Russia. Reading it I am once again struck by the destructiveness of U.S. strategy, which is to foment chaos in hopes that it will bring al-Assad to the table. Imagine a situation where al-Assad immediately accedes to Western wishes and steps down. The sectarian warfare will not stop. The opposition is splintered. They most likely will continue fighting each other for spoils. There is already some of this going on among jihadi groups.

If civil war erupts in Egypt everything changes. The Wahhabis will be in a pickle. The Muslim Brotherhood is their baby. Will they allow a return of military control? Possibly. If they are allowed to achieve their aims of Talibanizing Syria.

Islamists Dominate Rebels

Reuters has a story, "Syria's Islamists seize control as moderates dither," this morning which confirms the impression one gets from reading the daily news coming out of Syria. The rebels on the battlefield no longer include significant groupings of secularists fighting for political rights. Sunni fundamentalists fighting for a religious state dominate:

It's a pattern repeated elsewhere in the country. During a 10-day journey through rebel-held territory in Syria, Reuters journalists found that radical Islamist units are sidelining more moderate groups that do not share the Islamists' goal of establishing a supreme religious leadership in the country. 

The moderates, often underfunded, fragmented and chaotic, appear no match for Islamist units, which include fighters from organizations designated "terrorist" by the United States. 

The Islamist ascendancy has amplified the sectarian nature of the war between Sunni Muslim rebels and the Shi'ite supporters of Assad. It also presents a barrier to the original democratic aims of the revolt and calls into question whether the United States, which announced practical support for the rebels last week, can ensure supplies of weapons go only to groups friendly to the West.

World powers fear weapons could reach hardline Islamist groups that wish to create an Islamic mini-state within a crescent of rebel-held territory from the Mediterranean in the west to the desert border with Iraq.

That prospect is also alarming for many in Syria, from minority Christians, Alawites and Shi'ites to tolerant Sunni Muslims, who are concerned that this alliance would try to impose Taliban-style rule.

And speaking of the Taliban, though it was not addressed in this morning's substantial story, "Taliban Step Toward Afghan Peace Talks Is Hailed by U.S.," by Matthew Rosenberg and Alissa Rubin, my sense is this was a quid pro quo for the U.S. agreeing to arm the Syrian rebels. Qatar, where the Taliban reopened their political office yesterday, has been the Gulf Arab nation most active in its support of al-Assad's ouster.

The Obama administration knows that once Western military forces depart next year the Afghan government will collapse soon after. So some sort of agreement with the Taliban is essential not only to salvage a silver lining from the decade-plus occupation but also to maintain future viability of NATO out-of-area adventurism. To facilitate these negotiations, Obama is willing to provision the rebels with light arms.

It could be that Obama, cornered by his "red line" statement about the use of chemical weapons and hawks in his State Department, tried to make the most out of an atrocious situation by getting Qatar to muscle the Taliban to the table. Rosenberg and Rubin don't see much coming out of new talks. The Taliban are merely increasing their international profile as they prepare to take power.

Rounding out other Syria news, Russia got the best of the other G-8 nations. The final statement called for peaceful negotiations to begin as soon as possible, making no mention of al-Assad stepping down nor the alleged use of poison gas by the Syrian government. The Lebanese Army was sent to the port city of Sidon to quell gun battles between loyalists to Sunni cleric Sheik Ahmad al-Assir, who has called for jihad against al-Assad, and Hezbollah.

Crass, The Feeding of the 5000 (Second Sitting)

Suffering from a mysterious backache at work today I took refuge in The Feeding of the 5000 (Second Sitting), the first Crass release from 1978, an EP, that was reissued in LP form in 1980.

The news, as Reuters is reporting, that the Obama administration, based on assessment that the Assad government used poison gas, is going forward with military support for the Syrian opposition made for a gloomy afternoon.

Mark the date. This is the end of any hope for the Democrats.

Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi Calls for Holy War

Dominic Evans of Reuters is reporting this morning that rebels setting up to launch more rockets toward the Lebanese city of Baalbek were hit hard by Hezbollah. Russia blocked a UN Security Council statement of grave concern over the fighting in Qusayr because the UN had failed to speak out when the city was seized by rebels more than a year ago. Government forces seem to be in the mopping-up phase. Reuters is also reporting that Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV star "Sunni Muslim cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi called on Saturday for holy war against the Syrian government after fighters from Shi'ite Lebanese group Hezbollah intervened to help President Bashar al-Assad."

It is interesting when one reads the Western press coverage of the Syrian civil war it always refers to the spread of hostilities to adjoining nations as if it were a force of nature or an occult power and that if any blame was to be had it belongs to Assad for setting off the war by his violent crack down on Arab Spring protesters. But ownership of the regional, sectarian expansion of the war belongs firmly to the West's monarchical allies in the Gulf.