Need That Poison Gas

The UN team investigating allegations of the use of Syrian chemical weapons is in Turkey. According to a Reuters story,

They were sent to Turkey this week and its head, Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom, was meeting Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Thursday, a senior Turkish official told Reuters. 

The Syrian government and rebels fighting it have accused each other of using lethal chemical agents, including sarin gas, in the two-year-old conflict. 

More than 100,000 people have been killed since fighting began in March 2011 in what is the longest and most violent of the recent Arab uprisings, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. 

Western governments have grown frustrated that the U.N. mission has been unable to make progress on investigating the claims, a diplomat told Reuters. 

From Turkey, the team will be unable to gather soil samples or scientific evidence needed to prove chemical use, but could compile intelligence and interview or take blood samples from witnesses or victims of alleged attacks. 

"As he cannot travel to Syria, Sellstrom visits countries like Turkey, France and Britain that have some information about possible use of chemical weapons in Syria," said the Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sellstrom visited the Turkey-Syria border area and talked to officials who shared data on chemical weapons use, he said.

In order for the United States and the old colonial powers, Britain and France, to launch their Libya-style air attack on Syria they need the poison gas narrative front and center; it clouds the brazen illegality of their military adventurism. But the U.S. experience with another Swedish UN weapons inspector Hans Blix was not a happy one. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq Blix was right -- there was no conclusive evidence of WMDs -- and he held his ground despite the famous Colin Powell speech before the Security Council and its fantasies of mobile Iraqi biological weapons laboratories. Already secret intelligence agency analysis has been used as justification for the U.S. to arm the rebels. But a no-fly zone will require more. Thankfully, there is no reason to believe Ake Sellstrom will be any more compliant than Blix.

While there is no mention in the New York Times this morning of the government taking control of Tal Kalakh from the rebels, Sarah El Deeb reporting for The Associated Press has it:

On Wednesday, the [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights] said the regime drove rebels out of the town of Talkalakh, along the border with Lebanon. The town, which had a predominantly Sunni population of about 70,000 before the conflict, is surrounded by 12 Alawite villages located within walking distance of the Lebanon border. 

The government takeover will likely affect the rebels' ability to bring supplies, fighters and weapons from Lebanon. 

The town also lies on the highway that links the city of Homs to Tartus, in the coastal Alawite enclave that is home to one of Syria's two main seaports. 

Syrian state TV showed soldiers patrolling the streets of Talkalakh, inspecting underground tunnels and displaying weapons seized from the opposition. 

The governor of Homs, Ahmed Munir, told the private Lebanese broadcaster al-Mayadeen that some rebels in Talkalakh handed their weapons over to authorities. He said the town was a major area for infiltrators from Lebanon. 

"Talkalakh is clear of weapons," Munir said.

Southeast of Talkalakh, government forces also took control of the village of Quarayaten on a highway that links the rebels to another supply route from Iraq, according to an activist who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. 

The regime victories are likely to help it advance on rebel-held areas of the city of Homs, he said. The activist, who is connected to rebels in Homs, spoke by Skype.

Bill Roggio of The Long War Journal has a post this morning about the ongoing assault on the Minnigh airport in Aleppo. It's being led by the Muhajireen Army, a jihadi group comprised of fighters from the Russian Caucasus.

Going forward this appears to be the situation: Peace breaking out but jihadi mercenaries, paid and provisioned by the Saudis and Qataris, fight on Taliban-style with suicide bombings. It's Afghanistan. This time, in spite of the Global War On Terror, the United States is back to its Carter-Reagan era role -- supporting the mujahideen. It's a position that is so at odds with itself it will be very difficult to maintain.

Are U.S.-Taliban Talks Linked to Rebel Support?

Bloomberg is reporting this morning of a rebel car-bomb attack on the military airport in Aleppo:

The bomb killed at least 12 government loyalists and destroyed several buildings inside Minnigh Airport, which is partially under rebel control, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in an e-mail. Syrian government forces, backed by Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, launched an offensive earlier this month to try to retake the strategic city, Syria’s largest. 

The attack on the airport came a day after the U.S. and 10 other nations pledged to increase support for rebel forces in Syria, without saying what specific steps they would take or how much firepower may be needed.

Sarah El Deeb reporting for The Associated Press says that the government has begun shelling rebel-held suburbs north of Damascus:

Activists, meanwhile, reported heavy shelling of many districts north of Damascus, apparently an attempt to cut links between rebel-held districts that have served as launching pads for operations against the capital. Three children, including two from the same family, have been killed in shelling of the outlying district of Qaboun since Friday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on an extensive network of activists in Syria. 

The Lebanese TV station Al-Mayadeen, which had a reporter embedded with Syrian government forces in the offensive, quoted a military official as saying that the operation aims to cut rebel supply lines, separate one group from another and secure the northern entrances to the capital. The regime's forces have struggled for months to regain control of these suburbs.

Jeffrey Fleishman has an informative piece, despite a misleading headline, for the Los Angeles Times; he describes how the Arab states are using the Sunni-Shiite divide to distract their restive populations from government corruption and the lack of jobs:

"Arab states see Syria as a place to exhaust Iran's capabilities and keep it distracted from other issues it might be concerned with in the Arab world," said Rabha Alam, a researcher at Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "Hezbollah entering the equation has quickened the pace of sectarian rhetoric and turned it into a Sunni-Shiite conflict." 

Hezbollah embodies the fear that Sunni-led nations have of Iran, the preeminent Shiite voice, using the Syrian war to foment wider instability. Syria has become a struggle not just between Assad and the rebels, but for opposing Shiite and Sunni radical networks whose fighters come from as far away as Cairo and Tehran. 

"Hezbollah is part of the Iranian conspiracy which has a strategic objective in the region," said Mustafa Alani, a senior analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Geneva. "It has really changed the rules of the game." 

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah argues a counter-narrative: Before his men arrived in Syria, gulf state-funded Sunni militants, some with ties to Al Qaeda, infiltrated and are now commanding rebel factions. This scenario, he says, endangers Hezbollah's benefactor, Assad, and also threatens neighboring Lebanon with a volatile brand of Sunni extremism.

Political manipulations of Shiite-Sunni enmity, which dates back centuries to a struggle over a successor to the prophet Muhammad, may also be at work. Arab states, according to some analysts, may find it tempting to play on religious suspicion to deflect public attention from economic and social problems. 

Saudi Arabia is contending with a huge population of disillusioned, unemployed young people. Egypt's economy is faltering and political unrest is deepening ahead of demonstrations planned for Morsi's one-year anniversary as president on June 30. Across the Arab world, the broken promises of the uprisings have triggered despair and rising anger. 

Hezbollah's entry into the Syrian civil war "has led preachers and leaders in gulf states to adopt the discourse of 'victory for [Sunnis],'" said researcher Alam. "This keeps populations distracted from internal issues. This provides an important service to the gulf."

"This is happening in Egypt now," she said, as leaders and clerics try to siphon attention away from the government's failings. But there are consequences of rallying the region's young men around the fractious Syrian war and its dangerous religious implications.

"If we are sending our children to Syria, then which banner will they fight under ... what will they be armed with?" Alam said. "Or will we just be sending them off to die."

I'm surprised that so far there have been no stories linking negotiations with the Taliban, a Wahhabi political construct of the Gulf Arab monarchies, and the increased role of the United States in organizing the Syrian opposition. It seems obvious to me that there is a quid pro quo here. The U.S. promises to lead the effort to oust al-Assad as long as Saudi Arabia and Qatar exert influence on the Taliban to bargain with the Western puppet Karzai. But as Javid Ahmad argues on the AfPak Channel, "Peace talks only benefit Taliban." So the U.S. gets wet on both ends of the stick while the Wahhabis laugh all the way to the bank.

Obama Hamstrung

There is a tendency to overreact to the daily news, to presume that things will turn out worse than they actually do. But today I think it is a fair assessment to say that Obama, from this point forward for the remainder of his presidency, is hamstrung. Republican slaps and scratches will continue with regards to last year's Benghazi attacks; a series of news-hogging investigations on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party organizations will commence, with a possible silver lining being that light will be shed on the abuse of 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status by overtly partisan, political groups; and as Michael Shear and Jonathan Weisman report today,

Four months into his second term, the president was under increasing assault from Republicans who accused the administration of political bullying and a lack of transparency. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr. Obama’s secretary of health and human services, has drawn criticism in recent days for soliciting corporate donations to pay for the rollout next year of the new health care law.

And on Monday evening, The Associated Press reported that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months of telephone records of its reporters. The company’s editors called it a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into its news gathering, and Republicans quickly seized on the report.

What has the potential to be the most damaging for Obama is the DOJ investigation of AP. It was paranoia over leaks that brought Nixon down. And what seems to be the case based on a reading of "Phone Records of Journalists Seized by U.S.," by Charlie Savage and Leslie Kaufman, is that Attorney General Eric Holder was goaded into action by Congressional complaints about national security leaks:

Mr. Holder announced the two special leak investigations in June amid calls in Congress for a crackdown on leaks after a spate of disclosures about the bomb plot, cyberwarfare against Iran, Mr. Obama’s procedures for putting terrorism suspects on a “kill list,” and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The revelations had been published by The New York Times, The A.P. and in several books. 

Republicans accused the administration of deliberately leaking classified information, jeopardizing national security in an effort to make Mr. Obama look tough in an election year — a charge the White House rejected. But some Democrats, too, said the leaking of sensitive information had gotten out of control. 

Mr. Holder’s move at the time was sharply criticized by Republicans as not going far enough. They wanted him to appoint an outside special counsel, and a Senate resolution calling for a special counsel was co-sponsored by 29 Republican senators. 

On Monday, however, after The A.P. disclosed the seizure of the records, some Republican leaders criticized the administration as going too far. Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner, said: “The First Amendment is first for a reason. If the Obama Administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation.”And Doug Heye, a spokesman for Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, linked the revelation to a brewing controversy over the targeting of Tea Party groups for greater scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service, saying “these new revelations suggest a pattern of intimidation by the Obama administration.” 

The A.P. said Monday that it first learned of the seizure of the records last Friday afternoon when its general counsel, Laura Malone, received a letter from Mr. Machen, the United States attorney. The letter to Mr. Holder said the seizure included “all such records for, among other phone lines, an A.P. general phone number in New York City as well as A.P. bureaus in New York City, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut, and at the House of Representatives.” 

The Associated Press is a nonprofit global news cooperative owned by its American newspaper and broadcast members.

A legitimate worry about a hamstrung president, based on recent history -- think post-impeachment Clinton and Kosovo, is he tends to indulge in war-making powers (powers Constitutionally residing with Congress but since the creation of the national security state a de facto part of the executive branch). We'll see what Obama is made of. Many a politician in his position would counter the sudden surge of opposition by whipping up a war scare. Syria is ready at hand, even if Libya is proving more failure than success at this point. All in all things are not looking good.