Nate Silver and Nate Cohn in Basic Agreement with Ayatollah Khamenei + Half of the Satanic Duopoly Begins a "Draft Kerry" Campaign

The place to begin this morning is a quote from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Thomas Erbrink, "Iran’s Supreme Leader Says Israel Won’t Exist in 25 Years"):

Iranians must not forget that the United States is the “Great Satan,” Ayatollah Khamenei warned, criticizing those calling for better relations. “Some want to show this Satan as an angel, but the Iranian nation has pushed this Satan out,” he said. “We should not allow it to sneak back in through the window.”

As GOP dead-enders in the House of Representatives seek to satisfy their Saudi and Likud paymasters by delaying debate on the agreement over Iran's nuclear program, American voters are of a similar mind as Ayatollah Khamenei. They want to throw out Satan.

The two halves of Satan's brain -- the Republican-Democrat duopoly -- are having a difficult time processing this information. Nate Cohn today, "Donald Trump vs. the Party: Why He’s Still Such a Long Shot," still cannot accept that he was wrong back in July when he dismissed Trump as a flash in the pan. His argument that Trump cannot win now seems to rely on the fact that America is actually not a democracy. Elite party opinion, not voters, decide who a nominee is:

For past candidates, elite support has been necessary, and unified party opposition has been fatal. Without elite support, an ordinary candidate can’t build a top campaign or raise big money or draw major attention from traditional media. 

Party opposition is even worse. It ensures a chorus of influential critics in the media and a well-funded opponent with endless resources for advertisements to echo the attacks. Grass-roots support and super PACs can help compensate for a lack of broad support, but they probably can’t overcome broad opposition. The voice of the elites is too strong and influential.

The blogging sage, Nate Silver, the guy Nate Cohn was hired to replace, basically agrees with his replacement ("Stop Comparing Donald Trump And Bernie Sanders"):

What Sanders and Trump have in common is they’re both unlikely to be nominated. (If I were laying odds, I’d put either one at something like 15-1 or 20-1 against.) But it’s for different reasons. Sanders is losing now, but if he eventually overtakes Clinton — and if Biden fails to come to the establishment’s rescue — his position might become more viable. Trump is nominally winning, but the GOP race is much more volatile. And if he doesn’t lose steam on his own accord, the Republican establishment will use every tool at its disposal to stop him.

Sanders and Trump cannot win because voters in the United States really don't choose their leaders. That's the point of view that Silver and Cohn are peddling here. Where Iran's supreme leader interprets this as evidence of Great Satan, what is disappointing to me is that I don't think the two Nates do.

Democrats are reading the same tea leaves, and they are pitifully casting about for a stand-in should Hillary continue to falter. For a particularly dire assessment of the state of the Democratic Party, Patrick Healy's "Big-Name Plan B’s for Democrats Concerned About Hillary Clinton" is a must-read:

It is not just Mrs. Clinton’s weakness in the polls that has generated talk of other alternatives, but also the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is routinely drawing huge crowds at campaign events. That has been disconcerting to Democratic officials who believe that Mr. Sanders, a socialist, is so liberal that his presence at the top of the party’s ticket in 2016 would be disastrous. 

“If party leaders see a scenario next winter where Bernie Sanders has a real chance at the Democratic nomination, I think there’s no question that leaders will reach out to Vice President Biden or Secretary of State Kerry or even Gore about entering the primaries,” said Garnet F. Coleman, a Texas state lawmaker and Democratic national committeeman.

***

“You have Democrats beginning to panic about the one thing that a lot of them never worried about, which was Clinton’s electability in the general election,” said Robert Shrum, a veteran strategist who was a senior adviser to Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry during their presidential runs. “You still have to think of her as the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. But the challenge she faces in the general election is both the trust problem and the likability problem.”

The bottom line on Healy's piece? A draft Kerry movement is lurching to life. A true sign of desperation.

Ayatollah Connects Ferguson to P5+1 Talks

Returning home from the holidays, reading the Gray Lady in an aisle seat on a full flight, I was pleased to see Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, weighing in on Ferguson (Thomas Erdbrink, "Iran’s Supreme Leader Backs Further Nuclear Talks"):

The ayatollah also made reference to the riots this week in Ferguson, Mo. The unrest in response to a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, shows “the gap between the American people and their administration.”

There was a more expansive story in Business Insider (Hunter Walker, "Iran's Supreme Leader Says Ferguson Shows What's Wrong With America") which noted that Khamenei, in several Tweets on Ferguson, not only explained how the riots in St. Louis County and around the country prove that USG is battling its own people, who do not trust the government, but also how Israel, through a "Zionist network" that controls the "lifeline" of U.S. politicians by threat of blackmail, is preventing the federal government from publicly embracing a deal with Iran on its nuclear program as well as justice for Michael Brown.

The Khamenei Tweet on the Zionist connection to Ferguson is as follows:

#Zionist network blackmail US officials &if they act agnst their will, they're forced to resign,face defamation and death threats. #Ferguson

Here are the two Khamenei Tweets on Ferguson. The first, mentions low voter turnout during the recent midterm elections:

US isn't honest w its nation. The recent US election turnout was so low. At events in #Ferguson US is fighting w its ppl. #BlackLivesMatter

The next, reasserts the obvious, that the U.S. public does not trust its government:

We don't seek to gain the confidence of US; we don't need that. We don't trust you; your ppl do not trust you either. #Ferguson

All of this is fairly unremarkable and obvious. But it will set off some tongue-clucking among brainwashed Western liberals and conservatives.

Can anyone deny Zionists have a stranglehold, a veto on most aspects of U.S. foreign policy?

Khamenei's assertion that the "Zionist network" has a stake in maintaining the U.S. system of institutional racism and white privilege is more novel. Certainly Israel's deep bonds with the Southern Baptist Convention, ties that have been developed over the last 20-plus years, support such an assertion.

Immersing myself in the broadcast television coverage of Ferguson from Tuesday until this morning it is interesting to note the playbook that is followed whenever there is an outbreak of dissent, protest, riots, whatever.

The primary play in that book is to focus on the "violence" of the protests and loss of property. The source of the outrage is given short shrift. Only the News Hour -- from what I saw -- provided a cogent explanation of why the grand jury process, a process that should have resulted in an indictment of Darren Wilson, was totally skewed towards blaming the victim, the teenage Michael Brown.

The three-day's worth of coverage I saw was heavily weighted toward the suffering of Ferguson's small-business owners and employees not knowing if they were going to be able to pay their bills.

Obama is almost certain not to pursue any federal civil rights prosecution here. The least one would expect would be some sort of Department of Justice monitoring process for the local police of St. Louis County. But don't expect it. Holder is on his way out, and so too is Barack. There is no will to take on white privilege and institutional racism; just as there is no will to cut back the warfare state.

Which means it will be up to the young and and young at heart, those who want to see a more egalitarian society, to stay mobilized and maintain the struggle.

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.

MH17 Crash Site Canard + Maliki on His Way Out, So U.S. Moves the Goal Posts

Yatsenyuk submits his resignation as the junta prime minister of Ukraine, clearing the way for new parliamentary elections this fall. Europe is set to announce today a list of targets for a new round of sanctions against Russia. And the Western media monopoly persists in the canard, even when stories it publishes prove the exact opposite, that there is a Russian-backed conspiracy to tamper with evidence and block access to the Malaysia Airlines crash site in eastern Ukraine. Let's start there, with Sabrina Tavernise and Thomas Erdbrink and the misleading headline "Ukraine Disaster in Search of an Investigation":

There were a few new faces at the site on Thursday. Three Australian investigators worked in the field, joining three Malaysians. Before departing Thursday, the Malaysians said that they were surprised at the amount of access they had to the site and that they felt safe, Mr. Bociurkiw [a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] said. 

There have been widespread reports of looting, but Mr. Bociurkiw said his monitoring group, which has now spent more time at the site than any other, had not seen any. The Malaysians said they had seen valuables in the fields untouched, he noted, including a bottle of duty-free perfume, auto parts, backpacks full of belongings, a watch and some jewelry.

The Dutch Safety Bureau said in a statement that an initial examination showed that both of Flight 17’s so-called black boxes had been damaged, but that their memory chips were intact. The bureau added that there was “no evidence or indications of manipulation” of either the cockpit voice recorder or the flight data recorder, and that the data from both had been downloaded by experts from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch in Farnborough, England.

Given the high-volume mendacity of the junta, one wonders what the condition of the black box would have been if it had fallen into the hands of Kiev instead of the DPR. What is important to note is the prevalence across a wide range of stories -- stories coming out of Kiev and Brussels and D.C. -- of the bald lie that the Novorossiyan militia is somehow restricting access to the site and impeding the collection of evidence. This is such a bald lie, supported by not a single shred of evidence, that it leads me to believe that it is being used to 1) justify a Western military footprint in Donetsk, and 2) dismiss any evidence that emerges which shows the junta was to blame. That is why the crash-site story is being kept alive, even as Tavernise makes clear there is no story there. It is strange to see the prestige press engaged in conspiracy theories. In this case though there are no inconvenient facts exposed or complex theories limned; it is all bald lies and misleading headlines.

Speaking of bald lies, the goal posts are now being moved on the "It's All Maliki's Fault" canard. You'll recall from last month that as soon as Islamic State launched its blitzkrieg that captured Mosul the messaging across all sectors of the Western media and government was that the success of the ultra-jihadis was due to the Iraqi prime minister's authoritarianism driving normal Sunnis into the ranks of the Salafis. Therefore Maliki had to go.

Well, come to find out, now that it appears that Maliki is on his way out, he really isn't the problem after all. The Kurds selected their choice for president yesterday, clearing the way for the Shia to select their candidate for prime minister and seating a new government. According to Tim Arango and Suadad al-Salhy in "Iraq Picks New President to Confront Militant Threat":

The Parliament voted to approve Fouad Massoum, 76, a Kurdish politician and former guerrilla fighter against Saddam Hussein’s regime, as the country’s new president. He replaces Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who had been president since 2005 and was seen as a rare unifying figure among Iraq’s many factions but has been largely absent from the political scene since suffering a stroke in late 2012.

“Everyone likes him,” Abbas al-Bayati, a Shiite lawmaker, said of Mr. Massoum. “He is a moderate man and was agreed to by everyone.”

A week before, Parliament elected Salim al-Jubouri, a moderate Sunni Islamist, to the position of speaker, which was the first step in forming a new government after national elections in April. Under an informal political bargain forged after the toppling of Mr. Hussein in 2003, the Iraqi presidency is held by a Kurd, the speaker of Parliament is a Sunni Arab and the position of prime minister, the most powerful post, goes to a Shiite. 

The next political step, the selection of a new prime minister, will be more fraught. That process will determine the future of Mr. Maliki, who has been in power since 2006 but who has become an increasingly polarizing figure as the insurgency has grown and sectarian violence has intensified to a level not seen since 2006 and 2007.

***

Mr. Maliki has insisted that he will seek a third term, but he faces an array of opponents and has lost support from abroad. American officials, who believe he has become too divisive to lead the nation out of its current crisis, have been working behind the scenes to push Iraq’s leaders to select someone else. And Iran, which exerts enormous influence here, has signaled it would like to see new leadership. 

Last week, several Iranian officials, including Ali Shamkhani, a top national security official, visited the holy city of Najaf, in southern Iraq, and conveyed to religious leaders that Iran would prefer that Mr. Maliki be replaced, according to a senior Shiite lawmaker in Baghdad. 

But even if Mr. Maliki were replaced, there is little sense that the Iraqi political class would be able to establish a new political bargain that could bring peace. “There’s no glue to hold whatever grandiose governing coalition that emerges together,” said Ramzy Mardini, an Iraq expert and fellow at the Atlantic Council. He added, “the idea that if Maliki should leave and then we’d be on the path of reconciliation and compromise is wishful thinking.”

Lo and behold! Once the Iranians line up with Great Satan and agree that Maliki should be ushered off the main stage in order to get down to business of smashing the caliphate rising and piecing Iraq back together the story is changed. Now it is not Maliki's fault but the inherent politically instability of Iraq. Brett McGurk was back in front of Congress arguing for a friendly neighbor policy towards Islamic State:

In testimony before the House on Wednesday, Brett McGurk, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran and Iraq, portrayed an increasingly decentralized Iraqi government as the most likely way forward. “There is a recognition in Iraq that from the center out you’re never going to fully control all of these areas, and particularly given the capacity of ISIL,” he said, using an alternative acronym for ISIS.

Combine that with yesterday's soft focus almost loving portrayal of Islamic State's stewardship of Raqqa that appeared on the front page of the Gray Lady and it is not hard to make out the handwriting on the wall. The caliphate, backed by the United States and its client Gulf Sheikhdoms, is the answer the people of the Middle East are being given to the question raised by the Arab Spring.

Death Rattle from the House of Saud?

What is interesting about the Gray Lady's coverage this morning is the overt mention that current events in the Middle East point to the possibility that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia might be on the verge of collapse.

First, in Thomas Erdbrink's "U.S. and Iran Face Common Enemies in Mideast Strife," a story detailing the shared interests of the United States and Iran in combating the recent florescence of Sunni fundamentalism in the Middle East -- a story mostly built out of quotes from Aziz Shahmohammadi, a former adviser to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council -- comes this pearl in the third-to-last paragraph:

“We are worried for Saudi Arabia, which seems weak and potentially unstable,” said Mr. Shahmohammadi, the former adviser, who heads an institute that promotes dialogue between Sunnis and Shiites. “Even we, as their competitor, see all the horrible consequences if things go wrong there.”

Then after reading the Anne Barnard-Rick Gladstone piece, "Rebel Infighting Spreads to an Eastern Syrian City," on the civil war among Saudi-backed jihadis fighting the Syrian civil war, one comes upon Anne Barnard's noteworthy "Saudis’ Grant to Lebanon Is Seen as Message to U.S." Here Barnard explores the issues involved in Saudi Arabia's $3 billion "gift" to the Lebanese Army for the purchase of French weapons. (What she doesn't mention is that the French are being rewarded by the Saudis for obstructing the P5+1 nuclear agreement with Iran.) And once again the image of a bloated, senile, despotic Saudi Arabia floats to the surface:

Yezid Sayigh, a scholar of Arab militaries at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said the Saudis were declaring a “tactical divorce” from the Obama administration over their frustrations with what they see as America’s indecisiveness on Syria and its attempts at reconciliation with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival and Hezbollah’s patron. 

“They’re on the warpath, angry, and that doesn’t make for good policy,” Mr. Sayigh said. 

Analysts on both sides agree that if Lebanon’s government, under Saudi pressure, pushed the army to confront Hezbollah, it would risk fracturing the force along political and sectarian lines and destroying the closest thing the country has to a broad-based national institution. Mr. Sayigh said that not even the United States had tried to link aid to Lebanon’s army with action against Hezbollah. 

“Those are illusions,” said Talal Atrissi, a Lebanese military analyst who favors Hezbollah. “The Lebanese Army would be dismantled.”

While the Gray Lady has regularly reported Saudi estrangement with the Obama administration, she has not done so through an interpretive lens that focuses on Saudi weakness, irrationality and instability. This seems new and -- spread over three different stories -- feels intentional. One would have to go back to the Sunday Review opinion piece by Christopher Davidson, "The Last of the Sheiks?," published last October to find a similar example of speculation regarding the impending doom of the House of Saud.

The New York Times is largely aligned with the Obama administration. This is no mystery. All one has to do is read the Gray Lady's coverage of the recent implementation of the Affordable Care Act to figure this out. A message is being sent to the Saudis: "Relax!"

Desecration Hijr bin Adi al-Kindi's Shrine

At the end of a story today by Thomas Erdbrink and Hania Mourtada about the desecration of a Shiite shrine in a Damascus suburb by Syrian rebels readers are treated to a rare unvarnished -- albeit brief -- description of the Iranian perspective on Islamic sectarian conflict:

Iranian officials blamed the United States and Israel, saying they were supporting the Syrian rebels and Sunni extremist forces in the region. 

“They have launched a war between Shiites and Sunnis,” Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Sunday. “They plant bombs in Pakistan and Iraq, and recently the Zionist regime has hit Syria. We should be careful about colonizers and Israel.” 

Iran’s ideological narrative is that there are no real conflicts between the sects, but that Western powers and Iran’s enemies in the region deliberately mislead certain Muslim groups. Its leaders blame ultraconservative Wahhabis and Salafists, who they say are backed by the United States and Israel, through their regional allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 

“This Syrian so-called front, Al Nusra, is the symbol of Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” said Mojtaba Bigdeli, a former leader of a Shiite pressure group. “We respect Sunni shrines. We do not desecrate them. We may form self-sacrifice battalions to react to the Wahhabis and Salafists in Syria. For sure we will not remain silent.”

Any regular consumer of the news will have to acknowledge that the Iranian "ideological narrative" is more consistent than the one coming from the United States government. The United States says it acts in support of popular democracy and human rights, but then it tacitly approves a brutal crackdown on Arab Spring activists in Bahrain, not to mention decades of occupation by Israel in the West Bank; its chief allies in the Persian Gulf region are among the most despotic, unegalitarian states on the planet.

What's the rationale for aiding rebel groups in Syria? -- Freedom? Democracy? There are few secular fighters left in the Syrian opposition. So the United States is on the brink of arming the very people we've been engaging in global warfare since 9/11. It's crazy. The U.S. must think that through its gulf state allies it can control the Al Qaeda types. But time and again this has proven to be folly. The desecration of Hijr bin Adi al-Kindi's shrine is the latest example.

Predictably, the United States is sticking to its flimsy story that it is the Assad government not the opposition that is responsible for the use of nerve gas. No proof is supplied, just bald assertion; that and a whispering campaign has begun against Carla Del Ponte. This from today's frontpage story, "White House Holds Firm on Cautious Path in Syria Crisis," by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt:

The assertion that there is evidence suggesting the rebels have used sarin was made by Carla Del Ponte, a former chief prosecutor for international criminal tribunals that investigated Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia who is now serving on a commission looking into human rights abuses in Syria. 

But that commission later issued a statement clarifying that it had not reached a conclusion about which side used the gas, and the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, added the administration’s doubts. 

“We are highly skeptical of the suggestion that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons,” Mr. Carney said. “We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position.” 

A senior State Department official told reporters that the United States took Ms. Del Ponte’s allegations seriously, but said of the rebels, “We have no information that they have either the capability or the intent to deploy or use such weapons.” 

Another senior official noted that Ms. Del Ponte was not a member of another United Nations panel that is investigating chemical weapons.

With the rebels' desecration of Shiite shrines threatening a huge expansion of the war, I'm not hopeful that Obama is going to do the right thing. At a certain point, when the warhawks get amped up and Israeli bombs are falling, there's not much (apparently) that even POTUS can do.