Voting in Donbass a Success, U.S. Cries Foul

Much to the chagrin of the junta in Kiev and their backers in Western capitals, Sunday's referendum in Donetsk and Luhansk on greater autonomy from the coup government, despite a few instances, one fatal, of junta-initiated criminal violence, went well, really better than anticipated. Andrew Kramer and Alan Cowell report this morning in "Kiev Condemns Separatist Vote as Russia Offers Modest Support":

In Donetsk, the chairman of the central election committee of the separatist government, Roman Lyagin, said the preliminary results showed that “about 90 percent” of voters supported regional autonomy, but he added that a final count would take about a week because of difficulties in collecting ballots. The preliminary count, he told journalists, showed 89.07 percent in favor of self-rule and 10.19 percent opposed, while just under one percent of the ballots were filled out incorrectly or damaged.

In Luhansk, a deputy director of the election committee told the Russian news agency Interfax that 95.98 percent of voters wanted self-rule for the region and that turnout was 81 percent.

The first reports filed yesterday by Kramer were overwhelmingly positive. Then the final story posted shifted to accentuate the negative, "Ukraine Vote on Separation Held in Chaos." What that headline does not clarify is that the chaos, what there was of it, was created by the Ukrainian national guard. The last we time we heard from them they were terrorizing with tanks and APCs peaceful parade-goers in Mariupol on Friday.

Kramer goes out of his way to create the impression that significant numbers, possibly a majority, of voters in eastern Ukraine stayed home rather than participate in Sunday's referendum. This is based on the oft-repeated results of a recent Pew poll:

The provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk are predominantly Russian-speaking rather than Ukrainian-speaking, and in past elections they have tended to back pro-Russian politicians. But that does not mean that most people there want to secede from Ukraine. A poll by the Pew Research Center released this month indicated that 70 percent of respondents in eastern Ukraine favored keeping the country united, while only 18 percent favored secession; the remainder were undecided. 

The referendums demonstrated that there was substantial popular support for the pro-Russian separatists in some areas. But it offered no reliable gauge of the breadth of that support. It was not clear whether long voting lines had formed because few polling places were open, or because turnout was running high.

A couple things about this Pew poll. For one, notice that its 70 percent in favor of a united Ukraine does not necessarily exclude a yes vote in favor of the question asked yesterday, "Do you support the act of self-rule for the People's Republic of Donetsk?" Federalization of Ukraine could encompass self-rule by the regions. Secondly, as Moon of Alabama makes clear this morning, "Ukraine: Serious Media Largely Confirm Donetsk Poll Results," the Pew poll was conducted before the Odessa massacre Friday before last where 40 pro-federalization protesters were chased into a trade union building and burned alive and this past Friday's slaughter in Mariupol of innocent bystanders.

The Obama administration response to the Donbass plebiscite? Outright rejection:

A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said the United States would not recognize the results of the referendums, whatever they were. She said they were “illegal under Ukrainian law, and are an attempt to create further division and disorder.”

Echoed by the British poodle Hague:

Speaking in Brussels, William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said of the votes in eastern Ukraine: “These attempts at referendums have zero credibility in the eyes of the world. They are illegal by anybody’s standards.”

Those who have zero credibility in the eyes of the world are the NATO powers. More cosmetic sanctions directed at Russia are likely. What the U.S. and its European toadies are attempting to elide here is the obvious fact that people of the Donbass do not want to have anything to do with the coup regime in Kiev. This is not going to change. No amount of U.S.-prompted violence is going to alter the primary "facts on the ground." The United States should be ushering the parties to the negotiating table. But we know from experience that a rogue hyper-power addicted to violence is not going to make such a move. So we are back to the failed state scenario, a U.S. specialty.

U.S. Prefers New Cold War and a Ukraine Modeled on Kosovo

Fighting continues in Slovyansk. Both the Associated Press and David Herszenhorn of the New York Times turn once again to putsch interior minister Arsen Avakov's Facebook page for the details. According to the AP account:

Ukrainian military operations that began Monday to expunge pro-Russia forces from the city of Slovyansk were the interim government’s most ambitious effort so far to quell weeks of unrest in Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking east. 4 government troops and 30 militants were killed in the gun battles, Ukraine’s interior minister said Tuesday. The pro-Russia militia said 10 people were killed, including civilians. There was no immediate way to reconcile the figures. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov gave the death toll on his Facebook page Tuesday, adding that 20 government troops were also injured during fighting in Slovyansk. He said about 800 pro-Russia forces in and around Slovyansk used large-caliber weapons and mortars on Monday. By Tuesday morning, Ukrainian forces had taken hold of a key checkpoint north of the city, dealing a blow to insurgent lines of communication.

Herszenhorn's story, "As Ukrainian Election Looms, Western Powers and Russia Campaign for Influence," outlines the West's attempt to push through the May 25 Ukrainian presidential election despite an active military campaign in the southeast:

Russia has made clear that it wants the election to be delayed. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov pressed the point again on Tuesday, insisting that the interim government end bloodshed and amend the Constitution to devolve power to the regions — and that it do so before Ukrainians are asked to choose a new leader. 

Such changes would presumably address the demands by some pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine for a new system that would weaken the central government and expand the authority of regional and local officials. 

“Holding elections in a situation where the armed forces are being used against part of the population is rather unusual,” Mr. Lavrov said at a news conference in Vienna, where about 30 foreign ministers met under the auspices of the Council of Europe to discuss the situation in Ukraine. 

“The criteria of any process involving citizen choice are well known to all,” Mr. Lavrov said, according to the Interfax news service. “Elections and referendums must be free and fair, and they must proceed in a situation excluding violence and under objective and unbiased international monitoring.” 

At the Vienna meeting, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, said that Russian worries about violence were disingenuous as the Kremlin had fed the conflict in Ukraine to undermine the presidential election. “Russia is clearly intent on preventing or disrupting those elections,” he told reporters, according to The Associated Press. He added that the foreign ministers at the meeting supported the vote being held without outside interference.

I suppose Hague doesn't consider the United States underwriting the Ukrainian presidential election to the tune of $11 million as "outside interference."

The U.S. is threatening Russia with another round of sanctions if it doesn't support the May 25 poll and if it does support the upcoming autonomy referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk. The noxious Victoria Nuland appeared yesterday before uber-corrupt Bob Menendez's Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Let's recall here what the United States and its EU toadies are trying to accomplish. You have a Kiev junta that came to power via a violent putsch led by neo-Nazi organizations. An interim government, the current junta, was hastily slapped together with input from the U.S. It is a combination of corrupt Fatherland Party politicians and neo-Nazis from Svoboda and Right Sector. The May 25 election is meant to confer legitimacy on the putschists.

The problem with this is Ukraine is historically divided between a Ukrainian-speaking west and a Russian-speaking east. The junta has no representation from the east. To deny this, to argue that an election can proceed while a western-dominated Kiev junta is attacking with heavy armor "Occupy"-type protests rocking the country's east is delusional.

My feeling is that the U.S. suffers from this delusion because for decades it has been able to rely on unchallenged force, usually air power, to terrorize its enemies into submission. The overarching precedent here seems to be Kosovo and the bombing of Belgrade. USG planners forever seem to be returning to that NATO campaign as a template for success. It was the model for Libya, and it was constantly being bandied about in the run up to the aborted attack on Damascus last summer.

But the reality of Kosovo is that it was not a success. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was blown up, risking relations with China, and NATO Commander Wesley Clark almost began World War III when he ordered troops to attack Russian forces at the Pristina airport. And, after near cataclysm, at the end of the day, today, you have a tiny, criminal rump state that exists at all because of United Nations administration. Is this the future we want for a large, important state like Ukraine? Apparently the U.S. does.

But it is not clear that the important member states of the European Union do. The Kosovo template breaks down immediately when you try to apply it to Ukraine. First, and critically, Putin is no Milosevic, a politician that was easily cowed. Second, the citizens of the Donbass will never agree to be subjects of the Kiev junta. A real federalized system for the regions, along with Ukrainian neutrality, is the only way forward. The U.S. is unwilling to let this happen. It prefers a New Cold War and a dysfunctional Ukraine on the Kosovo model.

Threat of EU Sanctions on Russia Already Falling Flat

After an ennui-drenched Friday, a wonderful weekend.

Saturday was spent throwing a football with a coworker's sons, marching and chanting for "$15 Now!" The speeches at the post-march rally were actually good/informative. James Bible, former head of the Seattle NAACP, spoke about the class warfare being waged on the poor. Then Kshama Sawant laid out the plan for dealing with plutocratic opposition to the $15/hr. minimum wage -- agreeing to a three-year phase in for small business and non-profits to neutralize the plutocrats' tactic of hiding behind small business and then full speed ahead on gathering signatures to bring the $15/hr. minimum wage to the ballot as an initiative. I topped off the day by streaming two good movies: Out of the Furnace (2013) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Both hard-luck stories.

Sunday I ran the annual St. Paddy's Day Dash, which I do every year. I enjoy the course, which is up 99 from Seattle Center until just before you get to the bridge over to Wallingford; then you turn around and come back to Seattle Center. I was worried my time would be worse than it was, but it wasn't, despite being waterlogged by a steady rain. The rest of the day after the morning race I relaxed. Good weekend.

And one of the reasons the weekend was so good, in addition to a welcome decline in number of the usual threats emanating from Great Satan's orifice, was the result of the referendum in Crimea went smoothly. According to a story this morning by Alan Cowell, "Lawmakers in Crimea Move Swiftly to Split From Ukraine":

The referendum — in which 96.77 percent of voters supported breaking from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation — was greeted as a triumph in Moscow on Monday, and lawmakers there promised to move quickly to adopt legislation to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation. “Crimea returns to Russia!” a headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda said, while Nezavisimaya Gazeta declared that “Kiev lost Crimea.”

A member of Parliament announced that President Vladimir V. Putin would deliver an address to lawmakers on the situation in Crimea on Tuesday. Mr. Putin told President Obama on Sunday that the vote was legal and cited the independence of Kosovo — which Russia has not recognized — as the precedent for Crimea’s secession, the Kremlin said in a statement.

“The referendum was organized in such a way as to guarantee Crimea’s population the possibility to freely express their will and exercise their right to self-determination,” the Kremlin’s statement on the latest of a series of conversations between the two leaders said. 

Mr. Putin also continued to raise the issue of violence and protests in other parts of Ukraine, which have stoked fears that Russia could move forces beyond Crimea. He told Mr. Obama that “the current authorities in Kiev have so far failed to demonstrate the ability and desire to rein in the ultranationalist and radical groups that are destabilizing the situation in the country and terrorizing ordinary people, including the Russian-speaking population and Russia’s compatriots,” the Kremlin statement said.

The putschists in Kiev called up reservists (which they have done before, to little effect) and added another 20,000 to a new national guard being put together under the direction of the neo-Nazis in Right Sector.

Now the ball is in Brussels' court. So far the sounds emanating from the European bureaucracy are meek:

In Brussels, foreign ministers of European Union countries met on Monday to weigh a first response to Moscow’s unfolding strategy in Ukraine, including possible economic sanctions. 

One of the ministers attending the European Union meeting in Brussels, Sebastian Kurz of Austria, gave a strong indication that the punitive European measures under debate would not initially reach into the highest echelons of Russia’s powerful energy companies, which are close to the Kremlin.

In a radio interview, Mr. Kurz said Sunday’s ballot in Ukraine would trigger an array of measures including visa bans and the freezing of assets held by political and military figures who orchestrated Russia’s intervention in Crimea, Reuters reported. 

Asked whether the list would include the heads of the energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft, as reported on Friday in Germany, Mr. Kurz replied: “This is not expected at this time.” 

He added: “I think picking business bosses indiscriminately would be a wrong step.” 

The foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, he said, would draw up a list of people to be subjected to the measures. The ministers have been reported to be trying to reduce a tally of up to 130 names to a smaller number.

Western tough talk on sanctions already appears to be falling flat.

But before we leave to discuss briefly the long, to-be-expected hand-wringing think piece about the tarnished luster of U.S. hegemony by David Sanger, a statement from British Foreign Secretary William Hague:

As he arrived in the Belgian capital on Sunday, Mr. Hague called the Crimea referendum “a mockery of proper democratic practice.”

But a lethally violent insurrection in a nation's capital that sent the elected president fleeing in order to avoid being lynched by neo-Nazis brandishing weapons from a looted armory, this is "proper democratic practice"?

Western rulers and their court ideologues have turned the world upside down in defense of unilateralism. This is on full display in the aforementioned David Sanger analysis, "Global Crises Put Obama’s Strategy of Caution to the Test." Sanger runs through the standard "Neocon vs. Realist" debate. There is not much to recommend taking the time to read it. Public opinion -- what the voters in the "Greatest Nation on Earth"™ think about endless warfare to police the entire planet -- rates only a brief, indirect mention out of a lot of column inches of copy:

Not surprisingly, the testing of administration policy at a time the president is politically weakened at home has sparked a critical question. Is it Mr. Obama’s deliberative, pick-your-battles approach that is encouraging adversaries to press the limits? Or is this simply a time when exercising leverage over countries that defy American will or the international order is trickier than ever, and when the domestic pressure to stay out of international conflicts is obvious to overseas friends and foes alike?

This is obviously the question to explore, but Sanger ignores it. How long can governing elites continue to act as if they exist in a free-floating cloud above the masses who elect them?

Sudden Paranoid Thoughts Common During Cold War Return

It was a normal weekend for late winter, one that would probably be forgotten quickly if not for the fact that both Saturday and Sunday were spent glued to the personal computer checking the latest news coming out of Ukraine. The Cold War is back, and it is back in a big way.

The last post on this page having to do with events in Ukraine was on Friday. Then, Russian President Vladimir Putin had finally produced a statement, brief and broad, after nearly a week of silence since the putsch in Kiev had taken place. Masked gunmen in unmarked uniforms appeared in front of the two main Crimean airports. This set off a wail of panic from the putschists.

On Saturday Russian troops took full control of the Crimea and pro-Russian protesters took to the streets of the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk. The Russian Duma voted to authorize Putin's use of military force to protect Russians in Ukraine.

At this point, I thought that the West would ratchet back its tough talk and seek to quiet things down. I was wrong. The putsch government called for a full mobilization of its armed forces, saying that the situation in the Crimea amounted to a Russian invasion. And they received support from the West. Obama made a statement saying that Russia was in violation of international law. William Hague of Britain and John Kerry made similar disparaging sounds. (Hague is in Kiev today bucking up the putschists; Kerry arrives tomorrow). The G-8 meeting scheduled in Sochi is apparently off, and talk of sanctions can be heard.

That's basically where we are now. It was a teeth-grinding, unpleasant weekend. My anxiety and stress are due to the coverage in the Western media, which, after a few decent stories on Saturday questioning the legality of the putsch and the politics of the putschists, has returned to its biased, blinkered, anti-Russian norm.

For a good, brief statement of why the Russians are highly motivated to be pro-active in Ukraine read Jeffrey Sommers' "Dr. Strangelove Over Ukraine" that appeared on the Couterpunch web site this past weekend:

The scene for the original plot was set in the closing stages of the Cold War. George Bush (the elder) promised Gorbachev that if the Soviets let the Warsaw Pact go, Russia would never have to worry about the expansion of NATO. The US responded to this deal by immediately taking the former Warsaw Pact into NATO and then moving into the former USSR territory itself by taking in the Baltics. Nobody could blame the new entrants for wishing NATO entry, given their Soviet occupation past. But, neither could anyone blame the Russians for feeling utterly betrayed by the US and NATO for breaking their word. 

Thereafter, Eurasionists in the US State Department wanted more. For them, the goal was the further break-up of Russia and its ‘near abroad’ and remaking it in the image of a neoliberal periphery. For Russia, the ‘game’ has had an existential character. Russia was imploding (whether by their own actions, pressure from the West, or a combination of the two are all points for debate). For Russia, NATO’s moves into Georgia cut too close to the bone and Russia responded, yet the threat of NATO taking Ukraine represented taking Russia’s ‘heart’: the very ancestral home where ‘Russia’ was founded. 

Meanwhile, the EU has thought it could reprise its earlier eastward expansion into the former Warsaw Pact that delivered a consumer goods export windfall. This alleviated West European unemployment resulting from the Maastricht Treaty’s punishing fiscal and monetary requirements to create its currency union. Ukraine’s purchasing potential, however, is less than the countries that bordered Germany who were integrated into West European markets. An export boom is unlikely to occur with the proposed Association Agreement. Indeed, the possible damage to Ukrainian markets from poorly executed trade liberalization and non-visa regimes could flood the EU with cheap labor. This outcome would work to further erode Europe’s historically unique (and largely successful) ‘Social Market.’

What amazes me is that despite the biased, anti-Russian Western press, people aren't buying the U.S./EU position. If you read the comments section on the New York Times, readers are skeptical of the putschists' legitimacy and sensitive to Russian vital interests.

Power went out this morning at 2 AM. Now that the Cold War is back I thought, I wondered, Is this an electromagnetic pulse to shut down the power grid prior to a nuclear missile attack? These sudden paranoid thoughts were common back during the days of the Cold War. I hope they are not here to stay.

Western Warhawks Headed for Tough Times

For the first time since the end of last week a ray of sunshine, of reason, of hope this morning that there will be some pushback against the Western war machine. The Arab League declined to endorse an attack on Syria. This queers the pitch for Obama and the leaders of the old colonial powers Britain and France. They say that they got what they needed in the form of a Arab League statement blaming the Syrian government for the chemical attack in a Damascus suburb last Wednesday. Nonetheless they're embarking on an illegal war with very little if any popular mandate. They have no support domestically, and they can't even get a public go-ahead from the Gulf emirates who have been fueling the conflict and aggressively lobbying for U.S. intervention.

The story can be read this morning in David Kirkpatrick (thank goodness for David Kirkpatrick) and Mark Landler's "Arab League Stance Muddies U.S. Case." Doubtless the warhawks in the West wish for now they had Morsi back running the show in Cairo rather than the generals. It was Egypt that stood up to the Saudis and blocked harsher language against Assad from being included in the Arab League statement:

But while they will not say it publicly, several countries in the region have been working vigorously behind the scenes to topple the Assad government. For two years, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey have been shipping money and arms to rebels challenging Syrian troops. Neither Saudi Arabia nor any of the Sunni-dominated gulf states have publicly endorsed Western intervention. But all feel threatened by the regional rivalry with Iran, and all have privately urged the Western powers to intervene on behalf of the rebels, Western diplomats say. 

In the Arab League meeting on Tuesday, Arab diplomats said, Saudi Arabia pushed for stronger language explicitly condemning Mr. Assad for launching the attack, which would have come closer to helping the Western powers justify military action. 

But Egypt, still the most populous Arab state with the largest Arab military, disagreed, Arab diplomats said. 

“It shows the schizophrenia of the Arab world,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, noting that gulf states and Jordan also appear to be working closely with the West on possible intervention while refusing to endorse it publicly. 

But their silence created a potential problem for the United States and its European allies, he said, because it undermined the notion of a broad-based coalition with Arab support. “And every day that it goes on, opponents will try to exploit it,” he said.

And more trouble awaits the West today when Britain takes the Western case for war on Syria to the United Nations. At this point the West will have to reveal the evidence it has linking the Syrian government to the chemical attack in Ghouta. Up until now all that Secretary of State John Kerry and Press Secretary Jay Carney have mentioned is a circumstantial case: a chemical attack occurred; the Syrian government possesses chemical weapons; therefore it is beyond doubt that the Syrian government is responsible for the attack. This is the threadbare reasoning that the United States has relied on in its run up to war. Appalling, isn't it? There has been some whispering in the media about intercepted signal traffic that has Syrian government forces directing operations of the chemical attack. But the fact that Britain will be doing the heavy lifting at the UN leads one to believe that the Obama administration is leery about repeating a Colin Powell moment.

In any event, a debate will be had in a global forum, and it promises to be unkind to the bellicose Western perspective. The Brits will then hold a Parliamentary debate tomorrow which should also prove to be rough going for the Tories. Archbishop of Canterbury, Most Rev. Justin Welby, weighed in with a plea for caution and good sense in a Daily Telegraph interview yesterday. Foreign Secretary William Hague, who has been the point man for the Western warhawks, provided the case for intervention, which basically boils down to "We have to violate the UN Charter to protect decades of painstaking work to create rules and regulations to prevent the use of chemical weapons"; that, and the by now -- coming on the heels of support for the Egyptian military coup of a duly elected government -- totally unbelievable tripe about democratic nations living up to their values.

I imagine it's going to be rough going in the days ahead for the warhawks. It doesn't mean that an attack on Syria will not go forward, just that the West is going to pay a price for it, and I hope it's a steep one. Iran is threatening retaliation. Already the Obama administration is talking up the limited nature of its attack -- just some Tomahawk cruise missiles. I wouldn't believe it. And even if the strikes are limited there are always targeting errors and civilian casualties.

A major impediment to the Western case for intervention is the obviously counterintuitive nature of the Syrian government gassing a suburb shortly after the UN inspectors arrive into the country. Tactically there was no call for the attack. There is almost unanimous agreement that the SAA had no need for chemicals; the military was racking up steady gains in the area. The worst thing that Assad had to fear was foreign intervention, the very thing that the opposition has been trying to initiate for years. The rebels had everything to gain and Assad nothing by the use of chemical weapons.

So clearly the basic framework of the civil war up until now points to opposition being the perpetrators of the chemical attack in Ghouta. This is obviously a problem for the warhawks; hence, the story today by CIA scribe and rebel propagandist Anne Barnard, "Reports of Syria Chemical Attack Spur Question: Why?" It's a weak piece of tendentious reporting, but we've come to expect that from Barnard. From the outset she assumes that the Syrian government is the source of the chemical attacks; then she interviews a couple think tank hacks who explain that Assad ordered the attacks because he could, that he knew that there would be no repercussions.

If you were expecting more, that's all there is, which, incidentally, is identical to statement put out by the Syrian National Coalition. No where does Barnard engage the Syrian or Russian position and ask the question "Why would the rebels use chemicals on their own supporters?" The answer of course is too obvious. It's unfolding before our eyes.

West Likely to Arm Syrian Opposition

This morning's New York Times reads like a broadside for Western intervention on the side of the rebels in the Syrian civil war. First, there is C.J. Chivers' frontpage story, "Starved for Arms, Syria Rebels Make Their Own," which describes the makeshift bomb manufacturing supply line set up by the opposition. Fashioning mortars out of a sections of the main gun scavenged from government T-72 tanks, concocting RDX -- a plastic explosive -- from recipes taken off the Internet, cracking open old Soviet aircraft bombs that failed to detonate in order to extract the TNT mix inside, the rebel message is clear, "Give us real weapons and we'll win this war." 

Chivers concludes his piece with the following two paragraphs:

On a front in the arid farmland north of Hama, Khaled Muhammed Addibis, a rebel commander, pointed to a stack of rockets his fighters had tried to fire the previous day. They had failed to launch. Others had veered far off-target in flight. And none had reached their expected range. 

“All we need is effective weapons,” he said. “Effective weapons. Nothing else.”

So that's the first point in the pro-intervention broadside: let's at least get the opposition antitank and antiaircraft weapons. Next up is the story from Mark Mazzetti and Michael R. Gordon, "Syrian Forces Seen Stepping Up Air Attacks on Rebels," which can be read as a hawkish wish for a Western enforced no-fly zone. As Obama officials brute military options, intelligence reports are circulating which point to Syrian government air power as the source of rebels' woes and Assad's renewed momentum.

UK foreign secretary William Hague appeared yesterday with Secretary of State John Kerry to engage in "bosspeak" and decry the Assad regime:

“The regime appears to be preparing new assaults, endangering the lives and safety of hundreds of thousands of Syrians who are already in desperate need,” said Mr. Hague, who added that the brutality of its recent attacks “beggars belief.”

Hague says no effort is being spared to get the opposition and the Syrian government to the negotiating table. But everyone knows that this is a farce. It is the opposition that refuses to attend any peace conference. As Mazzetti and Gordon point out:

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hague emphasized that they remained committed to a political solution, though the prospects of the international conference, which was first announced in Moscow more than a month ago, have faded. General Idris had said he would not attend until the rebels received fresh arms and ammunition and their leverage in a potential peace conference was improved.

Kerry and Hague were asked about the viability of the opposition, but they responded with "bosspeak," saying Western energies were focused on a "political solution." This was repeated to the point of inducing nausea. Both Kerry and Hague blame everything on Assad and Hezbollah.

Not a word was mentioned about the massacre of Shiites in Hatlah by Al Nusra Front fighters. This is covered by Hania Mourtada and Anne Barnard in "Dozens of Shiites Reported Killed in Raid by Syria Rebels." A useful synopsis of the Syrian civil war up until now is delivered in four paragraphs:

The Syrian conflict began as a popular uprising demanding political rights, but gradually has taken on a more sectarian tone. As the conflict became militarized, with the government cracking down on demonstrators, some of its opponents, mostly Sunni army defectors and others, took up arms. 

Sunni jihadists from across the region have also joined the fight, and extremist groups have been able to count on financing from like-minded private donors, making them increasingly influential on the battlefield. 

Shiite fighters from Lebanon and Iraq have also entered Syria to defend Shiite shrines and fight alongside a government they see as protecting their interests. 

Sectarian tensions grew in recent weeks as Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group, fought a full-scale battle in Syria, helping the government to recapture the town of Qusayr last week. Syrian rebels fired rockets at Shiite neighborhoods in retaliation.

David Jolly reports this morning in "Syrian Death Toll Approaches 93,000, U.N. Says" that Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, is saying that 92,901 killings have been documented in Syria through the end of April.

The United Nations study was based on reports of 263,055 killings. Any reported killing that did not fully identify the victim by name, date and the location of death was excluded to avoid the possibility of duplication.

“This extremely high rate of killings, month after month, reflects the drastically deteriorating pattern of the conflict over the past year,” Ms. Pillay said in the statement, and “civilians are bearing the brunt of widespread, violent and often indiscriminate attacks.”

Ms. Pillay called for “an immediate cease-fire,” saying: “Nobody is gaining anything from this senseless carnage.”

She also urged the international community to help broker an end to the conflict, saying: “The only answer is a negotiated political solution. Tragically, shamefully, nothing will restore the 93,000 or more individual lives already lost.”

From today's stories it appears that the West will arm the Syrian opposition.War is here to stay.