The Washington Post reports: Syrian and Russian warplanes launched a ferocious assault against rebel-held Aleppo on Friday, burying any hopes that a U.S.-backed cease-fire could be salvaged and calling into question whether the deal would ever have worked.
Waves upon waves of planes relentlessly struck neighborhoods in the rebel-held east of the city on the first day of a new offensive announced by the government. Residents described the most intense airstrikes they had yet witnessed in a five-year-old war that has already claimed in excess of 300,000 lives.
By nightfall, more than 100 bombs had landed, and more than 80 people were dead, said Ammar al-Selmo, head of the Aleppo branch of the White Helmets civil defense group.
Rescuers don’t have the capacity to reach all the places that were hit because there are too many, he said. Three White Helmets bases were among the locations targeted, and two were destroyed, along with their equipment and fuel supplies, further diminishing the group’s ability to respond.
“It is a horrific situation now in Aleppo,” Selmo said. “There are dead people in the streets, and fires are burning without control.
“People don’t know what to do or where to go. There is no escape. It is like the end of the world.”
If there had been any doubt before that the cease-fire deal co-sponsored with Russia is dead, at least for the foreseeable future, the violence Friday put it to rest. A meeting in New York between Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov ended swiftly, without statements or discernible progress toward Kerry’s stated goal of reviving last week’s cease-fire.
Instead, the launch of the offensive called into question the entire premise of the agreement painstakingly negotiated by Kerry and Lavrov over the past eight months: that Russia shares the Obama administration’s view that there is no military solution to the conflict. [Continue reading…]
“…the entire premise of the agreement painstakingly negotiated by Kerry and Lavrov over the past eight months…”
Can this really be true — that the US spent 8 months in “painstaking negotiations” while expecting some other outcome? Could anyone seriously believe that the Russians were doing anything but setting things up for a final assault at major levels of brutality? Whatever could or could not be done about the war, getting stripped clean in “negotiations” is not an obligatory part of foreign policy.
Painful charade might be a better description.
For this administration there is a striking similarity between its insistence that there is no military solution to the war in Syria and its position on Israel/Palestine that the status quo is unsustainable. In both cases these are perspectives that freed Obama from any responsibility to be an agent of change.
With the help of a tireless secretary of state who seems blind to his own failures, Obama has turned diplomacy into a ritualistic alternative to war that supposedly retains value for no other reason than it is not war. Ironically, it is this form of hollow diplomacy that has played a significant role in prolonging the war in Syria.