Author Archives: News Sources

Syria: it takes more courage to say there is nothing outsiders can do

Simon Jenkins writes: The urge of much of Britain’s political establishment to attack Syria is in retreat. The prime minister’s eagerness to join an American bombing run on Damascus hit a humiliating reverse in the Commons on Thursday evening. The prime minister now appears to accept there will be no British intervention in Syria.

Prior to the vote, Downing Street had been swerving and skidding to avoid the Iraq trap. It wisely published the intelligence report indicating the Assad regime used chemical weapons in a raid on a Damascus suburb, possibly in random retaliation for an attempt on his life. Such weapons are illegal under international law. While it was wrong to rush to judgment with inquiries still in train, there is justice in a desire to enforce the law. But enforcement must be meticulous in its legality. Otherwise what is dispensed is anarchy, not law.

The government claimed it could attack Syria under the UN’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine, where people in a foreign state are abused by their own government. We know from the Iraq invasion that British politicians are adept at finding lawyers to say what they want. But facts are facts. The UN’s resolution 1674 on responsibility to protect plainly states that such action must be “through the security council in accordance with the charter”. That process was absent. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. intelligence ‘black budget’ reveals that Israel poses a national security threat to America

The Washington Post reports: U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.
[…]
Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:

● Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.

● The CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”

● Long before Snowden’s leaks, the U.S. intelligence community worried about “anomalous behavior” by employees and contractors with access to classified material. The NSA planned to ward off a “potential insider compromise of sensitive information” by re-investigating at least 4,000 people this year who hold high-level security clearances.

● U.S. intelligence officials take an active interest in friends as well as foes. Pakistan is described in detail as an “intractable target,” and counterintelligence operations “are strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.” The latter is a U.S. ally but has a history of espionage attempts against the United States. [Continue reading…]

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Cameron forced to rule out British attack on Syria after defeat in parliament

The Guardian reports: David Cameron indicated on Thursday evening that Britain would not take part in military action against Syria after the British government lost a crucial vote on an already watered-down amendment that was designed to pave the way to intervention in the war-torn country.

In a devastating blow to his authority, the prime minister lost a government motion by 272 votes to 285 – an opposition majority of 13 – after scores of Tory MPs voted with Labour.

Ministers had thought they were secure after a Labour amendment was defeated, in the first vote of the night, 332 votes to 220, a government majority of 112.

Labour claimed that the government ran into trouble when deputy prime minister Nick Clegg struggled, in the closing minutes of the debate, to answer concerns on all sides of the house that the government motion would have taken Britain closer to joining a US military operation against the Assad regime in Syria after last week’s chemical weapons attack.

One MP shouted “resign” as the results were read out by the speaker. David Cameron said the government would respect the decision of parliament which means that Britain will not take part in military strikes against Syria.

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Does Obama need congressional approval to bomb Syria?

Yahoo News: If President Barack Obama chooses to unilaterally launch a military attack against Syria in retaliation for the government’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians last week, he is certain to face criticism that he’s overstepping his executive authority.

The president has already run up against resistance from some members of Congress, who argue that under the 1973 War Powers Resolution and the U.S. Constitution he must seek the body’s full approval before taking military action against the country.

The disagreement is part of a larger and thorny constitutional and legal argument over how far Congress can go to check the chief executive’s war powers and what types of military actions constitute war.

Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., has said it would be “unquestionably unconstitutional” for Obama to bomb the country without Congress’ approval, and he has authored legislation to withhold funds from the effort. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia also has suggested the president might be on shaky legal ground if he doesn’t get a congressional OK. More than 100 members of Congress signed a letter to the president warning him to seek their approval before attacking another country.

Interestingly, Obama himself made a similar argument while on the campaign trail six years ago. He told the Boston Globe in 2007 that no president can use military force absent an “actual or imminent threat to the nation” without first getting Congress’ approval. (Vice President Joe Biden, for his part, vowed to impeach President George W. Bush in 2007 if he bombed Iran without first getting approval from Congress.)

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State Dept admits it doesn’t know who ordered Syria’s chemical strike

Foreign Policy reports: With the United States barreling toward a strike on Syria, U.S. officials say they are completely certain that Bashar al-Assad’s government is responsible for last week’s chemical weapons attack. They just don’t know who in the Syrian government is to blame.

On Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf admitted as much. “The commander-in-chief of any military is ultimately responsible for decisions made under their leadership, even if … he’s not the one that pushes the button or said, ‘Go,’ on this,” Harf said. “I don’t know what the facts are here. I’m just, broadly speaking, saying that he is responsible for the actions of his regime. I’m not intimately familiar with the command and control structure of the Syrian military. I’m just not. But again, he is responsible ultimately for the decisions that are made.”

On Tuesday, The Cable reported that U.S. officials are basing their assessment that the Assad regime bears responsibility for the strike largely on an intercepted phone call between a panicked Ministry of Defense official and a commander of a Syrian chemical weapons unit. But that intelligence does not resolve the question of who in the government ordered the strike or what kind of command and control structures are in place for the use of such weapons. “It’s unclear where control lies,” one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable Tuesday. “Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?”

Because of that lack of clarity, Harf took a beating on Wednesday. In a testy exchange during her daily briefing, Harf very nearly admitted that it makes no difference who in the Syrian government ordered the attack, a reflection of the lack of certainty that still shrouds U.S. understanding of the chemical attack that may have left as many as 1,000 people dead.

It wasn’t “very nearly” — she was quite explicit in saying that Assad will be held responsible irrespective of who ordered the attack and that she has no specific information on the chain of command.

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Cameron government resorts to cursing opposition leader on lack of support for Syria strike

The Guardian reports: A furious row between Downing Street and the Labour leadership has erupted after No 10 accused Ed Miliband of giving “succour” to the Assad regime after he moved to block an early Commons vote on military action.

As Cameron rejected a Labour amendment on Syria, the prime minister’s spokesperson accused Miliband of “flipping and flopping” and of having moved the goalposts in negotiations over the past 48 hours.

Asked whether Miliband was giving succour to the Assad regime, another Downing Street spokesperson said: “Yes. The fact is that a lot of the arguments over this could give succour to the regime.”

Labour immediately hit back. A spokesman said: “That is frankly insulting. Language like that demeans Downing Street.”

Miliband was already angry after a government source used expletives overnight to criticise Miliband. A government source told the Times on Wednesday night: “No 10 and the Foreign Office think Miliband is a fucking cunt and a copper-bottomed shit.” [Continue reading…]

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Cameron says no ‘single smoking piece of intelligence’ that Assad regime used chemical weapons

The Guardian reports: A British military attack on Syria will have to be a “judgment call” as there is no “single smoking piece of intelligence” that the regime used chemical weapons, David Cameron said at the beginning of the emergency Commons debate on Syria.

Arguing in favour of military intervention, the prime minister said he believed that forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad did use poisonous gas against the Syrian people “right in front of our eyes”.

Cameron told MPs there were at least 95 “horrific videos” of people dying in a gas attack in a suburb of Damascus two weeks ago, and added there was further evidence in the form of witness and social media reports.

However, the prime minister did concede that there could be no 100% certainty about the intelligence on which Britain would have to make a decision on whether to intervene in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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British intelligence report offers no explanation about why Assad would order chemical attacks

The Guardian reports: The report by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee on the Syrian chemical warfare attacks fails to answer a central question – about the motivation of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Its conclusion that the Syrian government was “highly likely” to be responsible largely rests on precedent and the firm view that the opposition was not capable of carrying out attacks on this scale.

The JIC did say that it had “some intelligence” to suggest “regime culpability” for the August 21st attack, which it says resulted in at least 350 fatalities. David Cameron, according to a covering letter from the JIC chairman, Jon Day, has had access to it all. But there is no further elaboration on this central point.

There is also a striking lack of any scientific evidence in the document.

The committee’s most unequivocal statement is that it was “not possible” for the anti-Assad opposition to have carried out a CW attack on this scale. The Syrian regime and supporters such as Russia (“with a good degree of confidence”) claim (though without producing supporting evidence) that that is exactly what did happen. The JIC addressed this point simply by noting that a number of (unidentified) opposition groups “continue to seek a CW capability”.

Overall, Day told the prime minister, the JIC had “high confidence” in the accuracy of all its assessments. But there was one significant qualification: “Except in relation to the regime’s precise motivation for carrying out an attack of this scale at this time – though intelligence may increase our confidence in the future.” [Continue reading…]

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Sorry, Obama. There were no ‘other avenues’ for Snowden’s whistle-blowing

Jennifer I. Hoelzer writes: Edward Snowden went over the president’s head, and the president thinks it was totally not cool of him. At a news conference earlier this month, he said: “There were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred.” Furthermore, “[w]ell before Mr. Snowden leaked this information,” the president reminds us, he signed an order that “for the first time … provided whistle-blower protection to the intelligence community.”

The president even says he “called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks.”

In other words, according to President Obama, Edward Snowden didn’t have to go over the commander-in-chief’s head to get his concerns addressed, because not only does the president support whistle-blowers — and thus would have taken Snowden’s concerns seriously — he was already in the process of addressing the issues Snowden went above him to get addressed.

I see a few problems with this.

First of all, it’s unclear exactly what avenues the president believes Snowden should have taken to raise concerns about the NSA’s secret surveillance programs. Last week, he told Jay Leno: “If you think that the government is abusing a program … you can come … to the appropriate individuals and say, ‘Look, I’ve got a problem with what’s going on here. I’m not sure whether it’s being done properly.’ ”

He has a point. If Edward Snowden had concerns that one of his co-workers was abusing the NSA’s surveillance authority to — for example — collect data on a former girlfriend or blackmail a member of Congress, he could have reported his concerns to a supervisor, and it’s highly likely that person would have done something about it.

But, contrary to what the president seems to think, Edward Snowden wasn’t concerned that the NSA was “improperly” collecting information on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was concerned that the government was collecting information on hundreds of millions of Americans. And how exactly does the president think Snowden should have raised that concern?

Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen, which requires employees to report “all suspected violations of the law” and cautions them to “take care to not report a violation to someone that [they] believe is involved in the matter.”

Well, nearly everyone Edward Snowden worked for — up to and including the president of the United States — was involved in the matter. So, again, whom exactly should he have gone to with his concerns? [Continue reading…]

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Obama is closer to Nixon than to MLK

Paul Rosenberg writes: Because Barack Obama is the United States’ first black president, there are many who still automatically associate him with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. And with the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it’s virtually a knee-jerk reaction to associate his presidency with the fulfillment of King’s dream.

But, as the almost-simultaneous sentencing of Chelsea nee Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison should remind us, a more accurate historical comparison to that time would link Obama to Richard Nixon, rather than King. Nixon, after all, tried to have Daniel Ellsberg jailed for revealing the Pentagon Papers, and Ellsberg himself has said, “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”

Elaborating further, Ellsberg said, “Various things that were counted as unconstitutional then have been put in the president’s hands now. He’s become an elected monarch. Nixon’s slogan, ‘when the president does it, it’s not illegal’, is pretty much endorsed now. Meaning not only Obama but the people who come after him will have powers that no previous president had.” [Continue reading…]

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NYPD designates mosques as terrorism organizations

The Associated Press reports: The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials.

The strategy has allowed the NYPD to send undercover officers into mosques and attempt to plant informants on the boards of mosques and at least one prominent Arab-American group in Brooklyn, whose executive director has worked with city officials, including Bill de Blasio, a front-runner for mayor. [Continue reading…]

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It won’t be long before intelligence agencies can’t find any employees

Charles Stross writes: The public perception of America as being a democratic republic that values freedom and fairness under the rule of law is diametrically opposed to the secretive practices of the surveillance state. Nationalist loyalty is highly elastic, but can be strained to breaking point. And when that happens, we see public servants who remain loyal to the abstract ideals conclude that the institution itself is committing treason. And an organization that provides no outlet for the concerns of loyal whistle-blowers like Thomas Drake is creating a rod for its own back by convincing the likes of leaker Edward Snowden that it is incapable of reform from within and disloyal to the national ideals it purports to serve.

Snowden is 30; he was born in 1983. Chelsea Manning is 25. Generation Y started around 1980 to 1982. But the signs of disobedience among Generation Y are merely a harbinger of things to come. Next up is Generation Z — the cohort born since the millennium.

Members of Generation Z are going to come of age in the 2020s, in a world racked by extreme climate events. Many of them will be sibling-less only children, for the demographic transition to a low birthrate/low death rate equilibrium lies generations in their past. They may not be able to travel internationally — energy costs combined with relative income decline is slowly stripping the middle classes of that capability — but they’ll be products of a third-generation Internet culture.

To the Z cohort, the Internet isn’t a separate thing; it has been an integrated part of their lives since infancy. They do not remember a time before the Internet or a life without smartphones. All of them will have had Facebook pages, even though they had to lie about their age to sign up (and even though having a social network presence is officially a no-no for spooks). All of them have acquired long histories visible on the Internet, even if only through the tagged photographs of their schoolmates. Mostly they photograph everything (even though taking photographs or being photographed is officially a no-no for spooks). Many of them even use lifeloggers (which has got to be a career-killer if your career lies in the shadows). They grew up in a surveillance state; they might want privacy, but they are under no illusions that the centers of authority will permit them to have it. Steeply climbing university fees and student-debt loading have turned a traditional degree into their version of Generation X’s unattainable job for life; their education will be vocational or acquired piecemeal from MOOCs (massive open online courses), and their careers will be haphazard, casual, and dominated by multiple part-time contracts.

They saw their grandparents’ and parents’ generations screwed by the great intergenerational transfer of wealth to the baby boomers — their great-grandparents, many of whom are lingering on into their twilight 80s. To Generation Z’s eyes, the boomers and their institutions look like parasitic aliens with incomprehensible values who make irrational demands for absolute loyalty without reciprocity. Worse, the foundational mythology and ideals of the United States will look like a bitter joke, a fun house mirror’s distorted reflection of the reality they live with from day to day.

Generation Z will arrive brutalized and atomized by three generations of diminished expectations and dog-eat-dog economic liberalism. Most of them will be so deracinated that they identify with their peers and the global Internet culture more than their great-grandparents’ post-Westphalian nation-state. The machineries of the security state may well find them unemployable, their values too alien to assimilate into a model still rooted in the early 20th century. But if you turn the Internet into a panopticon prison and put everyone inside it, where else are you going to be able to recruit the jailers? And how do you ensure their loyalty?

If I were in charge of long-term planning for human resources in any government department, I’d be panicking. Even though it’s already too late.

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Iranian parliament pursuing lawsuit against CIA for 1953 coup

The Los Angeles Times reports: A week after declassified CIA documents came to light verifying that the U.S. spy agency was behind a 1953 coup in Iran, parliamentarians in the Islamic Republic voted Tuesday to fast-track a lawsuit against Washington for interfering in Iranian domestic political affairs.

Sections of an internal CIA history of the operation that ousted Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and paved the way for the return of the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi were declassified two years ago but made public only Aug. 19 by the National Security Archive, an independent documentation research center in Washington.

The shah’s return was followed by years of brutal political reprisals and confrontation, leading to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the shah’s second flight into exile. The deposed monarch took refuge in several countries before being granted a brief U.S. stay for medical treatment that poisoned to this day relations between Washington and the religious leadership in Tehran. The shah died in Egypt in 1980.

Iranian lawmakers will begin Wednesday debating how to take the U.S. government to international court following a vote by the 290-seat parliament that was broadcast on state radio and reported by Iran’s Press TV. The plan to fast-track a lawsuit received 173 votes. [Continue reading…]

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Anti-Muslim monk stokes Burmese religious tensions

BBC News reports: This week, religious violence has once again flared in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Hundreds of Muslim homes have been burnt to the ground in Sagaing region after being attacked by Buddhist mobs.

In just over a year more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, have been killed and many more displaced as unrest has spread from Rakhine state in the west to towns across the country.

Many are blaming a controversial monk and the nationalist organisation he helps lead for the rising tensions.

In a classroom at one of Mandalay’s most famous monasteries, a teacher is at work. Shin Wirathu is taking a class of young monks at Masoeyin through the five precepts or pillars of the Buddhist faith.

This morning, he is lecturing on the importance of avoiding sexual misconduct.

“Yes venerable monk,” the young men chant in unison, as Wirathu softly delivers his advice on the need to avoid temptation.

When the class is over, he shows me outside. On the wall of the monastery courtyard are graphic posters of the Buddhist victims of recent religious and ethnic violence in Rakhine state in western Myanmar.

They are unpleasant viewing. The pictures from October last year show dead children with their heads cut open and the bodies of women with their internal organs spilling out of their torsos.

Wirathu said he put them up as a reminder to Buddhists that the country is under attack from Muslim “invaders”.

“Muslims are only well behaved when they are weak, ” he said. “When they become strong, they are like a wolf or a jackal, in large packs they hunt down other animals.”

Wirathu believes there is a Muslim “master plan” underway to turn Myanmar into an Islamic state.

If he is right, it is a long-term project. Latest estimates suggest that of Myanmar’s 60 million people, 90% are Buddhist and about 5% Muslim.

“Over the past 50 years, we have shopped at Muslim shops and then they became richer and wealthier than us and can buy and marry our girls,” Wirathu said. “In this way, they have destroyed and penetrated not only our nation but also our religion.”

Wirathu’s solution lies in a controversial nationalist organisation called 969. It calls on Buddhists to shop, sell property and marry within their own religion.

Small, brightly-coloured stickers have been distributed to clearly brand businesses as Buddhist-owned.

Supporters of 969 argue it is a purely defensive organisation, created to protect Buddhist culture and identity. Listening to the rhetoric of Wirathu and 969’s leaders, there is no doubt it is squarely aimed at Muslims. [Continue reading…]

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No clear legal basis for an attack on Syria

The Guardian reports: The United States and its allies are unlikely to build a clear case under international law for a military strike against Syria, and may instead make novel arguments about chemical weapons prohibitions, legal experts have said.

Britain is putting forward a resolution to the United Nations security council on Wednesday, condemning the alleged chemical attack in Syria last week and “authorising necessary measures to protect civilians” in the country.

However, Russia, which has a veto on the council, is widely expected to oppose any military action against Syria at the vote in New York. Western powers will therefore need to find another basis – outside of a security council resolution – under which to justify a strike against Syria.

The only other universally agreed basis for military action under international law is self-defence, and it would be hard for the US to argue that the Syrian conflict poses an imminent national security threat.

In Geneva, the UN special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, said on Wednesday that while inspectors had uncovered some evidence of a chemical attack, “international law says that any US-led military action must be taken after” agreement at the 15-nation security council.

“At this point the weight of international opinion would be that military action would not be legal,” said Ian Johnstone, a professor of international law at Tufts University. “However, I do think that there could be a case where violation of the law would be excused on the grounds of humanitarian necessity.”

Barry Pavel, a former director on the national security council under the Bush and Obama administrations, said that without UN or even Nato support, the US and its allies would seek to justify of a strike on “policy, political, moral and legal grounds”.

Pavel, who spent 18 years at the Pentagon is is now a vice-president at the Atlantic Council, said Obama would be expected to make a speech, answering questions about the legal basis of military action, prior to any strikes.

US, British and French political leaders have so far described the expected assault on Syria as a form of punishment or deterrence over its purported use of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, which resulted in hundreds of deaths.

Senior US officials have repeatedly said that President Assad’s forces “flagrantly violated” international law governing the use of chemical weapons, indicating that may form the basis for a justification of any future attack.

Defence secretary Chuck Hagel recently told reporters that any military action would occur “within the framework of legal justification”, but stopped short of saying it would be sanctioned under international law.

Professor Matthew C Waxman, from Columbia law school, said that even if the US and allies believed an attack on Syria was justified, they would “undoubtedly face some tough questions about the legality” of an intervention.

He said the US might forgo even attempting a technical justification for military action under international law which, in practical terms, would need the support of China and Russia, and instead build a moral case that use of force was “justifiable and legitimate”. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani tweets and retweets on Syria and chemical weapons

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Why Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. have little interest in ending the war in Syria

Christopher Dickey writes: With the United States on the verge, once again, of military action in the Middle East, it’s important to look at the Syrian conflict as what it is: the epicenter of a widening regional conflict. The limited U.S. missile strikes expected to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for the use of chemical weapons will sink the United States more deeply than ever into this turbulent quagmire. But there’s no guarantee that inaction would help the Obama administration get out or stay out. The regional players include too many American allies that are too important to U.S. interests, even though many of them are rivals and enemies of each other.

Let’s start with the Saudis, not least because Washington and Riyadh have had such close ties for so long, especially in the dark world of covert operations.

Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan used to be one of the most popular figures in Washington D.C., where he was ambassador, and for that matter in Aspen, Colorado, where he owned an enormous mansion. With a cigar in one hand and a snifter of Cognac in the other, he helped guide successive American administrations through the maze of intrigues in the Middle East, and helped create quite a few of them himself, including the arming of the Afghan mujahedeen and the complicated conspiracy that came to be known as Iran-Contra.

Since Bandar’s 22-year tenure in Washington came to an end in 2005, he has moved deeply into the shadows, and is now the head of his country’s intelligence services.

The Saudis see Iran as the single greatest threat to their security militarily (especially if it gets nuclear weapons), religiously (Shiite versus Sunni), and even territorially (by promoting unrest among the Shiite populations of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province and in neighboring Bahrain). And in many respects the Syrian war is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but, of course, it’s not as simple as that.

The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, before him have been intimate allies of the Iranian mullahs since the 1980s. Together, Iran and Syria have trained and armed Lebanon’s Hezbollah, one of the most effective guerrilla and terrorist organizations in the world.

In 2006, Prince Bandar actually encouraged Israel to wage what turned out to be a failed effort to obliterate the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Saudi support for Sunni rebels in Iraq also is meant to undermine a government in Baghdad that has grown ever closer to Tehran. Today, the Saudis have every interest in using the Syrian conflict to weaken Iran by depriving it of its allies in Damascus, or, at a minimum, draining Iran’s resources in a protracted Syrian war.

But there’s a twist. A secondary but significant Saudi concern is the Muslim Brotherhood, an international organization of Sunni Islamists which has deep roots in Syria and a clear ambition to dominate its political future. While the Saudis and the Brotherhood share the goal of deposing Assad, they are bitter enemies. [Continue reading…]

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Arab League refuses to support military strike on Syria

The New York Times reports: The leaders of the Arab world on Tuesday blamed the Syrian government for a chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of people last week, but declined to back a retaliatory military strike, leaving President Obama without the broad regional support he had for his last military intervention in the Middle East, in Libya in 2011.

While the Obama administration has robust European backing and more muted Arab support for a strike on Syria, the position of the Arab League and the unlikelihood of securing authorization from the United Nations Security Council complicate the legal and diplomatic case for the White House.

The White House said Tuesday that there was “no doubt” that President Bashar al-Assad’s government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack — an assessment shared by Britain, France and other allies — but it has yet to make clear if it has any intelligence directly linking Mr. Assad to the attack. The administration said it planned to provide intelligence on the attack later this week.

As Mr. Obama sought to shore up international support for military action, telephoning Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, administration officials said they did not regard the lack of an imprimatur from the Security Council or the Arab League as insurmountable hurdles, given the carnage last week. [Continue reading…]

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