ABC News reports: Obama confirmed publicly for the first time on “This Week” that he has exchanged letters with new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, who has vowed to act forcefully to prevent any Western military intervention in Syria, using “all efforts to prevent it.”

Obama said he believes his threat to use U.S. military force in Syria, and subsequent pause to pursue diplomacy, sends a signal to the Iranian regime in the ongoing dispute over its contested nuclear program.

“What they should draw from this lesson is that there is the potential of resolving these issues diplomatically,” Obama said.

“I think this new president is not going to suddenly make it easy,” he added. “But you know, my view is that if you have both a credible threat of force, combined with a rigorous diplomatic effort, that, in fact … you can strike a deal.”

U.S. State Department: Taking into account the decision of the Syrian Arab Republic to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention and the commitment of the Syrian authorities to provisionally apply the Convention prior to its entry into force, the United States and the Russian Federation express their joint determination to ensure the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons program (CW) in the soonest and safest manner.

For this purpose, the United States and the Russian Federation have committed to prepare and submit in the next few days to the Executive Council of the OPCW a draft decision setting down special procedures for expeditious destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons program and stringent verification thereof. The principles on which this decision should be based, in the view of both sides, are set forth in Annex A. The United States and the Russian Federation believe that these extraordinary procedures are necessitated by the prior use of these weapons in Syria and the volatility of the Syrian civil war.

The United States and the Russian Federation commit to work together towards prompt adoption of a UN Security Council resolution that reinforces the decision of the OPCW Executive Council. This resolution will also contain steps to ensure its verification and effective implementation and will request that the UN Secretary-General, in consultation with the OPCW, submit recommendations to the UN Security Council on an expedited basis regarding the UN’s role in eliminating the Syrian chemical weapons program. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri has told the Islamist militants who are some of Syria’s toughest opposition forces to avoid alliances with other rebel fighters backed by Gulf Arab states and the West.

His comment reflects a deepening rift between groups of the Western- and Arab-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and guerrillas sympathetic to Zawahri’s ultra hardline network, which seeks to wage a transnational armed campaign against the West.

Division among rebel fighters, as well as the influence of hardline Islamists, is one reason Western powers have hesitated to intervene in Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old conflict, in which more than 100,000 people have been killed.

In an audio speech released a day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 strikes, Zawahri said the United States would try to push opposition fighters to link up with “secular parties that are allied to the West”, the SITE monitoring service said. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The joint U.S. Russian push to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons is starting to have ripple effects, focusing attention on the suspected arsenal of Israel.

By forcing Syria to admit to its stockpiles of the weapons of mass destruction and take tentative steps toward their elimination, Washington and Moscow could coax Syria’s neighbors into eventually following suit, said Western and Arab diplomats.

But a frequent complaint among Arab countries in the region—that Israel has an undeclared but presumed nuclear-weapons program—has already resurfaced.

Syria’s government has hinted that it could raise Israel’s suspected arsenal of nuclear and other weapons as an international issue and potentially a precondition for Damascus moving ahead on the destruction of what the U.S. estimates is at least 1,000 tons of chemical agents.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly stated that Syria’s program was only necessary as a defense against Israel’s vastly superior firepower.

“It’s well known that Syria has a certain arsenal of chemical weapons and the Syrians always viewed that as an alternative [response] to Israel’s nuclear weapons,” he said Tuesday.

This position could place the Obama administration in a diplomatic corner. The U.S. has held to a decades-old policy of neither publicly acknowledging nor denying Israel’s capabilities, which are believed to include nuclear warheads.

It also could undermine the White House’s efforts to counter weapons proliferation and contain Iran’s nuclear program. The U.S. has repeatedly stated that American efforts to reduce its own weapons stockpiles, and those of its allies, diminished the needs of other countries to seek atomic bombs.

“The main danger of WMD is the Israel nuclear arsenal,” Syria’s ambassador to the U.N., Bashar Ja’afari, told reporters on Thursday. [Continue reading…]

In a lengthy report for Foreign Policy, Matthew Aid this week revealed the contents of a 1983 CIA intelligence estimate on Israel’s chemical weapons program. The estimate has not been declassified but was unearthed at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California where it was found having been stapled to an innocuous unclassified report.

According to the 1983 intelligence estimate, "Israel, finding itself surrounded by frontline Arab states with budding CW [chemical weapons] capabilities, became increasingly conscious of its vulnerability to chemical attack. Its sensitivities were galvanized by the capture of large quantities of Soviet CW-related equipment during both the 1967 Arab-Israeli and the 1973 Yom Kippur wars. As a result, Israel undertook a program of chemical warfare preparations in both offensive and protective areas."

Israeli concerns about Egypt and other Arab states possessing chemical weapons were legitimate. Documents discovered at the National Archives confirm that the Egyptian military had possessed a large stockpile of mustard gas since the early 1960s and had demonstrated that it was not afraid to use these weapons. A declassified May 23, 1967 intelligence assessment found at the National Archives reveals that Egyptian forces first began using mustard gas bombs against Saudi-backed royalist rebel forces in what was then known as North Yemen as early as 1963. According to a January 15, 1968 CIA report, U.S. intelligence learned in early 1967 that Egyptian Soviet-made Tu-16 bombers had dropped bombs filled with nerve agents on rebel positions in Yemen, marking the first time that nerve agents had ever been used in combat. And according to a May 20, 1967 top secret White House memorandum found at the National Archives, the Israelis sent Washington an intelligence report stating that Israeli intelligence had observed "canisters of [poison] gas" with Egyptian troops stationed along the Israeli border in the Sinai Peninsula.

The 1983 CIA estimate reveals that U.S. intelligence first became aware of Israeli chemical weapons-testing activities in the early 1970s, when intelligence sources reported the existence of chemical weapons test grids, which are specially instrumented testing grounds used to measure the range and effectiveness of different chemical agents, particularly nerve agents, in simulated situations and in varying climatic conditions. It is almost certain that these testing grids were located in the arid and sparsely populated Negev Desert, in southern Israel.

But the CIA assessment suggests that the Israelis accelerated their research and development work on chemical weapons following the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. According to the report, U.S. intelligence detected "possible tests" of Israeli chemical weapons in January 1976, which, again, almost certainly took place somewhere in the Negev Desert. A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer whom I interviewed recalled that at about this time, the National Security Agency captured communications showing that Israeli air force fighter-bombers operating from Hatzerim Air Base outside the city of Beersheba in southern Israel had been detected conducting simulated low-level chemical weapons delivery missions at a bombing range in the Negev Desert.

The U.S. intelligence community was paying an extraordinary amount of attention to Israel in the 1970s, according to a retired CIA analyst I spoke with who studied the region at the time. The possible January 1976 Israeli chemical weapons test occurred a little more than two years after the end of the 1973 war, an event that had shocked the Israeli political and military establishment because it demonstrated for the first time that the Arab armies were now capable of going toe-to-toe on the battlefield with the Israeli military.

To complicate things further, in January 1976 the long-simmering civil war in Lebanon was beginning to heat up. And the CIA was increasingly concerned about the growing volume of evidence, much of it coming from human intelligence sources inside Israel, indicating that the Israeli nuclear weapons stockpile was growing both in size and raw megatonnage. At the same time that all this was happening, the Israeli "chemical weapons" test mentioned in CIA document occurred. It increased the already-heightened level of concern within the U.S. intelligence community about what the Israelis were up to.

In March 1976, two months after the Israeli test in question, a number of newspapers in the U.S. published stories which quoted CIA officials to the effect that Israel possessed a number of nuclear weapons. The leak was based on an authorized off-the-record briefing of newspaper reporters by a senior CIA official in Washington, who intimated to the reporters that Israel was also involved in other activities involving weapons of mass destruction, but refused to say anything further on the subject. The CIA official was likely referring to the agency’s belief that the Israelis may have conducted a chemical weapons test in January 1976. According to a declassified State Department cable, Israeli foreign minister Yigal Allon called in the U.S. ambassador to Israel and registered a strong protest about the story, reiterating the official Israeli government position that Israel did not possess nuclear weapons. After the protest, all further public mention of Israeli WMD activities ceased and the whole subject was quickly and quietly forgotten.

The New York Times reports: The United States and Russia reached a sweeping agreement on Saturday that called for Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be removed or destroyed by the middle of 2014 and indefinitely stalled the prospect of American airstrikes.

However, the joint announcement, on the third day of intensive talks in Geneva, also set the stage for one of the most challenging undertakings in the history of arms control.

“This situation has no precedent,” said Amy E. Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are cramming what would probably be five or six years’ worth of work into a period of several months, and they are undertaking this in an extremely difficult security environment due to the ongoing civil war.”

Although the agreement for the first time explicitly includes the United Nations Security Council in determining possible international action in Syria, Russia has maintained its opposition to any military action.

But George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, emphasized that the possibility of unilateral American military force was still on the table. “We haven’t made any changes to our force posture to this point,” Mr. Little said. “The credible threat of military force has been key to driving diplomatic progress, and it’s important that the Assad regime lives up to its obligations under the framework agreement.”

In Syria, the state news agency, SANA, voiced cautious approval of the Russian and American deal, calling it “a starting point.” But there was no immediate explicit statement about the government’s willingness to implement it as detailed on Saturday.

In any case, the deal represented at least a temporary reprieve for Mr. Assad’s government — a reality that was bitterly seized on by the fractured Syrian rebel forces, most of which have pleaded for American airstrikes. General Salim Idris, the head of the Western-backed rebels’ nominal military command, the Supreme Military Council, denounced the initiative.

“All of this initiative does not interest us. Russia is a partner with the regime in killing the Syrian people,” he told reporters in Istanbul. “ A crime against humanity has been committed, and there is not any mention of accountability.” [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: He is rarely photographed or even quoted in Syria’s media. Wrapped in that blanket of secrecy, President Bashar Assad’s younger brother has been vital to the family’s survival in power.

Maher Assad commands the elite troops that protect the Syrian capital from rebels on its outskirts and is widely believed to have helped orchestrate the regime’s fierce campaign to put down the uprising, now well into its third year. He has also gained a reputation for brutality among opposition activists.

His role underlines the family core of the Assad regime, though he is a stark contrast to his brothers. His eldest brother, Basil, was the family prince, publicly groomed by their father, Hafez, to succeed him as president — until Basil died in a 1994 car crash. That vaulted Bashar, then an eye doctor in London with no military or political experience, into the role of heir, rising to the presidency after his father’s death in 2000. The two brothers — the “martyr” and the president — often appear together in posters.

The 45-year-old Maher Assad, however, has resolutely stayed out of the limelight. Friends, military colleagues and even his enemies describe him as a strict military man to the core. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The United States and Russia have agreed on a proposal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday after nearly three days of talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Kerry said that, under the pact, Syria must submit a “comprehensive listing” of its chemical weapons stockpiles within one week.

Kerry, at a press conference with Lavrov, said that under the agreement, U.N. weapons inspectors must be on the ground in Syria no later than November. The goal, he said, is the complete destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons by the middle of 2014.

Kerry and Lavrov said that if Syria does not comply with the agreement, which must be finalized by the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, it would face consequences under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, the part that covers sanctions and military action.

Kerry said there was no agreement on what those measures would be. U.S. President Barack Obama, he said, reserves the right to use military force in Syria.

“There’s no diminution of options,” he said.

Lavrov said of the agreement, “There (is) nothing said about the use of force and not about any automatic sanctions.”

Max Blumenthal reports: I sat inside a dimly lit, ramshackle trailer functioning as a general store for the residents of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, while a wiry, sad-eyed man named Adbel told me about the massacres that drove him from his hometown. Dragging deeply on a cigarette, Abdel described how army forces rained shells down on his neighborhood in Deir Ba’alba, a district in Homs, over five months ago, pounding the town over and over. Then he told me how government thugs barged into homes at 6am, methodically slashing his neighbors to death with long knives, leaving fields irrigated with the blood of corpses, a nightmarish scene that looked much like this. Like nearly everyone I interviewed in the camp, he described his experience in clinical detail, with a flat tone and a blank expression, masking continuous trauma behind stoicism.

As Abdel mashed his cigarette into a tin ashtray and reached to light another, a woman appeared at the shop window with three young children. She said she had no money and had not been able to purchase baby formula for three days. She had trudged to hospitals across the camp seeking help and was turned away at each stop. Without hesitation, the shop owner, a burly middle-aged man also from Homs, pulled a can of formula off a shelf and handed it over to the woman. She made no promise to pay him back, and he did not ask for one. Like so many in the camp, she left Syria with nothing and now depends on the charity of others for her survival. In a human warehouse of 120,000, the fourth largest population center in Jordan and the second largest refugee camp in the world, where few can leave and even fewer are able to enter, the woman’s desperate existence was not an exception, but the rule.

“We’re in a prison right now,” Abdel told me. “We can’t do anything. And the minute we try to have a small demonstration, even peacefully, [Jordanian soldiers] throw teargas at us.”

“Guantanamo!” the shop owner bellows.

None of the dozens of adults I interviewed in the camp would allow me to report their full names or photograph their faces. If they return to Syria with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad still intact, they fear brutal recriminations. Many have already survived torture, escaped from prisons, or defected from Assad’s army. “With all the bloodshed, the killing of people who did not even join the resistance, Bashar only wanted to teach us one lesson: That we are completely weak and he is our god,” a woman from Dara’a in her early sixties told me. “His goal is to demolish our spirit so we will never rise up again.” The woman’s sons had spent four months under sustained torture for defecting to the Free Syrian Army. She does not know where they are now, only that they are back in the field, battling Assad’s forces in a grinding stalemate that has taken somewhere around 100,000 lives.

When news of the August 21 chemical attacks that left hundreds dead in the Ghouta region east of Damascus reached Zaatari, terror and dread spiked to unprecedented levels. Many residents repeated to me the rumors spreading through the camp that Bashar would douse them in sarin gas as soon as he crushed the last vestiges of internal resistance—a kind of genocidal victory celebration. When President Barack Obama announced his intention to launch punitive missile strikes on Syria, however, a momentary sense of hope began to surge through the camp. Indeed, there was not one person I spoke to in Zaatari who did not demand US military intervention at the earliest possible moment. [Continue reading…]

A few days ago I posted the video below which recently appeared on Al Jazeera English. EA Worldview now provides additional background on the source of the footage and points out a number of inaccuracies in AJE’s reporting. EAW says: “To date, there has been no confirmed evidence of Iranian commanders overseeing Syrian military operations or of Iranian ground troops fighting on the battlefield.”

This is the Al Jazeera report based on film made by an Iranian documentary maker, Esmail Heydari, who is not identified correctly in the report:

The broadcasts by Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English exaggerated and distorted the videos when they claimed, “The Iranians are the ones calling the shots in [the] war…giving orders where to fight and when….”

Notably, Al Jazeera English does not say that Heydari is a documentary maker, and it wrongly identifies him as a “fighter”, mis-translating at least one of his statements in the raw footage. It uses him, incorrectly, in the highly exaggerated claim, “The video shows just how in control the Iranian fighters are….It is clear once again that Assad’s army has little say about what goes on.”

Later, Al Jazeera English almost certainly makes a further mistake by portraying Heydari as a “Syrian fighter”, asking Iranian officers for a holiday to boost his morale.

Al Jazeera English says a “rebel group posted this video”, but does not identify the faction to indicate why the brigade might have an interest in exaggerating the story of the Iranian presence or to give any context for the brigade’s battles with Shia fighters around Aleppo, or to report that Liwa Dawood overran the military facility where Heydari was on August 22. Al Jazeera also do not report that the group inside the facility overran by Liwa Dawood was not the Syrian Arab Army but a pro-regime Shia faction.

The original videos have been posted on YouTube by Brown Moses: video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4, video 5, and video 6.

Nick Danforth writes: “There’s nothing the Arab respects more, John, than a strong steady white hand drawing arbitrary lines betwixt there ridiculous tribal allegiances,” John Oliver said recently while dressed as a 19th-century British explorer.

[Daily Show clip preceded by 30-second commercial.]

Recently the Daily Show joined the growing consensus of commentators declaring that arbitrary, carelessly drawn imperial borders are to blame for all that’s wrong with the Middle East today. In doing so, they demonstrated that it’s easy to be incredibly funny and dangerously wrong at the same time. There’s plenty to criticize about the legacy of colonialism, but dwelling on colonial borders only increases the risk that our future interventions in the region will further undermine its already fragile states.

The idea that better borders, drawn with careful attention to the region’s ethnic and religious diversity, would have spared the Middle East a century’s worth of violence is especially provocative at a moment when Western powers weigh the merits of intervention in the region. Unfortunately, this critique overstates how arbitrary today’s Middle East borders really are, overlooks how arbitrary every other border in the world is, implies that better borders were possible, and ignores the cynical imperial practices that actually did sow conflict in the region. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Not long ago, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria seemed a remote and embattled figure, with the United States threatening airstrikes and other Arab leaders denouncing him for having used chemical weapons against his own people.

Yet in recent days, he appears, paradoxically, to have turned the crisis to his advantage, making clear to a global television audience that he aims to use President Obama’s own “red line” against him.

In exchange for relinquishing his chemical arsenal, Mr. Assad said Thursday, he will require that the United States stop arming the Syrian opposition — a demand that might seem wishful from the leader of a devastated country where civil war has left 100,000 dead, two million living as refugees and large swaths of territory beyond his control.

Mr. Assad outlined his demands on Thursday, telling a Russian TV interviewer that the arms-control proposal floated by his patron in Moscow would not be finalized until “we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists.”

Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a blunt response to Mr. Assad’s comments after meeting Thursday with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, saying the standard procedures for identifying and securing the weapons were too slow in Syria’s case. “There is nothing standard about this process,” Mr. Kerry said. “The words of the Syrian regime, in our judgment, are simply not enough.”

Mr. Assad, sounding relaxed and confident, hinted in his interview that the Russian proposal — which requires Syria to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention — could become a lever for endless negotiations and delays, much as Saddam Hussein delayed arms control inspectors during the 1990s. “It doesn’t mean that Syria will sign the documents, fulfill the obligations, and that’s it,” Mr. Assad said.

The state-owned Syrian newspaper Al Watan put it bluntly in a headline on Thursday: “Moscow and Damascus pull the rug out from under the feet of Obama.” [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Talks between U.S. and Russian officials on disarming Syria of its chemical weapons program broadened Friday to include how to settle the civil war and start a process of government transition.

But diplomats made clear that prospects for a larger deal, known as Geneva 2, depend on the outcome of talks under way this week over Syria’s chemical weapons and on whether warring parties in Syria are able to negotiate.

A meeting between Russian and U.S. officials on the larger government transition talks will take place late this month, when world leaders gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meeting, Secretary of State John Kerry said in Geneva. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration urged Syria on Thursday to come clean about its past nuclear research as well as its chemical arsenal, accusing President Bashar al-Assad of blocking access to facilities linked to a Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007.

The top U.S. diplomat to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Syria’s two-year-old civil war was no excuse for its failure to answer questions about its alleged nuclear program, which Western intelligence officials believe was on a path toward making nuclear weapons.

“It remains essential that Syria fully cooperate,” Ambassador Joseph Macmanus told a meeting of the U.N. watchdog agency’s 35-nation governing board in Vienna.

Macmanus specifically pressed for access to three sites inside Syria that he said were suspected of having a “functional relationship” to the Deir al-Zour reactor destroyed by Israeli warplanes six years ago. One of the sites has been described by U.S. officials as a pilot plant for making the reactor’s uranium fuel.

The three facilities have long been a focal point of an IAEA investigation into the size and scope of Syria’s nuclear program, which is believed to been halted by the 2007 Israeli air raid dubbed Operation Orchard. The presumed cornerstone of the program was the plutonium reactor built with North Korean help on the banks of the Euphrates River in Syria’s eastern desert.

A report Thursday by independent nuclear researchers said ancillary facilities built to support the Syrian reactor could still contain uranium and other material of potential value to terrorist groups or black-market profiteers. The Deir al-Zour reactor was still under construction at the time of the 2007 attack, and it is unclear what became of the hundreds of uranium fuel rods that would have been required to operate the facility .

“The uranium could be anywhere within government controlled areas today, if it even remains in Syria,” warned the report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nonprofit group. “Determining its fate must be a priority.” [Continue reading…]

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: Eager to forestall a U.S. intervention, Bashar al-Assad has agreed to relinquish his stockpile of chemical weapons — a stockpile that, until this week, he denied even possessing. But Syria’s president continues to deny — as he did in a recent interview with Charlie Rose — that he used such weapons on civilians in an Aug. 21 attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. That’s less surprising than the people who believe him, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary: countless Americans, including public figures from across the political spectrum who — out of opposition to war in general, or to President Barack Obama specifically — eagerly believe and spread misinformation. Call them chemical-weapons truthers.

One such group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which is comprised by former spooks and diplomats, last week wrote an open letter to Obama warning that he might be led by dubious intelligence into intervening in Syria. They claimed to have learned from “former co-workers” that “the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21.”

If true, this would be devastating to the Obama’s credibility. But skepticism of intelligence agencies notwithstanding, not everyone is likely to be swayed by the claims of anonymous informants. After all, the VIPS are also contradicting the considered judgment of the British, French and German intelligence — not to mention respected independent analysts like Eliot Higgins. Even the cautious-to-a-fault Human Rights Watch has confirmed the regime’s culpability in August’s sarin gas attack.

VIPS insists its detailed account of the attack came from “a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East.” These have confirmed, they say, that the “chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters.” Based on “some reports,” they allege, “canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened.” They forcefully reject the notion that “a Syrian military rocket capable of carrying a chemical agent was fired into the area.”

I asked three of the signatories about their sources. They proved curiously evasive. But one VIPS member, Philip Giraldi, has since published an article in The American Conservative — and the reason for their hesitation has become obvious. The sources for VIPS’ most sensational claims, it turns out, are Canadian eccentric Michel Chossudovsky’s conspiracy site Global Research and far-right shock-jock Alex Jones’s Infowars. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: Signaling a possible thaw in long-frozen relations, the Obama administration and the new leadership in Iran are communicating about Syria and are moving behind the scenes toward direct talks that both governments hope can ease the escalating confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear program.

President Obama reportedly reached out to Iran’s relatively moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, through an exchange of letters in recent weeks. The pragmatist cleric is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, and after years of the United States cold-shouldering his ultraconservative predecessor, U.S. officials say it’s possible they will meet with Rouhani on the sidelines.

Beyond that, U.S. and Iranian officials are tentatively laying the groundwork for potential face-to-face talks between the two governments, the first in the rancorous 34 years since radical students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and founded the Islamic theocracy. Diplomatic relations have been broken ever since.

Both governments have issued conciliatory public statements in recent days that suggest a new willingness to scale back the tension.

Obama suggested in four TV interviews this week, for example, that Iran had played a constructive role in pushing Syrian President Bashar Assad to refrain from using chemical weapons. Iran is one of Syria’s closest allies and supplies conventional arms to Assad’s forces, so Rouhani may have considerable leverage in the Russian-led effort to disarm Syria of its toxic weapons. [Continue reading…]

Vladamir Putin writes: Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.

No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.

The world reacts by asking: if you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. Thus a growing number of countries seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This is logical: if you have the bomb, no one will touch you. We are left with talk of the need to strengthen nonproliferation, when in reality this is being eroded.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

Responding to Obama’s address to the nation on Tuesday, Putin challenges the president’s wisdom in invoking the supposed virtue of American exceptionalism:

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

Even if Putin makes a number of highly questionable assertions, the main thrust of his argument is hard to challenge: the United States has a responsibility to abide by international law. It can’t credibly claim that it is defending the international norm which prohibits the use of chemical weapons, while acting in a way that undermines the authority of the primary institution for upholding international law: the United Nations.

Some of the New York Times’ readers are taking exception to the fact that op-ed space was made available to a foreign head of state in order to challenge U.S. foreign policy. Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s public editor devoted a column to explaining the Times’ decision. She could have explained it in four words: this is free speech.

Questions could more appropriately be fired at the White House, such as: where is Obama’s op-ed?

If the administration has had trouble articulating its policy maybe it’s because it’s making it up as it goes along. Maybe they prefer videos, interviews, briefings and televised statements in the hope that few Americans bother reading the transcripts or try and analyze the content.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words when you don’t have a thousand words to offer.

The New York Times reports: Mr. Netanyahu, breaking a week of silence on the Syria situation, echoed his colleagues by saying that Israel’s main concern was how it relates to what it sees as its greatest threat: the potential for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. And in his view, the message seemed to be that Israel needed to be prepared to take care of itself.

“The world needs to make sure that anyone who uses weapons of mass destruction will pay a heavy price for it,” Mr. Netanyahu said Wednesday at the graduation ceremony for a naval program. “The message in Syria will also be heard very well in Iran.”

He cited President Obama’s speech Tuesday, in which he said that Israel could defend itself but also had Washington’s “unshakable support,” and quoted a famous saying of the ancient Jewish scholar Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

“The operational translation of this rule is that Israel should always be able to defend itself and will protect itself by its own strengths against every threat,” Mr. Netanyahu told the crowd. “The state of Israel is today prepared to act with great strength.”

Israel has insisted throughout Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war that it will not intervene except to protect its border or to prevent the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah. There is a stark divide here over whether Mr. Assad’s continued rule is preferable to a victory by Syrian rebel groups, some of whom are allied with Islamic extremists seen as even bigger threats. There is a growing sense that a continuation of the bloody battles may be the best outcome for now.

But Israelis have largely been disappointed by what they describe as Mr. Obama’s indecision — a sharp contrast from their own military secretly striking weapons convoys in Syria that it suspected were bound for Hezbollah several times this year.

Ehud Yaari, a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is based in Jerusalem, said Israelis were dubious about the diplomacy and “confused at the performance of the president.” There was also a concern that both Syria and Iran might obtain advanced Russian weapons systems as part of the deal after the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported on Wednesday that Russia had agreed to give Iran advanced S-300 antiaircraft missiles and build an additional nuclear reactor at the Bushehr nuclear site.

“They got the distinctive feeling that the president was looking for every possible way to avoid acting on the red line which he himself issued,” said Mr. Yaari, a television analyst here with close ties to Israel’s security and intelligence establishment. If Mr. Obama’s “not willing to have a very modest, limited strike on Syria, a punitive strike,” he added, “when we come to that, would he be contemplating a bigger move on Iran?” [Continue reading…]