Haaretz reports: The American Jewish establishment jumped off the fence on Tuesday and came out in full support of Congressional approval of President Barack Obama’s plans to launch a military strike against Syria’s chemical weapon capacity.

And Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren took the unusual step of expressing support for elements of President Obama’s statements on Syria, including his assertion that the Assad regime must be held accountable and that there should be “international consequences” for his use of chemical weapons.

The sudden unified burst of support for Obama’s request for Congressional authorization for a strike against Syria follows almost two weeks in which Jewish organizations have maintained a low profile on the August 21 chemical attack near Damascus and the American response to it.

Jewish leaders told Haaretz that the public support expressed in the past two days by leading Republican figures such as Representatives John Boehner and Eric Cantor, as well as the qualified backing shown by Senator John McCain, allayed concerns that the Jewish groups would be accused of taking sides in a political feud between the two parties. “The dynamics changed overnight,” one source said.

The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations said in a statement that “failing to take action would damage the credibility of the U.S. and negatively impact the effort to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capacity.”

The American Jewish Committee sent a letter to all members of Congress expressing support for Obama’s request for “limited military action” against Syria and warning that “acquiescence in the face of the crimes evidently committed by the Assad regime would doubtless have wide-ranging consequences for U.S. interests and influence in the Middle East and around the world.”

The pro-Israel lobby AIPAC urged Congress to “grant the president the authority to protect America’s security interests.” The lobby’s statement said that “barbarism on a mass scale must not be given a free pass.” And sources said that AIPAC would henceforth lobby Congress to support the use of force against Bashar Assad.

The Anti-Defamation League went a step further, lauding Obama’s “demonstration of U.S. leadership” and calling on Congress to “swiftly add its voice to hold Assad accountable for the wanton slaughter of his own citizens.”

ADL National Director Abe Foxman told Haaretz that from a “moral perspective” there was “nothing to debate” because of “our own people’s experience with gas.” In addition, he said, the threat to America’s national security interests in the Middle East, in which Israel has such a high stake, “go above and beyond any political consideration.”

Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice President of the Conference of Presidents, said yesterday that the statement reflects the “general consensus” of the American Jewish organizations. He said that some organizations expressed concerns about taking sides in a political battle, but that briefings by the Administration helped to forge the Conference’s statement, which reflects the “middle ground” of various Jewish opinions.

The sources said that their support also stemmed from conversations with Israeli leaders who expressed concern about the negative ramifications of a Congressional veto on Obama’s proposals both for Israel and for America’ standing in the Middle East.

Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin offered a glimpse of international compromise over Syria on Wednesday, declining to entirely rule out Russian backing for military action as he prepared to host a summit of world leaders.

As the United States and allies prepare to bypass any Russian U.N. veto and attack Damascus, there is little chance of Putin’s support. But his words may herald new efforts to overcome great power rivalries that have let Syria descend into bloody chaos.

At the same time, Moscow said it had sent a warship it calls a “carrier killer” to the eastern Mediterranean, where a U.S. fleet is waiting for Congress to approve orders from President Barack Obama to launch punitive strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad following his forces’ alleged use of poison gas.

Putin’s remarks on the eve of a G20 summit in St. Petersburg stressed Russia did not share Obama’s conviction that Assad has resorted to chemical warfare – he noted suggestions the August 21 gassing was instead the work of al Qaeda-linked rebels.

And only proof, plus backing in the U.N. Security Council that depends on Moscow, would justify using force, he added. Nonetheless, in saying he did “not rule out” his support, Putin gave a shot of warmth to relations with the West that the Syrian conflict has helped chill to levels recalling the Cold War.

Russian support for military strikes on Syria could actually be the best way of preventing them happening. The possibility of losing Russia’s protection will probably alarm Assad even more than the threat of attacks. If the Obama administration was to turn its attention to a political strategy instead of obsessing over target lists, it would see an important opening in Putin’s comments and grab hold of it.

Der Spiegel reports: Germany has said in no uncertain terms that it will not participate in a strike on Syria without the backing of the United Nations Security Council. But the country’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), agrees with the US position which holds Syrian President Bashar Assad responsible for the poison gas attacks near Damascus on Aug. 21. In a secret briefing to select lawmakers on Monday, BND head Gerhard Schindler said that while there is still no incontestable proof, analysis of the evidence at hand has led his intelligence service to believe that Assad’s regime is to blame.

In the briefing, Schindler said that only the Assad regime is in possession of binary chemical weapons such as sarin. The BND believes that regime experts would be the only ones capable of manufacturing such weapons and deploying them with small missiles. The BND believes that such weapons had been used several times prior to the attack on Aug. 21, which is believed to have killed more than 1,400 people. Schindler said in the earlier attacks, however, the poison gas mixture was diluted, explaining the much lower death tolls in those assaults.

During his 30-minute presentation, Schindler offered up scenarios to explain why the Assad regime resorted to chemical weapons use, including, he said, the possibility that Assad sees himself involved in a crucial battle for Damascus. The city is besieged by rebel groups, with particular pressure coming from the east. Schindler believes it is possible that the regime ordered the use of poison gas as a way of intimidating the rebels. It could also be the case that errors were made in mixing the gas and it was much more potent than anticipated, he said. [Continue reading…]

Oh, how about for this reason: That grandiose title, “leader of the free world,” is supposed to signal that America is a democracy and its democratically elected representatives are supposed to take into consideration the views of the people they represent. So, public opinion should matter on the question about authorizing military strikes on Syria. But that’s now all irrelevant because the Israel lobby has spoken and members of Congress no longer need to think too much about which way to cast their votes.

Pew Research: President Obama faces an uphill battle in making the case for U.S. military action in Syria. By a 48% to 29% margin, more Americans oppose than support conducting military airstrikes against Syria in response to reports that the Syrian government used chemical weapons.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Aug. 29-Sept. 1 among 1,000 adults, finds that Obama has significant ground to make up in his own party. Just 29% of Democrats favor conducting airstrikes against Syria while 48% are opposed. Opinion among independents is similar (29% favor, 50% oppose). Republicans are more divided, with 35% favoring airstrikes and 40% opposed.

The public has long been skeptical of U.S. involvement in Syria, but an April survey found more support than opposition to the idea of a U.S.-led military response if the use of chemical weapons was confirmed. The new survey finds both broad concern over the possible consequences of military action in Syria and little optimism it will be effective. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration is considering putting the Pentagon in charge of arming and training moderate rebel forces in Syria, a move that could help expand the effort significantly beyond the limited scope of the current Central Intelligence Agency program, U.S. officials said.

These internal discussions come as Congress begins a debate over a resolution to authorize limited strikes against Syria in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons last month.

The move would substantially revamp one of the administration’s most secretive and controversial undertakings in the 2½-year-old civil war. President Barack Obama authorized the CIA program in June after Hezbollah’s large-scale entry into the conflict on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s side and a U.S. determination that Syrian forces had used chemical arms in small amounts in earlier clashes.

The idea of giving the Pentagon a greater role in the effort has gained traction in recent weeks among some in Congress and in the administration who say the CIA’s arming and training program is too small and slow-moving.

Administration officials have privately told lawmakers they don’t want to tip the balance against the Assad regime for fear Islamist groups in the opposition with links to al Qaeda could seize large swaths of the country and Mr. Assad’s weapons. At the same time, the White House says it wants to build up moderate elements in the hope they will one day play a leadership role in a post-Assad Syria. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: President Barack Obama’s national security team is trying to make the case to sceptical U.S. lawmakers for a limited strike against the Syrian government over its alleged use of chemical weapons on August 21.

Following are details of missile strikes and other limited military action taken by the United States over the past 30 years and what transpired afterwards:

* Lebanon 1983 – In September 1983, U.S. battleships anchored in the Mediterranean Sea off Lebanon shelled Syrian, Palestinian and Druze forces in the Shouf Mountains outside Beirut in support of the Lebanese army, during the complex civil war that began in 1975.

It was one of several actions that created a perception that the United States was taking sides in the war. A month later, Shi’ite Muslim suicide bombers blew up the U.S. Marine and French barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Marines and 58 French paratroopers. President Ronald Reagan pulled U.S. forces out of Lebanon in February 1984. Lebanon’s civil war raged on until 1990.

* Libya 1986 – U.S. bomber aircraft struck sites in the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi, 10 days after the deadly bombing of West Berlin’s LaBelle nightclub frequented by American soldiers, which Washington blamed on Libya. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s adopted daughter was alleged to have been killed, and his sons were reported injured.

Libya was not linked to another major terrorist attack until the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground. Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who denied involvement in downing the jet, was convicted of the bombing in a court in the Netherlands 2001. Gaddafi ruled Libya until his ouster in August 2011. [Continue reading…]

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has spoken.

However many members of Congress were willing to oppose President Obama’s request for authorization to attack Syria, that number just got slashed by the institutional authority that few in Washington dare challenge: the Israel lobby.

AIPAC urges Congress to grant the President the authority he has requested to protect America’s national security interests and dissuade the Syrian regime’s further use of unconventional weapons. The civilized world cannot tolerate the use of these barbaric weapons, particularly against an innocent civilian population including hundreds of children.

Simply put, barbarism on a mass scale must not be given a free pass.

This is a critical moment when America must also send a forceful message of resolve to Iran and Hezbollah — both of whom have provided direct and extensive military support to Assad. The Syrian regime and its Iranian ally have repeatedly demonstrated that they will not respect civilized norms. That is why America must act, and why we must prevent further proliferation of unconventional weapons in this region.

America’s allies and adversaries are closely watching the outcome of this momentous vote. This critical decision comes at a time when Iran is racing toward obtaining nuclear capability. Failure to approve this resolution would weaken our country’s credibility to prevent the use and proliferation of unconventional weapons and thereby greatly endanger our country’s security and interests and those of our regional allies. AIPAC maintains that it is imperative to adopt the resolution to authorize the use of force, and take a firm stand that the world’s most dangerous regimes cannot obtain and use the most dangerous weapons.

Update: And now, following AIPAC’s lead, the National Jewish Democratic Council has tossed in its own two cents:

In response to clear evidence that the Assad regime used chemical weapons against its own people, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) urges Congress to authorize President Obama to use military force against the government of Syria. As Secretary of State John Kerry said, “this debate is about the world’s red line, it’s about humanity’s red line; and it’s a red line that anyone with a conscience ought to draw.”

NJDC Chairman Marc R. Stanley stated, “We need to be clear about what is at stake here. This is not about choosing sides in Syria’s civil war or starting a war with Syria. This is about deterring the Assad regime from using chemical weapons again. The US should send a message to the world that the use of these horrible weapons is unacceptable and that the consequences of using weapons of mass destruction will always outweigh any perceived benefit.”

The NJDC agrees with President Obama that even if not required by law, debate and approval by Congress will show the world that Americans are united in their commitment to affirm, with force if necessary, that the use of weapons of mass destruction is intolerable. This will send a clear signal to the world that the United States stands by its commitments. Failure to authorize force would encourage even worse abuse of weapons of mass destruction, destabilize the region, and endanger the security of all Americans.

The NJDC applauds Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Cantor, Minority Leader Pelosi, and Minority Whip Hoyer for stepping forward to back the President’s plan. Furthermore, NJDC urges Americans on all sides of the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans, liberals, libertarians and conservatives, to contact their elected representatives immediately, and let them know that calibrated military action against Syria is a moral and strategic necessity. The United States is the world’s lone superpower, and with that power comes responsibility.

The Daily Beast reports: Late Tuesday evening, Senate leaders reached a compromise on a resolution to authorize President Obama to use military force against Syria for up to 60 days with a one-time optional 30 day extension, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Daily Beast.

The resolution, the result of a negotiation between Senate Foreign Relations Committee heads Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Bob Corker (R-TN), also would prohibit Obama from putting American boots on the ground, limits the mission to attacking Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons capabilities, and requires a report to Congress laying out the administration’s plan for aiding the moderate elements of the armed Syrian opposition within 30 days. The limits on the duration of the president’s authorization are in line with the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and Congress would have to grant any extension after the initial 90 day period.

The committee will hold a business meeting Wednesday at 11:30 to review and vote on the resolution to send it to the Senate floor. That means committee members will have to make up their minds before a scheduled classified briefing by Secretary of State John Kerry and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: Any faction found to have used chemical weapons “must be brought to justice,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday. But the head of the world body also warned that any use of force to punish perpetrators would be legal only in self-defense or with U.N. Security Council authorization.

Ban appealed for patience among U.N. member states while an investigative team that returned from Syria over the weekend completes analysis of biomedical and environmental samples it collected.

The team, which spent four days in search of evidence that chemical attacks occurred Aug. 21, will have delivered all of its forensic evidence to European labs for analysis by Wednesday, Ban said at U.N. headquarters in New York at a webcast news conference.

“We need to emphasize the importance of not jeopardizing the scientific timelines needed for accurate analysis,” he said, without providing any specifics on when the results will be available and made public.

The U.N. investigators, led by Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom, were tasked solely with determining whether chemical weapons were used, not who used them, in attacks in Damascus suburbs that U.S. intelligence reports say killed more than 1,400 people.

Asked whether threatened U.S. military action to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government would be legal, Ban insisted that “the Security Council has primary responsibility for international peace and security.” [Continue reading…]

Patrick Cockburn asks: What can be done to end the appalling and ever-growing miseries of the 23 million Syrian people? The answer is to make either war or peace effectively. Limited missile strikes on Syrian military bases are not going to compel President Assad to negotiate his own departure from power. The only military action that might do this is a full-scale assault including a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone. This means giving the rebels an air umbrella, as was done for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq in 2003 and the anti-Gaddafi militiamen in Libya in 2011. And thus fighting a full-scale war with the likelihood that Russia, Iran and Hezbollah will increase their support for Assad. Anything less than this full-scale military commitment simply stokes the war and increases the violence. It gives the opposition hope (particularly since so many of its official leaders reside safely abroad) that one day there will be a Libyan-type intervention by Nato on their behalf.

Limited intervention means that the stalemate will continue. One of the best chances for peace – the day of mutual exhaustion and realisation that nobody is going to win on the battlefield – is postponed. The analogy with Kosovo in 1999 is shallow and misleading since defeat was only admitted by an isolated Serbia after a 78-day air bombardment and the threat of a Nato land invasion.

If all-out war is not feasible, could peace come by negotiation? Here America and Britain’s stance has been hypocritical, publicly supporting peace talks while offering only surrender terms to the Assad government at a time when it controls most of Syria. This was largely the result of a miscalculation by world leaders in 2011-12 whereby they underestimated the staying power of the Assad government. Its collapse was gleefully predicted, a role for Assad in Syria’s political transition ruled out, while Iran, an important player, was to be excluded. A peace conference so out of keeping with the real balance of power is not going to stop any wars. But bringing Iran in would undermine the US, European and Israeli effort to isolate it over its development of nuclear power. The US would effectively have to recognise Tehran as a regional power, which would infuriate the Israelis and the Gulf monarchies.

Even then, peace would not come easily, if at all. The best interim solution could be a UN-monitored ceasefire as briefly occurred under the Kofi Annan plan in 2012. All sides are dependent on outside backers, and even those who most want to fight need weapons, ammunition and money. Heavy pressure could be put on them to agree to a peace conference and a temporary ceasefire.

This would be a Lebanese-style truce – unsatisfactory but better than full-scale war. A peace conference on this basis could be the political and diplomatic counterpart to the limited US military strike President Obama is contemplating. In practice there has been a stalemate in most of Syria for the last year. If the Syrian army did use poison gas, it shows it does not have the strength to retake even the inner rebel-held suburbs of Damascus. It is better therefore for the battle lines to be frozen under some form of UN supervision. Long-term solutions will only begin to be feasible when Syrians are no longer at the mercy of what Northern Ireland politicians used to call “the politics of the last atrocity”.

McClatchy reports: The Obama administration’s public case for attacking Syria is riddled with inconsistencies and hinges mainly on circumstantial evidence, undermining U.S. efforts this week to build support at home and abroad for a punitive strike against Bashar Assad’s regime.

The case Secretary of State John Kerry laid out last Friday contained claims that were disputed by the United Nations, inconsistent in some details with British and French intelligence reports or lacking sufficient transparency for international chemical weapons experts to accept at face value.

After the false weapons claims preceding the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the threshold for evidence to support intervention is exceedingly high. And while there’s little dispute that a chemical agent was used in an Aug. 21 attack outside of Damascus – and probably on a smaller scale before that – there are calls from many quarters for independent, scientific evidence to support the U.S. narrative that the Assad regime used sarin gas in an operation that killed 1,429 people, including more than 400 children.

Some of the U.S. points in question:

The Obama administration dismissed the value of a U.N. inspection team’s work by saying that the investigators arrived too late for the findings to be credible and wouldn’t provide any information the United State didn’t already have.

U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq countered that it was “rare” for such an investigation to begin within such a short time and said that “the passage of such few days does not affect the opportunities to collect valuable samples,” according to the U.N.’s website. For example, Haq added, sarin can be detected in biomedical samples for months after its use.

The U.S. claims that sarin was used in the Aug. 21 attack, citing a positive test on first responders’ hair and blood – samples “that were provided to the United States,” Kerry said on television Sunday without elaboration on the collection methods.

Experts say the evidence deteriorates over time, but that it’s simply untrue that there wouldn’t be any value in an investigation five days after an alleged attack. As a New York Times report noted, two human rights groups dispatched a forensics team to northern Iraq in 1992 and found trace evidence of sarin as well as mustard gas – four years after a chemical attack.

The U.S. assertion also was disputed in an intelligence summary the British government made public last week. “There is no immediate time limit over which environmental or physiological samples would have degraded beyond usefulness,” according to the report, which was distributed to Parliament ahead of its vote not to permit Britain to participate in any strike.

Another point of dispute is the death toll from the alleged attacks on Aug. 21. Neither Kerry’s remarks nor the unclassified version of the U.S. intelligence he referenced explained how the U.S. reached a tally of 1,429, including 426 children. The only attribution was “a preliminary government assessment.”

Anthony Cordesman, a former senior defense official who’s now with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, took aim at the death toll discrepancies in an essay published Sunday.

He criticized Kerry as being “sandbagged into using an absurdly over-precise number” of 1,429, and noted that the number didn’t agree with either the British assessment of “at least 350 fatalities” or other Syrian opposition sources, namely the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has confirmed 502 dead, including about 100 children and “tens” of rebel fighters, and has demanded that Kerry provide the names of the victims included in the U.S. tally.

“President Obama was then forced to round off the number at ‘well over 1,000 people’ – creating a mix of contradictions over the most basic facts,” Cordesman wrote. He added that the blunder was reminiscent of “the mistakes the U.S. made in preparing Secretary (Colin) Powell’s speech to the U.N. on Iraq in 2003.”

An unclassified version of a French intelligence report on Syria that was released Monday hardly cleared things up; France confirmed only 281 fatalities, though it more broadly agreed with the United States that the regime had used chemical weapons in the Aug. 21 attack.

Another eyebrow-raising administration claim was that U.S. intelligence had “collected streams of human, signals and geospatial intelligence” that showed the regime preparing for an attack three days before the event. The U.S. assessment says regime personnel were in an area known to be used to “mix chemical weapons, including sarin,” and that regime forces prepared for the Aug. 21 attack by putting on gas masks.

That claim raises two questions: Why didn’t the U.S. warn rebels about the impending attack and save hundreds of lives? And why did the administration keep mum about the suspicious activity when on at least one previous occasion U.S. officials have raised an international fuss when they observed similar actions?

On Dec. 3, 2012, after U.S. officials said they detected Syria mixing ingredients for chemical weapons, President Barack Obama repeated his warning to Assad that the use of such arms would be an unacceptable breach of the red line he’d imposed that summer. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chimed in, and the United Nations withdrew all nonessential staff from Syria.

Last month’s suspicious activity, however, wasn’t raised publicly until after the deadly attack. And Syrian opposition figures say the rebels weren’t warned in advance in order to protect civilians in the area.

“When I read the administration’s memo, it was very compelling, but they knew three days before the attack and never alerted anyone in the area,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian opposition activist who runs the Washington-based Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “Everyone was watching this evidence but didn’t take any action?” [Continue reading…]

Among the plethora of conspiracy theories around what virtually no one now disputes was a chemical weapons atrocity in Damascus on August 21, the question Ziadeh raises comes closest to what many observers will view as a smoking gun: the idea that Washington received advance notice of the chemical attack and did nothing to prevent it. Why would no one have raised the alarm?

Why, because of course the attack provided the long-sought pretext for U.S. intervention in Syria!

In my struggle against the automatons who keep on relentlessly pressing this pretext argument, I fear that I might tire before they do, but here we go one more time.

The only way the pretext argument makes sense is if one ignores the political evidence that has been accumulating for the last two years. That evidence represents two things:

1. The non-existence of any political will among Western governments to become directly militarily engaged in the war in Syria.

2. Repeated and unambiguous declarations that neither the U.S. nor its allies has any intention of directly intervening.

Intervention in its most assertive form has not risen above commitments to supply opposition forces with weapons and yet even these commitments when made by the U.S. have yet to be translated into action.

There is no evidence that President Obama’s attitude towards Syria differs much from that of the average America — that Syria has come to represent a problem for which no one has a solution; that the war has no impact on America; and that most people would rather ignore what’s happening.

For a man supposedly in search of a pretext to launch another Middle East war, Obama is doing one hell of a job presenting a conflicting image. Having made his momentous decision to launch an attack, he immediately puts off acting on that decision, hands the issue over to Congress but sees no reason why they need cut short their vacation. And likewise, he sees no reason to postpone his next round of golf.

Reem Salahi writes: Traveling into “liberated” (i.e. rebel-controlled) Syria, I was initially struck by the appearance of normality. Olive groves bloomed, kids played on the street and food and drink stands peppered the roadways. Absent were the pictures and statutes of Bashar and his father Hafez al-Assad that I had come to expect from my many trips to Syria. Also missing were the regime flags and any other sign of Baathist rule.

The deeper we went into Syria, though, the more abnormal things became. Tinted and unlicensed SUVs with the insignia of a Free Syrian Army (FSA) or Islamist brigade were readily prevalent. Men with guns strapped to their backs wearing military fatigues and long beards rode on motorcycles. Demolished factories and bombed stores were more frequent sights than open and functioning stores. And FSA checkpoints secured the entry and exit points of most towns. As we drove deeper into Idlib Province, I found myself thinking of Dorothy’s line in the Wizard of Oz: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Entering Kafranbel — a small yet internationally-known town due to its witty posters and weekly protests — I was awestruck by the painted walls with messages of “rEVOLution”.

The media center was abuzz with foreign journalists and local activists as they prepared their posters for the Friday protest. The English and Arabic posters as well as the drawings depicting Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin were calculated to speak to local and global audiences. The activists spent hours strategizing how best to express their dissatisfaction with the U.S.’s failure to provide anti-aircraft missiles and heavy weaponry that could strike down government planes that terrorized the “liberated” areas.

Yet in the subsequent days, I experienced the more honest banality of life. Despite not having a physical presence in the “liberated” areas, the government still controlled the utilities and cut the electricity for 20 or more hours a day as both a carrot (a reminder that it remained in power) and a stick. There was no phone service and Internet was rare; jobs were even rarer. At times, it seemed that the only activity was in the sky from helicopters transporting soldiers or dumping loads of explosives on “liberated” towns or in the hospitals that assumed the consequent casualties.

As we lazily sat around during the long hot summer days drinking one cup of sweetened tea after another and doing little else, I was surprised to hear Syrians state they had “no time.” I soon understood that it was not the physical demand for time but the lack of mental clarity for solutions to the intractable conflict that had left Syrian towns with no formal governance and little resources; their residents, without exception, were left psychologically scarred and emotionally taxed. As one young man expressed to me: “everyone wants to train me in transitional justice and documenting human rights abuses but no one has offered to train me on how to overthrow the Regime. It’s been over two years and I still don’t know how to do the very thing that got me involved in this Revolution in the first place.” [Continue reading…]

Robin Yassin-Kassab visited Atmeh, a Syrian refugee camp close to the Turkish border which currently houses 22,000 refugees: Some tents are fire-resistant; some are plastic; some are concoctions of canvas and blankets. Some have been distributed by the United Nations’ refugee agency, some by Turkish and expatriate Syrian charities. Some tents are pitched among the silvery olive trees, but the area closer to the barbed wire, where tents are set unshaded on the baked and stony earth, is much grimmer. There are toilets (unpleasant and not nearly enough of them), rough shower blocks, and daily deliveries of clean water. But there are also streams of green liquid filth, which the children fall into as they play. Many children have something that sounds like a bad smoker’s cough but is most probably tuberculosis — a disease, like typhoid and leishmaniasis, once defeated in Syria but now resurgent.

A “main street” in Atmeh features stalls set up in tents that sell cigarettes, soda, and sandwiches for those who can afford them; there are also barbers in tents and of course a tented mosque. A “ready meal” breakfast is sent in by the Turks each morning, and a simple lunch — lentil soup, for instance — is prepared in communal kitchens and distributed in buckets around the camp. There is no dinner.

Most impressively, a civil society infrastructure has been established — something that was effectively forbidden in Assad’s Syria. Atmeh has its own Coordination Committee — an extension of the committees that sprang up across Syrian cities and villages from the revolution’s first days in order to provide services the state wouldn’t and to organize protests and media work. Over half the assembled members and speakers at the meeting I attended were women, a fact which illustrates both the expanded social role of women in the revolution and the disproportionate numbers of women (and children) in the camp, because so many men are dead, imprisoned, or fighting.

One of the committee’s duties is to help set up schools for the camp’s children. I saw three schools: the Revolution House, which was a single-room concrete shack; the Ghurabaa (“Strangers”) School, run by Salafi Islamists and disapproved of by many because it entirely ignores the old Syrian curriculum in favor of a purely “Islamic” education; and the Return School, which serves 500 children, cramming 40 at a time in stifling tent classrooms.

The Return School was where I gave my storytelling workshop as part of the Maram and Karam foundations’ Camp Zeitouna project, which included workshops in calligraphy, art, dental care, and soccer skills. We were assisted by some of the school’s 20 unsalaried teachers and inspired by the laughing, shouting children. Some of these children have had only one month of schooling in the last two years. Some are physically scarred and emotionally traumatized. They responded well to the workshops and of course to the soccer field and playground constructed by Maram. They responded best of all, simply, to attention.

One of the trip’s highlights was sitting in the dust on the new soccer grounds and being sung to by a group of boys and girls — a surreal mix of revolutionary nationalist, jihadi, and romantic songs. One of the low points was meeting Manar, a woman whose two children died in a tent fire caused by a fallen candle. Another woman said she’d prefer to be dead than living in such conditions. American teenagers say such things in English, and it means nothing much. In Arabic it means a great deal.

Tamador, a volunteer psychologist, does her rounds. She advises a woman whose husband has abandoned her for another wife, but still turns up to take her money. She hears about a man who sexually abuses his son’s wife. Pre-existing social problems have been immeasurably exacerbated by war trauma, unemployment, entrapment, and the forced proximity of the extended family.

Muhammad Ojjeh, our soccer coach and professional photographer, went down on one knee with his long lens to shoot a picture of a child. The child screamed in terror, turned, and ran. His mother shouted after him, “It’s a camera, stupid, not a gun.”

A woman welcomed us to her tent shamefacedly. “We’ve become Bedouins,” she apologized. Deprived for so long of influence on the public space, Syrians of all classes take inordinate pride in their carefully ordered homes. Now this, too, is denied them.

An angry man reacted badly to the playground under construction. “What’s the use of this?” he complained. “We don’t want to stay here. The insects are eating us! We want to return to our homes. We need weapons. We need help.” [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: In June, the White House authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to help arm moderate fighters battling the Assad regime, a signal to Syrian rebels that the cavalry was coming. Three months later, they are still waiting.

The delay, in part, reflects a broader U.S. approach rarely discussed publicly but that underpins its decision-making, according to former and current U.S. officials: The Obama administration doesn’t want to tip the balance in favor of the opposition for fear the outcome may be even worse for U.S. interests than the current stalemate.

U.S. officials attribute the delay in providing small arms and munitions from the CIA weapons program to the difficulty of establishing secure delivery “pipelines” to prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands, in particular Jihadi militants also battling the Assad regime.

Allied rebel commanders in Syria and congressional proponents of a more aggressive military response instead blame a White House that wants to be seen as responsive to allies’ needs but fundamentally doesn’t want to get pulled any deeper into the country’s grinding conflict.

The administration’s view can also be seen in White House planning for limited airstrikes—now awaiting congressional review—to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons.

Pentagon planners were instructed not to offer strike options that could help drive Mr. Assad from power: “The big concern is the wrong groups in the opposition would be able to take advantage of it,” a senior military officer said. [Continue reading…]

Shirley Williams writes: President Obama’s decision to consult Congress before taking any military action against the Syrian government offers a brief opportunity for diplomatic efforts to construct a political settlement. That decision has been welcomed by many in the Middle East, among them the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.

It is astonishing that, apart from by the Conservative MP Rory Stewart, Iran was hardly mentioned in the debates in parliament last week – given that it has a vital role in the region and is the key to a negotiated outcome. It is the most important ally that Syria has, as a recent report by the Rand corporation points out. With a population of 75 million, and with oil and natural resources, it is the most important Shia Muslim state in the world.

Iran is also a country that has suffered more cruelly than any other from chemical weapons. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iran lost tens of thousands of young men, many to the obscene effects of chemical weapons used by Iraq, which was never condemned by the west.

Iran has repeatedly condemned the use of chemical weapons, most recently in a statement by President Rouhani about the attack on the eastern Ghouta district of Damascus. He was careful not to associate the attack with a particular perpetrator, but the president’s detestation of chemical weapons was plain.

In the UN, Iran has been active in advocating the chemical weapons convention. President Rouhani has been bold in calling for negotiations with the western allies, and in committing himself to a foreign policy of “reason and moderation”. His foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has stressed the need for consultation and co-operation on Syria. In a country anxious about its own security, in a region where it feels threatened, it takes courage to speak in these terms. Iran’s political leaders are constrained by divided public opinion and by the views of its military elite, the Revolutionary Guard, which has close links with Syria. Iran’s president needs a constructive response from the west. [Continue reading…]

UNHCR photo shows mass exodus of Syria refugees fleeing to Iraq, August, 2013.

For Americans to grasp the magnitude of the crisis in Syria, it’s worth drawing some comparisons and imagining what this would look like here.

Imagine this: Every single person in California, Texas, New York, and Florida has fled their home. Nearly everyone who once lived in California is now a refugee in Mexico and has little more than a sheet of canvas to protect themselves from the sun. The rest of the world sees on their TV screens the misery of America and everyone agrees its awful but then carries on living their life as though nothing was happening.

RTÉ reports: The United Nations has said that nearly seven million Syrians have been displaced by the civil war, which is almost one third of the population.

UNHCR envoy to Syria Tarik Kurdi said five million people had been displaced internally.

Another two million had sought refuge in the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq.

More refugees are expected to leave the country in advance of an anticipated airstrike by the US military following what it said was a chemical weapons attack the US blames on President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Lebanon has around one million people, either refugees who have formally registered, or others who have moved into employment, or who have enough resources of their own not to declare themselves refugees.

The influx is putting a strain on Lebanon’s meagre resources, according to the International Crisis Group.