The New York Times reports: American intelligence analysts now believe that President Bashar al-Assad’s troops have used chemical weapons against rebel forces in the civil war in Syria, an assessment that will put added pressure on a deeply divided Obama administration to develop a response to a provocation that the president himself has declared a “red line.”

“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,” the deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, said in a statement released by the White House on Thursday afternoon. “Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information”

President Obama said in April that the United States had physiological evidence that the nerve gas sarin had been used in Syria but lacked proof of who used it and under what circumstances. Mr. Rhodes said that American intelligence officials now believed that 100 to 150 people had died from the attacks, and he said that the number “is likely incomplete.”

In his statement, Mr. Rhodes alluded to Mr. Obama’s position that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line for the United States. “The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal reports: A U.S. military proposal for arming Syrian rebels also calls for a limited no-fly zone inside Syria that would be enforced from Jordanian territory to protect Syrian refugees and rebels who would train there, according to U.S. officials.

Asked by the White House to develop options for Syria, military planners have said that creating an area to train and equip rebel forces would require keeping Syrian aircraft well away from the Jordanian border.

To do that, the military envisages creating a no-fly zone stretching up to 25 miles into Syria which would be enforced using aircraft flown from Jordanian bases and flying inside the kingdom, according to U.S. officials.

The Daily Beast reports: In sharp remarks directed against his Democratic successor and his wife’s former boss, President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama risks looking like a “wuss,” a “fool,” and “lame” for not doing more to influence events in Syria.

Clinton, speaking with Sen. John McCain Tuesday night in a closed press event sponsored by the McCain Institute, contrasted Obama’s inaction in Syria to his own action in the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, which included the bombing of the forces of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton said a president must look beyond public and congressional reluctance to military intervention for the sake of national security and to save lives.

Hassan Hassan writes: As US officials deliberate this week on whether to arm the Syrian rebels, they should remember one point: It will be easier to impose a solution on the regime than on the people.

Leaks from meetings in Geneva last week suggested that representatives from Russia and western countries were focusing on handpicking opposition figures to lead the planned negotiations with the regime. Critical issues such as the future of the security forces, whose brutality sparked the revolt in the first place, were hardly discussed. The world’s great powers appear to think that if some opposition groups agree with the regime on a formula, they can then impose the solution on the rest of Syria. But the time for such thinking is long gone.

Neither those in charge of the regime nor the rebels across Syria are interested in compromise. And “victory” by one side or the other will not end the violence.

Consider the context. The government controls hardly any of the country’s eastern region. The north, from Idlib to the countryside around Aleppo, is in the hands of the rebels. The regime is either weak or embattled everywhere else, except in Damascus and Suwaida in the south and in the coastal region in the west. Even in those areas, especially the coastal region where there is a strong rebel presence, the regime is not secure.

The point is that extending the reach of state agencies back across the entire country will require major, sustainable military ground operations – in effect an invasion.

Any solution or process that can end the violence must be acceptable to the people. Contrary to some media reports, the rebels on the ground have the resilience and determination to continue fighting. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Sunni rebels tore through a Shiite village in eastern Syria, killing dozens while documenting the rampage with videos broadcast Wednesday, and a Syrian military helicopter struck a pro-rebel Sunni town in Lebanon, in incidents that sharpened the sectarian divisions across Syria and beyond.

Mortars and rockets from Syria have landed across the Lebanese border before, but the air attack on Wednesday appeared to be the first in which a Syrian aircraft struck from within Lebanese airspace.

Both incidents bore repercussions from the victory last week by Syrian forces and fighters from the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah over the strategic town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border.

Hezbollah’s pivotal role in Qusayr drew condemnation from Sunni governments and Sunni religious leaders across the region, as the Syrian civil war becomes a focal point for the centuries-old feud between the two rival sects of Islam.

After the battle, some Hezbollah fighters patrolled Qusayr brandishing Shiite banners and blaring Shiite chants from vehicles, underscoring sectarian motivations driving the conflict.

BBC News reports: At least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria since the start of the conflict, according to latest United Nations figures.

This represents a rise of more than 30,000 since the UN last issued figures covering the period to November 2012.

At least 5,000 people have been dying in Syria every month since last July, the UN’s human rights body says.

But it says these statistics are an underestimate as it believes many deaths have not been reported.

The National Interest: In the days after the joint Syrian Army–Lebanese Hezbollah victory over the rebels in the strategic town of Qusayr, the Assad regime has been positively giddy, announcing plans for a major offensive to retake the northern city of Aleppo. Assad’s key backer, Iran, has also been gloating. A victory speech of sorts, reported by hardline outlet Fars News and translated by the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran Tracker, offers a broad insight into how one of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s closest advisers sees the Islamic Republic’s standing in the region, and how the Syrian conflict figures in Iranian strategy. It’s a vision that sharply conflicts with how we’d expect Tehran to see itself — and accordingly, one that should be closely examined as the United States attempts to compel Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program.

The speaker, general Yahya Rahim-Safavi, is Khamenei’s top military aide, a role that he took up after a decade heading the politically powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He’s an influential player — notably, he backed the infamous head of the IRGC’s covert Quds Force, general Qassim Suleimani, whom the New York Times branded “Iran’s Master of Chaos.” And if his position and background didn’t already give it away, Rahim-Safavi is known as a resolute hardliner.

In Rahim-Safavi’s eyes, Iran’s strategic position is strong and getting stronger, and two men are responsible — Ali Khamenei and George W. Bush. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Lebanese have long viewed the Hezbollah guerrilla army as a state-within-a-state. But having watched it launch a military adventure in Syria and brutality on the streets of Beirut, they feel ever more hostage to the Islamist group’s regional agenda.

Within minutes of a busload of unarmed demonstrators arriving on Sunday at the Iranian embassy in Beirut to protest against Iran and Hezbollah’s military involvement in Syria, Hezbollah enforcers surrounded the building and scattered the crowd with batons and gunfire, leaving one dead.

The small demonstration by an anti-Hezbollah crowd showed that the “Party of God”, armed and financed by Iran, is not prepared to contemplate even the smallest level of threat.

Such visibly frayed nerves in Lebanon’s capital follow the Shi’ite group’s dramatically increased involvement in the two-year-old Syrian civil war, helping troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad retake the border town of Qusair.

The Guardian reports: The British National party leader, Nick Griffin, has paid a surprise visit to Syria after being invited by the regime of the president, Bashar al-Assad, to take part in a fact-finding visit to the war-torn country.

Writing on Twitter, Griffin said he wanted to highlight the risk that the UK government’s support for opposition fighters seeking to oust Assad could plunge the Middle Eastern state into an “Iraq-style hell of sectarian hate“.

He linked the kind of Islamist militancy espoused by some of the rebels with the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich last month.

The BNP spokesman Simon Darby said Griffin, who is an MEP for North-West England, was invited to Damascus as part of a delegation of European politicians, including MEPs and MPs from Belgium, Russia and Poland. [Continue reading…]

Hassan Hassan writes: Hezbollah can finally claim a victory in Syria. The town of Qusayr, adjacent to the Lebanese border, has fallen to the Lebanese militia after nearly a month of fierce battles with Syrian rebels. Dozens of Hezbollah’s fighters have been killed, despite air cover and ground support from Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The Qusayr battle has been constantly, and wrongly, described as a turning point in the Syrian war. Why has this small town of some 30,000 residents become “strategic,” as it is constantly described in the press, all of a sudden? The town had previously been run by its Sunni residents for more than a year, with little mention of its strategic benefits.

Hezbollah’s open military intervention in Syria partly explains the publicity the Qusayr battle has received. As a result, the “Party of God” has lost much of its political and ideological capital in the region — a capital the militia had painstakingly acquired from its three-decade career of “resisting” Israel.

But beyond the supposed military benefits of Qusayr, the battle for the town carried important consequences for the balance of power within the Syrian opposition. Qusayr is arguably the first battle in Syria to be completely sponsored by Saudi Arabia, marking the kingdom’s first foray outside its sphere of influence along the Jordanian border. Riyadh has now taken over Qatar’s role as the rebels’ primary patron: In one sense, the Saudis can also claim a victory in Qusayr, as they have successfully put various rebel forces under the command of their ally in the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Chief of Staff Gen. Salim Idriss. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Rebels fighting the Syrian government on Thursday seized control of the only border crossing operated by United Nations peacekeeping forces along the Israeli-Syrian cease-fire line in the Golan Heights, according to the Israeli military and rebel forces. Israeli forces were placed on alert in the sensitive and disputed area as the violence of the civil war threatened to spill over into Israeli-held territory.

A few hours later the situation remained confused. Israeli media reports said that the Syrian government forces appeared to have retaken the Quneitra crossing and the Syrian state news agency SANA said that a unit of the government forces had “repelled terrorist groups” that had “tried” to take over Quneitra border crossing.

But Ahmad al-Basheer, a member of the local revolutionary committee in the Quneitra area who was reached by Skype, insisted that the crossing was still under the rebels’ control and that the entire province of Quneitra had been “liberated.”

“The regime won’t recapture this crossing even if we all have to die to thwart it,” he added.

As the fighting raged, the Israeli military declared the Israeli side of the crossing a closed military zone and ordered farmers to stay out of fields near the cease-fire line, apparently anticipating more conflict between Syrian government forces and the rebels.

Vali Nasr writes: Syria’s uprising offered the possibility of a strategic defeat of Iran. In this scenario, Iran would be weakened by the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, its single Arab ally and a vital link to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia. Isolated, Iran would become more vulnerable to international pressure to limit its nuclear program. And as Iran’s regional influence faded, those of its rivals — U.S. allies Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — would expand.

Instead, events in Syria are spinning in Iran’s favor. Assad’s regime is winning ground, the war has made Iran more comfortable in its nuclear pursuits, and Iran’s gains have embarrassed U.S. allies that support the Syrian uprising. What’s more, Iran has strengthened its relationship with Russia, which may prove to be the most important strategic consequence of the Syrian conflict, should the U.S. continue to sit it out.

Part of the U.S. calculation in declining to intervene has been the assumption that Assad would inevitably fall. The U.S., apparently, did not consider the implications of leaving the door open to a comeback by Assad. Reinforced by Hezbollah fighters and armed with Iranian and Russian weapons, the Syrian army broke through rebel lines in the central city of al-Qusair last week. The symbolic victory has dashed hopes for a quick end to the regime or a diplomatic resolution to the fighting.

Syria is now a proxy war, the outcome of which will determine the regional pecking order. In the Mideast, aura of power decides strategic advantage. Hezbollah’s prowess in Syria is a blow to Saudi Arabia, which has supported Hezbollah’s political opponents in Lebanon. The Syrian army’s gains are a setback to the Saudis, Qataris and Turks, all of whom have backed the rebels with money and weapons.

The U.S. has withheld lethal aid, not to mention military action. The Obama administration has eschewed intervention in Syria as a slippery slope to full-scale war, a costly repeat of the Iraq fiasco. In making this case, however, the administration sends a strong signal that it also would not go to war against Iran, despite President Barack Obama’s statement that no option is off the table when it comes to stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. When U.S. officials say their options for intervention are constrained by Syria’s air defense systems, they are also saying they fear Iran’s. [Continue reading…]

Micah Zenko writes: Last week, the Daily Beast published an “exclusive” news story supported by comments from two anonymous administration officials: “Obama Asks Pentagon for Syria No-Fly Zone Plan.” The newsworthiness and hype surrounding such reporting was puzzling given that the military’s operational plans for a no-fly zone (NFZ) in Syria were completed many months ago and have been refined as new information has become available. Of course, versions of these plans have also been briefed in detail to the White House on multiple occasions. Soon after the Daily Beast story ran, Pentagon spokesperson Dave Lapan felt compelled to declare: “There is no new planning effort underway.” This failed effort to plant a story about White House interest in NFZ options for Syria is perhaps the most perfunctory effort ever to coerce a foreign leader — in this case, Bashar al-Assad, before the forthcoming diplomatic discussions in Geneva.

The Obama administration’s leaks should not be surprising — they are representative of the theatrical and half-hearted nature of America’s debate over military intervention in Syria. On March 27, 2011, just one week after a U.S.-led coalition began selectively enforcing an NFZ over Libya, then-Senator Joseph Lieberman endorsed a similar measure for Syria, in case Assad “turns his weapons on his people and begins to slaughter them, as Qaddafi did.” Over the subsequent 27 months, every plausible military tactic and mission has been exhaustively analyzed and deliberated by policymakers, active-duty and retired military officials, pundits (including myself), journalists, and others.

Civilian officials have requested a range of military options, the Pentagon’s planning process has responded, congressional committees have held multiple hearings, the media has covered the unfolding fighting in and around Syria, and interested commentators have offered their opinions.

Seven months ago, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters: “On the no-fly zone itself, you know that we’ve been saying for quite a while we continue to study whether that makes sense, how it might work.” As those “studies” have continued, the American people have been polled repeatedly to gauge their opinion — the latest two polls demonstrate that less than a quarter of Americans think the U.S. military should intervene in Syria.

At this point, it is safe to say that — short of definitive evidence of large-scale regime-directed chemical weapons use, or threats to Turkey, a U.S. treaty ally — it is highly unlikely that the United States will intervene militarily in Syria’s civil war. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Syrian government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies seized control of the border town of Qusair on Wednesday, dealing a major defeat to rebel fighters battling to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

Two weeks of heavy fighting reduced many buildings to mounds of twisted concrete, whole blocks flattened by shelling, with glass and rubble littering the streets as tired but delighted Syrian soldiers gathered at the bullet-riddled clock tower.

“We will not hesitate to crush with an iron fist those who attack us. … Their fate is surrender or death,” the Syrian armed forces command said in statement. “We will continue our string of victories until we regain every inch of Syrian land.”

An opposition group from the town said more than 500 rebels had died in two weeks of fighting, with a further 1,000 wounded, leaving just 400 outgunned men struggling to hold onto the town.

Facing determined Hezbollah guerrillas from neighboring Lebanon, who swung the fight Assad’s way, the survivors decided to escape in the night through a corridor that the attackers said they had deliberately left open to encourage flight.