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…]

National Journal reports: Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat President Obama last year, has a message for the White House: Call me.

In an interview with National Journal, Adelson said he stands behind the White House’s push for American military action against the Syrian government. Perhaps as important, Adelson said he’s ready, if asked, to roll up his sleeves and help Obama — the “commander in chief,” as he repeatedly referred to him — corral the needed votes in Congress for a strike.

“He is our commander in chief, whether we like what he says politically or not,” Adelson said late Monday evening.

The 80-year-old, one of the most influential GOP moneymen in the nation, is no Obama apologist. He’s still the financier who, along with his wife, spent nearly $100 million trying to defeat Democratic candidates, Obama chief among them, last year. But he is also a pro-Israel hawk who said America’s standing in the world is at stake in the showdown with Syria over chemical weapons.

“I would be willing to help out the administration, because I believe it’s the right thing to do. He is our only — we don’t have any other commander in chief,” he said.

The comments are Adelson’s first public remarks on the Syria situation, although the Republican Jewish Coalition, an advocacy group that he chairs, came out in support of a Syria strike last week. His offer of a helping hand came as Russia floated a diplomatic solution in which Damascus would cede its chemical weapons to avoid a strike, something Obama called a potential “breakthrough” on Monday. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: With a U.S. attack on Syria on hold, Western-backed rebels said they feared they had lost their best chance of promptly ousting President Bashar al-Assad and sidelining Islamist extremists.

Rebels in Syria, already frustrated with delays in promised U.S. military aid, said on Wednesday that they gave up on the prospect of decisive foreign help after President Barack Obama asked Congress to delay a vote on striking Syria.

Mr. Obama put U.S. military momentum on pause on Tuesday night to give time for diplomacy to run its course, after a Russian proposal that Damascus hand over its chemical weapons, an effort to avert an attack.

The Obama administration moved on Wednesday to follow up on the Russian proposal, with Secretary of State John Kerry heading to Geneva to meet Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

Britain, France and the U.S. presented proposals for a Security Council resolution to Russia in New York on Wednesday, though a Western diplomat said negotiations on a text wouldn’t begin until after the outcome of the Kerry-Lavrov meetings.

“The revolution is dead. It was sold,” said Mohammad al-Daher, a commander in the rebels’ Western-backed Free Syrian Army. “People used to assume that Assad will be gone, no question. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the end result of these negotiations is that he remains as president and beyond that, turns into a national hero who saved his country.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to U.S. officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear — a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the U.S. role in Syria’s civil war.

The arms shipments, which are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked, began arriving in Syria at a moment of heightened tensions over threats by President Obama to order missile strikes to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in a deadly attack near Damascus last month.

The arms are being delivered as the United States is also shipping new types of nonlethal gear to rebels. That aid includes vehicles, sophisticated communications equipment and advanced combat medical kits.

U.S. officials hope that, taken together, the weapons and gear will boost the profile and prowess of rebel fighters in a conflict that started about 2½ years ago.

Although the Obama administration signaled months ago that it would increase aid to Syrian rebels, the efforts have lagged because of the logistical challenges involved in delivering equipment in a war zone and officials’ fears that any assistance could wind up in the hands of jihadists. Secretary of State John F. Kerry had promised in April that the nonlethal aid would start flowing “in a matter of weeks.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: A surge of clashes in Syria’s oil-producing northeast has killed dozens of rebels and Kurdish fighters in the past two days, activists said on Thursday, in fighting that highlights a struggle for territory and resources.

Fighters from Syria’s ethnic Kurdish minority – roughly 10 percent of the 23-million-strong population – have carved out an increasingly autonomous region near the frontiers with Iraq and Turkey.

Syrian Kurdish militants, particularly the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), have repeatedly clashed with opposition fighters led by al Qaeda-linked units in the region as government forces retreated over the past year.

The fighting has underlined the growing complexity of Syria’s conflict which started with largely peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad and degenerated into a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people.

Divisions in Syria along ethnic and sectarian lines – as well as the rise of radical Islamist units that have come to dominate the rebel movement – have made Western powers including the United States more hesitant to get directly involved in the 2-1/2-year-old uprising.

The Kurdish PYD’s military wing blamed al Qaeda-linked groups for the latest violence, saying fighters from the Nusra Front and Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) attacked a string of Kurdish villages in Hasaka province.

Heavy artillery and tanks were used, it said. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Washington and Moscow are taking applause for a possible diplomatic bargain to have Syria hand over its chemical arsenal.

U.S. President Barack Obama has put off a congressional vote on attacking Syria that he was likely to lose; Russia, having presented the idea, can now present itself as peacemaker after two years of Western criticism that it is shielding a tyrant.

Yet the ultimate victor could be President Bashar al-Assad. And, if past experience with international cooperation on Syria is repeated, the main losers may be other Syrians, of whom more than 100,000 have been killed and over 6 million made homeless since Assad cracked down on demands for democracy in 2011.

For all the talk of a deal that may ease a dilemma for Western leaders seeking a politically acceptable response to a poison gas attack on August 21, few Syrians see it as any solution to the greater crisis their nation faces.

Chemical weapons account for perhaps 2 percent of deaths in the civil war; in the three weeks since toxins killed some 1,400 people near Damascus, according to U.S. officials, conventional bombs and bullets have killed more than twice that number.

Assad, who calls his enemies terrorists and highlights the role of Islamist militants, grows in confidence as the threat of U.S. strikes fades and diplomacy affords him legitimacy.

“Syria and its allies are trying to buy time and avert Western action at all costs, while the Obama administration is also looking for time in the face of an uncertain congressional landscape,” said James Fallon of consultancy Control Risks.

“The proposal is of considerable short-term diplomatic utility but is unlikely to form the basis for long-term compromise.”

Those living in rebel-held areas say they now fear more years of attacks by weapons just as deadly and terrifying as nerve gas, but lacking the taboo, all while the world focuses on the minutiae of how to destroy Syria’s chemical arms. [Continue reading…]

Micah Zenko writes: Over the past two years, many thoughtful pieces have advocated for U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A review of such pieces reveals three core justifications: protecting civilians; altering the battlefield to help topple Assad or facilitate a diplomatic solution; and countering Iranian influence in the region. Very few have emphasized the need for the U.S. military to uphold international norms.

However, since the White House recently made norm-enforcement the primary, professed basis for attacking Syria, intervention advocates have adopted this reasoning. Indicative of this shift, in the 24 months preceding Secretary of State John Kerry’s August 26 speech, the words “international norm” and “Syria” appeared together 263 times in the 6,075 English-language news publications surveyed by the search engine Lexis Nexis, and 792 times in the 13 days after. Naturally, the normative argument has also become fodder for those opposing intervention, with Sen. Ted Cruz proclaiming on Sunday, “I don’t think that’s the job of our military, to be defending amorphous international norms.”

There are two fundamental questions at the heart of this debate that are worth discussing: what, exactly, norms are and how a state can and should go about enforcing them. The answers to these questions, taken together with recent, contradictory statements by the administration about its aims, reveal that, when it comes to international normative arguments, the U.S. is on shaky ground with its quest to strike Syria.

Norms, defined as “shared expectations about appropriate behavior held by a community of actors,” are socially constructed, highly contested, and forever changing. In international relations, both weak and powerful states attempt to promote and socialize norms that are in their own self-interest, while diminishing the salience of those that are not. As political scientist Ward Thomas notes, norms are “both products of and constraints upon state action, serving an essentially instrumental purpose.” For example, President Richard Nixon unilaterally abandoned U.S. offensive biological weapons programs (over the unanimous objection of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) in part for moral and diplomatic reasons, but also for material ones: Biological weapons provided no strategic deterrent advantages over nuclear weapons.

As compared to other norms, the one against the use of chemical weapons in warfare is widely endorsed, meeting international relations scholar Jeffrey Legro’s three criteria for what constitutes a robust norm: specificity, durability, and concordance. Somewhat counterintuitively, the norm’s durability has been further reinforced in Syria: Assad has been compelled to claim that he has never used chemical weapons, and his patron, Russia, is contending that chemical weapons attacks have only been conducted by rebel forces. Since Syrian security forces have not deployed chemical weapons in a widespread and indiscriminate manner since the opening days of the civil war, Assad has not embraced their use. He has also negotiated the — albeit delayed and constrained — United Nations chemical weapons inspection team access to sites where the attacks occurred to collect physical evidence.

With an understanding of what constitutes norms, the more pointed version of the second question of interest here is whether the U.S. bombing of Syria, with little overt or direct international support, would be the most widely accepted and enduring means of enforcing the norm against chemical weapons. As one senior administration official warned, “[D]oing nothing sends a message… that you can carry out chemical weapons attacks with impunity.” This assumes both that any alternatives to military force are “nothing,” and that the only way to enforce this international norm is with a few days of cruise missiles and airstrikes.

Unfortunately for the White House, there are norms about enforcement that contrast with its approach. Syria is a state party to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases” in warfare, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which forbids the arbitrary deprivation of life. Neither of these treaties allows for a single country to be the arbiter and enforcement authority. Most world leaders and international lawyers believe Syria’s referral to the International Criminal Court, U.N. Human Rights Council, and/or the Security Council must be the first step before collective enforcement and punishment procedures are chosen.

If President Obama does not follow any of these near universally accepted enforcement procedures, and — with or without Congress’s approval — authorizes a near-unilateral attack against Assad regime targets, the U.S. will be derided, rejected, or ignored by much of the international community. An attack would build upon the already long and tragic history of American military involvement in the Middle East. Nobody in the region, or elsewhere for that matter, would conceive of this particular intervention in isolation from all the U.S. troops, missiles, and bombs that preceded them. Nothing captures public attention and anger like widely televised and well reported uses of military force. Should Obama proceed on the current path, the world will again remember America’s bombs far longer than the horrendous war crime that they were a response to. [Continue reading…]

USA Today reports: A deal allowing Bashar Assad to surrender Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles runs the risk of extending his stay in power and undercutting support of rebels who have been fighting his regime with U.S. support, some analysts say.

“Assad is going to come out of this stronger,” said Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council official who is now a professor at Penn State.

Instead of an attack that could weaken Syria’s military, particularly its ability to use chemical weapons, negotiations with Assad’s government could strengthen the Syrian leader, Leverett and others say.

No deal has been struck yet and the United States could still go ahead with a planned cruise missile strike if no agreement is reached, President Obama said in an address to the country Tuesday night.

The president asked Congress to postpone a vote on military action while pursuing diplomacy. But Obama said military action could still be used if diplomacy failed.

The plan was developed by Russia and would be formalized by the United Nations.

Analysts say the risk is that Russia and Syria will be tough negotiators who will use the talks as an attempt to build protection for Assad in return for giving up his regime’s chemical weapons, attempting to trade chemical weapons for allowing Assad to stay in power.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has served as Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations and understands the institution well, Leverett said. He has a reputation as a tough negotiator.

The process of removing Assad’s chemical weapons could take years, giving Assad and his Russian allies time. The destruction of Libya’s main chemical stockpiles were only completed this year, nearly 10 years after Moammar Gadhafi said he would relinquish his nuclear program and chemical weapons stockpiles.

During that time, Assad will likely be able to continue battling rebels while dealing with weapons inspectors and attempting to consolidate his power.

“In a sense it gives the regime permission to fire as much as it wants” if it doesn’t use chemical weapons, said Jeffrey White, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former Defense Intelligence Agency official. [Continue reading…]