Obama’s blurred line on chemical weapons

The New York Times reports: When President Obama first warned Syria’s leader, President Bashar al-Assad, that even making moves toward using chemical weapons would cross a “red line” that might force the United States to drop its reluctance to intervene in the country’s civil war, Mr. Obama took an expansive view of where he drew that boundary.

“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” he said at an Aug. 20 news conference. He added: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

But in the past week, amid intelligence reports that some precursor chemicals have been mixed for possible use as weapons, Mr. Obama’s “red line” appears to have shifted. His warning against “moving” weapons has disappeared from his public pronouncements, as well as those of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The new warning is that if Mr. Assad makes use of those weapons, presumably against his own people or his neighbors, he will face unspecified consequences.

It is a veiled threat that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta repeated Thursday: “The president of the United States has made very clear that there will be consequences, there will be consequences if the Assad regime makes a terrible mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people.”

The White House says the president has not changed his position at all — it is all in the definition of the word “moving.”

Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Thursday that “ ‘moving around’ means proliferation,” as in allowing extremist groups like Hezbollah, which has training camps near the weapons sites, to obtain the material.

Whenever the White House needs to make a statement utterly lacking in credibility, they always call on Tommy Vietor — that seems to be his specialty. What has moved around is the administration’s stance and the clarification comes from Panetta.

Obama’s statement in August implied that the U.S. would act to prevent Assad from using chemical weapons. The U.S. position now is that Assad will suffer serious consequences if he uses them — a tacit acknowledgment that the U.S. is not actually capable of preventing these weapons being used.

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U.S. trains rebel brigades to secure chemical weapons

Syria Deeply reports: The US and its allies have hired contractors to train some Syrian rebel brigades in chemical weapons security, Syria Deeply has exclusively learned from four diplomats, including one US official. The sources asked to remain anonymous, as they deal directly with developments in Syria. The training would mark a higher level of coordination between the US and armed opposition forces, working to secure Syria’s chemical arsenal during a period of political turmoil.

The diplomatic sources say defense contractors hired by the US and its European allies have recently conducted training exercises with Syrian rebel forces in Turkey and Jordan. The programs were intended to prepare brigades to handle chemical weapons sites and materials they might encounter, as Assad troops lose control of over parts of the country. US contractors have also been on the ground in Syria to monitor the status of regime stockpiles, said an employee with a major US defense consultancy that has been engaged in that work.

“They’re probably trying to provide near real-time surveillance at all these sites. There’s no point in limiting yourself,” said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He emphasized that any training of rebel fighters would represent just one element of contingency planning underway and said it would be incorrect to assume that training rebels is “the only hope”.

The State Department affirmed its concern over Syria’s chemical weapons, concerns that have been discussed with opposition leaders, but would not comment directly on the details of this report. The Defense Department hasn’t responded to a request for comment on the revelations.

Tim Brown, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, said he would be “shocked” if the US did not already have covert counter-proliferation forces on the ground, working with allies and regime defectors to monitor chemical weapon stockpiles.

Brown, who is an expert in using satellite imagery to detect chemical weapons, said there is a limit to what satellite imagery and other aerial reconnaissance can reveal about the state of chemical weapons. Concerned countries would need “eyes on the ground” to evaluate the status of sites, especially if chemical weapons are being moved.

“What is the signature of the movements? Are there heavily guarded convoys? The smaller the movement, the harder it is to detect [from the sky],” Brown said. [Continue reading…]

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Assad is not suicidal

Joshua Landis writes: Assad is unlikely to use chemical weapons at this time. He must know that as soon as he uses them, he will have written his death warrant. I do not think he is suicidal or about to pursue a “Samson option” as some have suggested.

The Alawite community of 2.5 million that lives in the coastal region of Syria is counting on his army to protect them from possible retribution from the rebel militias. Sectarian hatred has been driven to a high pitch by the brutality of the regime. Syrians have been putting hate in their hearts over the last two years, making the likelihood of some sort of retribution ever more likely and the ethnic cleansing a possibility, even if a small one at this time. Assad and his generals will want to protect their families who live along the Mediterranean coast.

Should Damascus become ungovernable, as I believe it eventually will — although that may be a long time from now — he will have to fall back with his army to the coastal region. Then he will have his back to the wall and the likelihood of his using chemical weapons goes way up. He would most likely threaten to use them should rebel militias begin pushing into the Alawite Mountains or attack the coastal cities. He will want to keep them as a deterrent.

The Chemical weapons scare now going on may be overblown. Speaking to a general at Central Command in Tampa yesterday, I was reminded that chemical weapons are difficult to arm and use. Sarin was used by Saddam in Halabcha, where bombs were dropped by planes, which means that Assad could do the same because he has an airforce. But for the rebels to use them effectively would be difficult, without proper missiles or systems to launch projectiles which are difficult to arm.

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No confirmed reports Assad preparing to use chemical weapons: Ban

Al Arabya: There are no confirmed reports that President Bashar al-Assad is preparing to use chemical weapons, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon says in a press conference while visiting Syrian refugee camps in Turkey on Friday.

Ban reiterated his warning, saying that it would be an “outrageous crime” with huge consequences if the Assad regime decides to use chemical weapons against civilians, Reuters reported.

His visit comes amid international warnings to the Assad regime not to use chemical weapons to combat the armed revolt in the war-ravaged country.

Speaking in Iraq on Thursday, Ban said Assad should be “brought to justice” if his Damascus regime uses chemical weapons against its own people.

“I have expressed my gravest concerns to (the) government of Syria and I have sent a letter directed to President Assad a couple of days ago,” Ban told a news conference in Baghdad.

“I have warned that in any case, if chemical weapons is used, then whoever (it) may be will have to be brought to justice, and it will create serious consequences to those people,” the U.N. secretary general said.

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Morsi’s ‘Brothers know best’ approach

Steven Cook writes: Morsi’s decisions last month to grant himself powers above any court, retry the deposed leader Hosni Mubarak, and rush the passing of a new Brotherhood-driven draft constitution — and his party’s unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimate concerns of millions of Egyptians — result from a worldview that should be familiar to Egyptians.

The Brothers, like the Free Officers who came to power in 1952 and produced Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Mubarak, are what the Yale anthropologist James Scott calls “high modernists.” High modernism, which places a premium on scientific knowledge and elites with special skills, is inherently authoritarian. It might seem a strange designation for the Brotherhood, since most observers think of it as a religious movement. But in reality, the group has used religion to advance a political agenda. To suggest that the organization’s leaders are dilettantes when it comes to Islam would be an overstatement, but the majority of them are first and foremost doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and engineers. They think of themselves as a vanguard that is uniquely qualified to rebuild Egypt and realize its seemingly endless quest for modernization. Moreover, they believe that the people entrusted them with the responsibility to do so as a result of free and fair elections in late 2011 and 2012.

With the Brotherhood in control of the now-dissolved People’s Assembly, Shura Council, Constituent Assembly, and the presidency, this vanguard thought it could choose a path for Egypt within the councils of its own organization. There was no need for consensus or negotiation, hence Morsi’s August 12 decision to decapitate the national security establishment and his subsequent efforts to place sympathizers in influential positions within the state-controlled media. In a television interview broadcast on November 29, he even called his recent decree an effort to “fulfill the demands of the public and the revolution.” There is, he implied, no reason to question his decisions, which were in the best interest of Egypt.

Morsi’s miscalculation — which both he and the Brotherhood later compounded — was to think that everyone understood the results of the Egyptian elections the way the Brothers did. In other words, that they gave him and his party a mandate to rule with little regard for those who might disagree. The Brotherhood’s discrediting of the tens of thousands who turned out in protest as felool (remnants of the old regime) and thugs was not only positively Mubarak-esque but also reinforced Morsi’s “Brothers know best” approach to Egypt’s political problems. It is easy to dismiss the opposition’s charge that Morsi is the “new Mubarak” as hyperbole from a group of people who have become well-versed in manufacturing outrage. Still, they have a point. Both men share the high-modernist worldview, which did not bode well for political reform under the previous regime and does not augur well for democracy in Egypt’s future.

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Morsi’s unsustainable autocracy

Khalil al-Anani writes: To understand the underlying factors behind Morsi’s latest decree, one needs to discern his personality and worldview.

Indeed, the story of Morsi in power resembles his journey within the Brotherhood. He has strived to portray himself as a “self-disciplined” leader with serious character. He is not a “smiling” politician. It was part of his political persona.

Politically speaking, Morsi always acted like a “man-on-a-mission.” He was one of the average members in the Brotherhood, but became a self-made success, and, as we know, is now president of Egypt.

A hard worker and devotee to the conservative wing that has controlled the Brotherhood since the end of 1990s, Morsi in a few years (2000-04) proved himself as a trustful and loyal cadre to the Brotherhood leadership.

He was always ready to deliver and do the jobs that others might resist. Surprisingly, yet understandably, he became the Head of the political division of the Brotherhood at the expense of the shrewd and politicized figure, Essam al-Eryan, who was alienated and marginalized.

Morsi was also responsible for accommodating and containing discontent among the Brotherhood youth that surfaced in 2007 and ’08.

From 2005 to 2010, Morsi exemplified the most resilient and resistant character of the Brotherhood in the face of the Mubarak regime, which gave him added power and confidence.

After the revolution, Morsi’s ikhwani career became more visible. He was selected to be the head of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP).

Morsi, and not the Supreme Guide, represented the Brotherhood in negotiations with Omar Suliman only a few days before the downfall of Mubarak.

Ironically, the promotion and emergence of Morsi reflected his organizational commitment and acquiescence to the Brotherhood leadership and objectives.

After becoming president, Morsi maintained his style as a “man-on-a-mission.” For many, he is acting as the Brotherhood’s man in the presidency, rather than the president for all Egyptians.

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How to save Egypt’s dying chance at democracy

David Rhode writes: The return of protests, tanks and death to the streets of Cairo this week is harrowing. So is the power of the rampant conspiracy theories that cause both Muslim Brotherhood members and their secular opponents to sincerely believe that they are the defenders of Egypt’s revolution.

Criticisms of President Mohamed Morsi’s power grab and rushed constitutional process are legitimate. So are complaints that the country’s secular opposition is poorly organized, lacks majority support and refuses to compromise.

Barring a surprising change in direction, Egypt’s experiment with democracy seems to be headed toward failure. The country’s flawed constitution will likely be ratified in a referendum on Dec. 15. A frustrated and distrustful opposition will boycott subsequent Parliamentary elections. Mr. Morsi will lead a “soft authoritarian” government similar to that of former President Hosni Mubarak. Small opposition parties will exist, but the Muslim Brotherhood’s dominance of the state, politics and society will never be in doubt.

U.S. officials — ever eager for stability in the Middle East — will turn a blind eye and establish a “working relationship” with Mr. Morsi.

“I think the impulse of most American administrations is to show up in an Arab country and say, ‘Take me to your leader,’ ” Nathan J. Brown, a George Washington University professor and leading expert on Egypt, told me in a bleak interview this week. “I don’t think we have many alternatives. The United States is not in the position to back a military coup or the opposition.”

Mr. Brown is correct. Yes, the United States has some economic leverage in Cairo, but in general America remains radioactive in post-Mubarak Egypt. After 40 years of the U.S. backing Egyptian strongmen who made peace with Israel, Washington is hugely mistrusted.

A September 2012 Gallup Poll found that 82 percent of Egyptians opposed the country’s government accepting any economic aid from the United States. By comparison, 42 percent of Egyptians surveyed — roughly half that number — opposed the country’s peace treaty with Israel.

For those who think more “American leadership” is the answer: a U.S.-backed military coup — which it is doubtful the U.S. could engineer — would radicalize Islamists across the region and be an enormous gift to Al Qaeda. Similarly, if Washington openly backs the country’s secular opposition, those opponents will be viewed as American stooges and lose popular support. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the mind of an octopus

Sy Montgomery: “Meeting an octopus,” writes [professor of philosophy, Peter] Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.” Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom — until it swims away.

For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface. The deepest layer passively reflects background light. The topmost may contain the colors yellow, red, brown, and black. The middle layer shows an array of glittering blues, greens, and golds. But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn? Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely colorblind.

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods — octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid — may be able to see with their skin.

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote a famous paper titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Bats can see with sound. Like dolphins, they can locate their prey using echoes. Nagel concluded it was impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat. And a bat is a fellow mammal like us — not someone who tastes with its suckers, sees with its skin, and whose severed arms can wander about, each with a mind of its own. Nevertheless, there are researchers still working diligently to understand what it’s like to be an octopus.

Jennifer Mather spent most of her time in Bermuda floating facedown on the surface of the water at the edge of the sea. Breathing through a snorkel, she was watching Octopus vulgaris — the common octopus. Although indeed common (they are found in tropical and temperate waters worldwide), at the time of her study in the mid-1980s, “nobody knew what they were doing.”

In a relay with other students from six-thirty in the morning till six-thirty at night, Mather worked to find out. Sometimes she’d see an octopus hunting. A hunting expedition could take five minutes or three hours. The octopus would capture something, inject it with venom, and carry it home to eat. “Home,” Mather found, is where octopuses spend most of their time. A home, or den, which an octopus may occupy only a few days before switching to a new one, is a place where the shell-less octopus can safely hide: a hole in a rock, a discarded shell, or a cubbyhole in a sunken ship. One species, the Pacific red octopus, particularly likes to den in stubby, brown, glass beer bottles.

One octopus Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock. Then it chose a third. Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front. Then it went to sleep. What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious: “Three rocks are enough. Good night!”

The scene has stayed with Mather. The octopus “must have had some concept,” she said, “of what it wanted to make itself feel safe enough to go to sleep.” And the octopus knew how to get what it wanted: by employing foresight, planning — and perhaps even tool use. Mather is the lead author of Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate, which includes observations of octopuses who dismantle Lego sets and open screw-top jars. Coauthor Roland Anderson reports that octopuses even learned to open the childproof caps on Extra Strength Tylenol pill bottles — a feat that eludes many humans with university degrees.

In another experiment, Anderson gave octopuses plastic pill bottles painted different shades and with different textures to see which evoked more interest. Usually each octopus would grasp a bottle to see if it were edible and then cast it off. But to his astonishment, Anderson saw one of the octopuses doing something striking: she was blowing carefully modulated jets of water from her funnel to send the bottle to the other end of her aquarium, where the water flow sent it back to her. She repeated the action twenty times. By the eighteenth time, Anderson was already on the phone with Mather with the news: “She’s bouncing the ball!”

This octopus wasn’t the only one to use the bottle as a toy. Another octopus in the study also shot water at the bottle, sending it back and forth across the water’s surface, rather than circling the tank. Anderson’s observations were reported in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. “This fit all the criteria for play behavior,” said Anderson. “Only intelligent animals play — animals like crows and chimps, dogs and humans.” [Continue reading…]

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Video: Carving up the Arctic

AJ’s The Stream frames the question: Will the melting of the Arctic sea ice bring about a change in the geopolitical landscape?

This seems like the wrong question to be asking. When global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels is what is opening up this ‘bonanza’ of new fossil fuel reserves, it’s a bit like a man with lung cancer discovering a wonderful new source of cheap cigarettes.

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Why Assad may be unlikely to use chemical weapons

Charles P. Blair, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, writes: Syria’s weapons, produced beginning in the early 1970s with Egyptian assistance, have been intended to deter Israel’s nuclear capability and to offset Syrian conventional inferiority. It’s unlikely they could have served either purpose, but designed for use in large-scale, state-to-state warfare, Syria’s chemical weapons are particularly unsuited for the urban fights that have characterized the civil war. Close-quarters combat renders chemical weapons not only ineffective but counterproductive; with sarin or VX, a simple wind shift could turn the deadly agent against the Syrian military. Syria’s likely blister agent — so called “mustard gas” — is highly corrosive, remaining a hazard for forces attempting to occupy the affected area.

That doesn’t mean Assad won’t use chemical weapons — in particular, there is the possibility of irrational action if the regime is on the verge of collapse. The more isolated the top leadership becomes, the more likely it is to make unsound decisions based on an altered sense of reality. But the greater threat remains terrorist acquisition of chemical weapons if the military loses control over relevant sites and facilities. The Pentagon estimated earlier this year that it would take more than 75,000 troops to secure Syria’s chemical weapons against theft — and that assumes that U.S. intelligence knows precisely where they all are. After the fall of Baghdad, looters gained access to Iraq’s Al-Qaqaa military installation, and close to 200 tons of military grade explosives vanished, even though there were 200,000 coalition forces available and the International Atomic Energy Agency had specifically warned of the explosives’ vulnerability.

Some commentators have warned that, as with Iraq, intelligence could be faulty: perhaps Syria has no (or few) WMD. Alas, that is unlikely given Syria’s early chemical cooperation with Egypt and its perceived need to deter nuclear-armed Israel. Indeed, following the 2007 destruction of its al-Kibar nuclear facility, Syria may well have doubled down on its reliance on chemical, and possibly, biological weapons to afford the country a perceived deterrent against existential threats. Given all the variables in play, it seems all but certain that in the end an inventory of Syria’s chemical stockpile will reveal significant gaps in the current assessments.

Christian Science Monitor adds: By ordering “activity” at chemical weapons sites, Assad could be reminding the international powers demanding his departure that his fall would likely be followed by chaos – in which radical Islamists could get their hands on Syria’s weapons of mass destruction.

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War in Syria — approaching the end or a new chapter?

Tony Karon writes: The stern warnings by President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials this week that Syria‘s President Bashar Assad would face “consequences” and be “held accountable” for any use of chemical weapons against his own people, has amplified speculation that the country’s bloody civil war may be entering a terminal phase. After all, the regime is now using air strikes and artillery against insurgent neighborhoods in its own capital, having lost control of vast swathes of northern and eastern Syria. Assad had refrained from using stocks of weapons of mass destruction over the past 22 months, aware that doing so could force reluctant Western powers to intervene — and analysts had assumed that he might take such a risk only if he felt the wall at his back.

NBC News reported Wednesday that U.S. officials now say chemical munitions are being prepared for use by the Syrian military — after reporting a day earlier that a senior Pentagon official had said there was “no evidence yet that the Syrian military has actually begun the process of mixing precursor chemicals to produce deadly Sarin nerve gas.” Wednesday’s report suggested the Syrian military was, in fact, mixing precursor chemicals into bombs, but had not yet been ordered to use them.

Still, just what such reports might signal about the overall arc of events in Syria is unclear. There’s no question that rebel forces have made dramatic territorial gains over the past month, with insurgents boosting their artillery and surface-to-air missile capability as they overrun outlying military bases. Two regime aircraft have been downed by SAMs over the past two weeks, suggesting some rebel formations now had some means to defend against air strikes. And the regime’s increasingly besieged garrison in Aleppo is struggling to hold onto Syria’s second city, while the rebels have now launched what may be a sustained assault on the capital Damascus.

But for all of that writing on the wall, it may yet be premature to suggest that the 22-month civil war that has claimed more than 30,000 lives is near an end. The regime still has an overwhelming advantage in fire-power, analyst Joe Holliday of the Institute for the Study of War told the Washington Post this week, and the limits of rebel arms and organization may mean that their victory remains many months away. “What we’re seeing is a contraction from the regime,” Holliday said. “The rebels have been successful in forcing the regime to give up on outlying outposts.” The territory it has been forced to cede includes much of Syria’s borders with Iraq and Turkey, and oil fields in the east. Indeed, despite remaining the most powerful military player within the country, the Assad regime no longer controls Syria, which no longer functions as a single, centralized nation state. And its failure to destroy the rebellion or reverse its gains after two years of fighting will have signaled the regime’s strategic decision makers that restoring control over all of Syria may be a bridge too far. The decisive question, instead, may be the end-game logic of the “contraction” posited by Holliday.

Different rebel factions — which have yet to be consolidated under a single military or political leadership — control pockets of territory throughout the country, while an autonomous Kurdish zone has emerged along the Turkish border, ceded by the regime to Kurdish militia at odds with the rebellion. And even the major cities, Damascus and Aleppo, now contain internal, ethnic and sectarian “borders” across which mortar and artillery fire blazes. Absent a negotiated political solution, U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned last weekend, Syria could become a “failed state” where government institutions “whither away” to be replaced by “lawlessness, warlordism, banditry, narcotics, arms smuggling, and worst of all, the ugly face of communal and sectarian strife.”

Yet, such a fracturing of Syria could, in the minds of some of the hard men around Assad, offer the prospect of salvaging more than they might if the regime is defeated and replaced by a strong, Sunni-dominated central state. Assad’s regime is not so much a personality-cult dictatorship as it is a system of Alawite minority rule and privilege, and its core remains a cohesive, heavily armed and highly motivated Alawite-dominated army that believes it is fighting for the survival of its community. Even once it recognizes that it can no longer rule the entire country, its sectarian communal logic may militate against making a desperate last stand in Damascus, a predominantly Sunni city. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S. is offering too little too late on Syria

Rime Allaf writes: In August, when President Obama first stated that Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons would be a “red line,” the message to Assad was loud and clear: Everything else was permissible.

More than three months and many more thousands of Syrian victims later, Obama has inexplicably reiterated this objection. But by warning against the use of chemical weapons, he has once again merely reassured Assad that barrel bombs, missiles, cluster bombs and bullets are acceptable tools to slaughter his people.

What could have been interpreted as political caution in a pre-election climate must be considered in a different context now that Obama has settled comfortably into his second term. In fact, his latest statement sounds rather like a promise: If Assad doesn’t change the current parameters, the U.S. won’t either.

Semantics aside, it is clear that his refusal to increase pressure on the Assad regime, which many had expected would happen in November, means that Obama is encouraging the status quo. Indeed, the only pressure the U.S. seems to have been exerting recently has been on its allies.

The U.S. has done everything it could to impede actions that could have tipped the balance against Assad. From urging its Gulf allies to refrain from arming the resistance, to holding back a fellow NATO member, Turkey, from responding even when the Assad regime shot one of its fighter jets, to refusing to immediately recognize the coalition that the Syrian opposition finally managed to put together, every overt or covert U.S. action has been a protraction of its first response to the uprising, in March 2011. This is when the secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said members of Congress had described Assad as a reformer, just days after the massacre of dozens of peaceful demonstrators.

Far from being indecisive on Syria, the U.S. has demonstrated that it is consistent, albeit with a questionable rationale, when it comes to letting Syrians fight it out among themselves before deciding to swoop in, perhaps, when the country is at a breaking point. With most cities destroyed beyond recognition, with some five million refugees and displaced Syrians, with hundreds of thousands disappeared in Assad’s jails and well over 40,000 killed by the regime, and with extremist factions fighting their own battles to boot, it seems that we are now close to such a breaking point. [Continue reading…]

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In Egypt the elite may have changed, but the revolution continues

Jack Shenker writes: The vast majority of Egyptians have been told throughout history that they are little more than interlopers in the closed rooms where decisions over their lives, community and environment are made; this is a nation where the political elite has always viewed the wider population as so many static pieces, devoid of agency and in need of being controlled and pacified through a fluid web of top-down munificence and brutal repression.

That authoritarian conception of the state remained entrenched regardless of the differing ideologies and motivations of those who ruled, from colonial officials to the post-1952 military dictatorship, from Hosni Mubarak’s kleptocrats to the army junta that managed the so-called “transition” to democracy.

And it remains today, under the rule of a Muslim Brotherhood whose critique of Egypt’s problems is moral rather than structural, whose vision of power is exclusionary instead of pluralistic.

All these regimes have variously claimed the mantle of revolutionary legitimacy and attempted to seize a narrative of progressive change. All have deployed crude symbolism – nationalistic and religious – to turn Egyptian against Egyptian in an effort to solidify their power and maintain the status quo. And all have resorted to raw violence when faced with opposition.

It is that authoritarian state that the Egyptian revolution has been ranged against since January 2011. Some well-intentioned commentators have bemoaned how the utopia of the original “18 days” in Tahrir Square has given way to bloodshed, how the unity of so many Egyptians in rejecting Mubarak has sadly dissipated into internecine strife.

But they forget that this has never been and never could be a pacifist revolt: more than 100 police stations were burned to the ground on 28 January 2011 as revolutionaries met state violence with resistance of their own and sought to beat the regime’s security apparatus off the streets. And although the “Islamists v secularists” faultline is not irrelevant, it is also not the primary lens through which to understand the latest scenes.

There never was a golden struggle that came to a glorious conclusion when Mubarak relinquished power, only for civil warfare to subsequently blot the copybook of “New Egypt”. There is one ongoing struggle, against a state that seeks to deny Egyptians any genuine empowerment and a voice in their own futures, and its latest iteration is playing out on the streets of Heliopolis this week.

Unlike his predecessors, Mohamed Morsi was elected democratically at the ballot box, but like his predecessors his notion of government is narrow, conservative and anything but democratic. Despite his rhetoric about the revolutionary martyrs, the security apparatus that killed them remains virtually intact under Brotherhood rule.

In Morsi’s first 100 days as president, rights organisations recorded 88 cases of police torture, resulting in 34 deaths. Opposition, be it official or on the street, is viewed as a conspiratorial enemy to be blitzed, not a legitimate element of political life.

For evidence just look at the draft constitution, not the content (though that is alarming enough) but the process. Written almost exclusively by old, Islamist men, the document is now being rammed through via the ousting of dissenting voices and Morsi’s unilateral constitutional decree that puts a metaphorical gun to the heads of the electorate: vote yes to my constitution, or reaffirm my extra-judicial dictatorship.

Democracy is about more than just a single ballot paper every four years, and Egypt’s revolution is about more than just formal, institutional democracy. Since early 2011, ordinary Egyptians have messily, heroically and relentlessly muscled their way into the arena of political power. Never mind Tahrir – from Nile Delta villages to Bedouin tribal lands and urban slums, communities are tearing down the outdated suffocating contours delineating who gets to have a say, who gets to make a dynamic choice about the world around them.

The old elite game of making decisions at the top and allowing access to state resources only through an extensive patronage network, the flipside of which is violent repression, no longer works; the only problem is that those wedded to a moribund vision of the authoritarian state, including the Brotherhood, don’t seem to have noticed yet. [Continue reading…]

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If not two states, then one

Saree Makdisi writes: Israel did not wait long to reveal its first response to the United Nations General Assembly’s overwhelming recognition of Palestine as a non-member state, almost immediately announcing its intention to push forward with plans to build housing for Jewish settlers in E1, an area of the West Bank just to the east of Jerusalem.

Although it is sometimes misleadingly referred to as “disputed” or “controversial,” settlement construction in E1 is no more and no less of a contravention of international law than settlement construction elsewhere in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. What makes this development significant is E1’s location, sealing tight the gap between East Jerusalem and Israel’s largest settlement, Maale Adumim, further to the east.

That gap is the last remaining link for Palestinians between the northern and southern parts of the West Bank; it also occupies the interface among and between the Palestinian communities of Ramallah, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem — which, apart from being the cultural, religious, social and economic focal point of Palestinian life, is also one day supposed to be the capital of Palestine.

In moving forward with long-threatened plans to develop E1, Israel will be breaking the back of the West Bank and isolating the capital of the prospective Palestinian state from its hinterland. In so doing, it will be terminating once and for all the very prospect of that state — and with it, by definition, any lingering possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [Continue reading…]

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How Obama can get tough with Bibi

Lara Friedman writes: Recently, the European Union adopted harsh new Iran sanctions, strongly supported by Israel. Shortly thereafter, Israel announced new East Jerusalem settlement construction. The EU’s top official Catherine Ashton, who was about to visit Israel, condemned the announcement in measured terms; Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, publicly told her, in effect, to shove it. Imagine if in response, Ashton had indefinitely postponed her trip. Imagine that Israeli ambassadors in EU capitals were summoned to the local foreign ministries and read the riot act. Imagine that Israeli press had been alerted, leading to headlines about how Prime Minister Netanyahu and Lieberman were squandering the friendship of the EU and European support on Iran for the sake of settlement expansion.

None of that happened. Instead, Lieberman’s comments were politely ignored. Ashton went to Israel. And settlement construction advanced.

This episode demonstrates how things got to the point where they are today. Netanyahu and Lieberman believe they are unaccountable because they have never been called to account. They’ve seen that their defiance of Israel’s closest allies carries no price, either diplomatically or in the domestic arena. The two are, of course, linked: Israel’s allies acquiescing to Netanyahu treating them as underlings and enemies has only strengthened Netanyahu politically, and added to his aura as “King Bibi.” [Continue reading…]

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Several killed in Egypt clashes; Morsi’s advisers resign

Al Jazeera reports: At least four people have been killed in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, as supporters and opponents of President Mohamed Morsi clashed near the presidential palace, the health ministry says.

Fighting continued into the early morning on Thursday with fires burning in the streets where the opposing sides threw stones and petrol bombs at each other.

“No to dictatorship,” Morsi’s opponents chanted, while their rivals chanted: “Defending Morsi is defending Islam.”

Riot police were sent in to break up the violence on Wednesday, in which about 350 people were injured.

A small group of opposition activists had been camped outside the palace since Tuesday night, when tens of thousands rallied against a controversial decree which gives Morsi near-absolute power.

Supporters of the president marched to the palace on Wednesday and tore down the opposition’s tents. Witnesses said they threw stones and used clubs to attack demonstrators. Opposition protesters were driven away from the palace and fled down side streets.

Thirty-two people were arrested, according to a statement from the interior ministry.

Protests spread to other cities, and offices of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia and Suez were torched.

Both sides blamed the other for starting the clashes: Opposition leaders said Morsi was responsible for the bloodshed, while senior Brotherhood officials accused the opposition of “inciting violence”.

Morsi did not make any public appearances on Wednesday, but his prime minister, Hisham Qandil, issued a brief statement calling for calm “to give the opportunity for the efforts being made now to begin a national dialogue”.

Al Ahram reports: Egypt president Mohamed Morsi’s aides Seif Abdel-Fattah and Ayman El-Sayyad have resigned on Wednesday in the wake of the clashes that erupted in front of the presidential palace between supporters and opponents of Morsi.

“We are today announcing the decision that we have made but put on hold for more than a week. We hoped to find a solution, but to no avail,” El-Sayyad said on his Twitter account.

Seif Abdel-Fattah told Al-Jazeera television: “Egypt is bigger than a narrow-minded elite. Egypt will continue its revolution.”

“We can no longer stay silent because they [the Muslim Brotherhood] have harmed the nation and the revolution and we need to rebuild Egypt…the youth are the ones who took to the front lines to serve the revolution…I pray for mercy for the souls of the martyrs.”

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Syria loads chemical weapons into bombs; military awaits Assad’s order

NBC News reports: The Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said.

As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the “precursor” chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded inside the bombs.

Sarin is an extraordinarily lethal agent. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces killed 5,000 Kurds with a single sarin attack on Halabja in 1988.

U.S. officials stressed that as of now, the sarin bombs hadn’t been loaded onto planes and that Assad hadn’t issued a final order to use them. But if he does, one of the officials said, “there’s little the outside world can do to stop it.” [Continue reading…]

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