Thursday, July 19, 2012

Sarin, Cyanide

Governments in the region have used chemical weapons against domestic opponents -- Yemen during its civil war in the 1960s, and Iraq against Kurdish and Shiite rebels in 1988 and 1991 -- so such a scenario isn’t implausible in Syria, Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said in a research paper this week.
To ensure chemical weapons don’t fall into the hands of terrorists, the U.S. should enlist the help of Syrian officers to locate them as well as manage “the political end game in Damascus,” Lincoln Bloomfield, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state in former President George W. Bush’s administration, said at a congressional hearing yesterday.
At least 180 Syrians were killed yesterday by security forces, Al Jazeera television reported, citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
About 125,000 Syrians have fled the country, with Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon the primary destinations for refugees, U.S. State Department officials told reporters yesterday.

Suffering Syrians

The officials said they estimate that 1.5 million Syrians inside the country need urgent medical care, food and shelter, including 300,000 to 500,000 who’ve been displaced from their homes. The U.S. has spent $64 million in humanitarian assistance for Syrian refugees this year, and more is coming, according to the State Department.
Rice and other Western diplomats attacked Russia for putting its historic links and economic interests with Assad first. Syria is an arms customer and hosts Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union in the port of Tartus.
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, criticized the Obama administration’s handling of Russia in a statement yesterday.
“Russia’s veto again shows the hollowness of President Obama’s failed ‘reset’ policy with Russia and his lack of leadership on Syria,” Romney said. “President Obama has given away generous concessions on missile defense and nuclear arms to Russia, but has received little in return except obstruction and belligerence. While Russia and Iran have rushed to support Bashar al-Assad and thousands have been slaughtered, President Obama has abdicated leadership and subcontracted U.S. policy to Kofi Annan and the United Nations.”

Ulterior Motives

Russian UN envoy Vitaly Churkin accused the U.S. of “pushing its own geopolitical designs” in the region, particular relating to Iran, suspected of carrying out a secret nuclear weapons program and funding Shiite Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.
“It’s all about Iran,” Churkin told reporters yesterday. “A major geopolitical battle is being fought on the fields of Syria, and which have nothing to do with the Syrian people.”
“It’s all very sad for them to fire away this biased rhetoric saying nothing about the larger picture of their policy,” Churkin said. “To me it is hypocritical.”
The Western-drafted resolution excluded military action like the UN-authorized NATO air strikes that were used to help oust Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. It called instead for measures such as an embargo on supplying arms to the Syrian military and the freezing of assets.
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