D-Day over Syria chemicals is set for June

Abdelbari Atwan, publisher and editor-in-chief of the London-based pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi, today says he hears through the grapevine that the die is cast for a Syria war finale in June.

He elaborates:

My unimpeachable Arab sources suggest the United States has already passed on the information -- which was understandably short on details -- to trusted regional allies.

What gives credence to their anticipation is this:

1. The majority of the Arab region’s wars and invasions took place in the summer months, mostly June. They include the 1948 War, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1982 Invasion of Lebanon, the 2006 Lebanon War and the 1990 Invasion of Kuwait. The revolutions of 1952 in Egypt and 1958 in Iraq also took place in the summer month of July.

2. Last week’s report in The Times of London that a soil sample taken out from a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus, and smuggled out of Syria in a secret British operation, appeared to provide the first forensic evidence of chemical weapons being used in the ongoing fighting. The sample could not indicate whether regime forces or rebel fighters fired the chemical.

3. A report by CNN last week saying that under pressure from Democrats and Republicans, the Joint Staff of the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command have updated potential military options for intervention in Syria.

4. Reports that the intensive training in Turkey and Jordan of small, CIA-vetted groups of FSA fighters by special American and British forces will conclude around mid-May.

5. The European Union’s embargo on the shipment of arms to Syria will expire end-May, allowing Britain and France to supply antiaircraft and antitank weapons to Syrian opposition forces.

6. The impasse over terms of the UN deploying a chemical weapons inspection team in Syria. Damascus has asked for the UN team to investigate what it says was a poison attack by rebels in Aleppo’s Khan al-Assal last month. But Damascus has rejected demands by the opposition that the inspectors also be sent to investigate other locations where rebels say government forces used chemical munitions.

The leak about British Ministry of Defense scientists establishing conclusive proof that chemical munitions are used in Syria was not meant to ascertain freedom of expression or The Times’ credentials. It was meant to serve another purpose, which we know little about for the moment.

But the disclosure does evoke the story of Farzad Bazoft, the Iranian-born British journalist who was sent to Baghdad in 1989 to fetch a soil sample from near a nonconventional weapons complex. Months after the incident, Iraq was isolated – and the rest is history.

Some six months ago, U.S. President Barack Obama started warning that Syria’s use of chemical weapons would cross a red line and could change his calculus about intervention.

Last week, foreign ministers from the G8 nations ended a two-day meeting in London echoing his repeated warnings since. They reaffirmed in their closing statement their view that “any use of chemical weapons would demand a serious international response.”

Significantly, Syrian opposition leaders Moaz al-Khatib and Ghassan Hitto met with several of the G8 ministers on the sidelines of the London talks.

This shows we’re inching closer to the scenario of the Iraq invasion coming in the wake of the Iraq sanctions and embargo.

The Iraq scenario kicked off with the March 1988 use of poison gas against the Kurdish town of Halabja that killed 5,000 people.

The Homs neighborhood of al-Bayyada could well become Syria’s Halabja and Bashar al-Assad could in turn become the new Saddam Hussein.

The evidence-gathering process is gaining pace in Syria to justify and legitimize military action that seems imminent.

The pressing question is: Will the military action start with no-fly zones and the qualitative arming of the opposition in order to induce a bigger involvement by Iran? Or will it start in the framework of a joint American-Israeli-Arab war against Iran and Syria together?

Iran is in the frame because Israel believes the Islamic Republic will have the bomb by year’s end.

The big difference between the Iraq and Syria scenarios is that when it faced the embargo, the Saddam regime stood alone. Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russia was broke and in a state of transition and China was building up it economic muscle.

In contrast, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia and its four BRICS partners – namely, China India, Brazil and South Africa – are standing behind the Assad regime.

Ironically, the hot summer month of June comes this year some 40 days ahead Ramadan. I won’t be surprised if it turned out to be the most incendiary in the Arabs’ history.

Russia in the line of Arab fire over Syria

Iraq's Tariq Aziz with Mikhail Gorbachev (top) and Syria's Faisal Mekdad

There are practically no Arab takers of Russia’s underhanded offer to play peace facilitator in Syria.

Two think pieces appearing today in the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat explain why.

One by Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, head of Alarabiya TV news channel, says “it is too late” for Moscow now to change from warmonger to peacemaker.

The other, by Lebanese journalist, author and political analyst Samir Atallah, draws parallels between the visits to Moscow of Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad this week and of Iraq’s Tariq Aziz in the buildup to the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Rashed

In his think piece -- titled “Why kiss the Russians’ hands?” – Rashed writes:

I don’t understand this insistence over the past year and a half on trying to convince the Russians to renounce Assad’s regime in Syria despite the Kremlin’s intransigence.

Why is Russia still the focus of the Arab drive to stop the genocide against the Syrian people?

The Kremlin’s lord and master, Vladimir Putin, has been unambiguous and resolute in his dogged support of Bashar al-Assad, providing him with weapons and experts, shielding him at the UN Security Council and defending him in international forums. He even printed bank notes for Assad to bypass sanctions on minting the Syrian currency in Europe.

In the beginning, we gave Russia the benefit of the doubt. Gulf delegations and representatives of Syrian opposition forces flocked to Moscow bearing promises and gifts to try to solve the puzzle. We thought the Russians probably believed Assad’s arguments or feared for their interests, or worried about Islamist extremists, or sought material gains. All these concerns were raised and addressed, but to no avail.

Now, a year after all those visits, meetings, gifts and deals, it seems the reason is irrelevant. The only remaining conclusion is that Russia will stand by Bashar to the end, even as she begins to use endearing phraseology to justify her shameful positions.

Even if Russia now changed her stand, it would be too late to be helpful.

The Russians helped prolong the war and they shared in killing 50,000 human lives, in destroying most Syrian cities and in displacing three million people.

What use is Russia’s stance today? Zilch.

If the Russians were to abandon Assad in the present day, he would fall in a month. If they didn’t, he would fall in two months. It is too late to try and reduce Syria’s losses. Cessation of the war will only cut the losses of Assad and his clique.

We pinned hopes on the Russians intervening during the past 20 months, for them to be partners in peacemaking. Instead, they chose, together with Iran, to be Assad’s partners in crime.

We pinned hopes on an early cessation of the hemorrhage so as to preempt grudges and acts of revenge and build a civil state representing all Syrians.

But prolongation of the conflict by Assad’s allies paved the ground for the emergence of terrorist groups and internecine rifts.

There is no room left for a smooth and peaceful transition of the kind branded about by good-intentioned people, such as international Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

So why pay heed to the Russians and make the pilgrimage to Moscow, which only led Syria to a quagmire of blood?

We’re fully aware Bashar’s regime has been prone to crumble for more than a year, running short on fuel for tanks and ammunition for warplanes to continue pounding the cities daily for eight months. We knew, and so did the Russians, that no regime, regardless of its military muscle, can withstand a mass revolt. The outcome is certain, save for the date of the regime’s fall.

For that reason, we no longer want any pleading with the Russians to continue. The cemeteries, the widows, the orphans, the bereaved and the wounded won’t accept any of the solutions the Russians propose or approve.

Atallah

In his column -- headlined “Destination Moscow, Tariq Aziz’s route” -- Atallah asks, “What does Mekdad’s trip to Moscow via Beirut remind you of?”

“It reminds me,” Atallah writes, “of poignant days in Baghdad, when Tariq Aziz used to travel to Moscow via Iran because Iraq’s airports were closed.”

Each time Aziz flew to Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev would tell him, “Go tell the president that war is looming. Iraq will lose the war and be destroyed.”

On his last visit to Moscow, Atallah recounts, Aziz told the Soviet president: “Saddam accepts your advice. Find us a way out.”

Gorbachev replied: “You destroyed all doors. You failed to read the sea-change in the world.”

Saddam was counting on the Iraq-Soviet Friendship Treaty, according to Atallah. He thought the Soviets were going to wage a world war for the sake of a country 300 kilometers beyond their borders. “He was wrong. The Soviets didn’t fight to keep their grip on [East] Berlin or their foothold in Cuba – their first and foremost outpost on America’s doorstep…”

Atallah says the shuttles to Damascus of Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi, and of Nabil Elaraby before them, are reminiscent of past shuttles by go-betweens to Baghdad. “They pleaded with Saddam Hussein to spare Iraq and the region warfare and its aftermath…”

A few months ago, when Damascus airport was still open, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem flew to Moscow in person. He later told the world that everything was hunky-dory with his friend Sergei Lavrov.

Russia’s friends, Atallah counsels, need to carefully read Gorbachev’s “Memoirs” and the latest book of Yevgeny Primakov [“Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present”] to spare themselves false hopes and their peoples sanctions, death and destruction.

“In matters of Law,” Atallah wraps up, “there is something called ‘precedent.’ The word is often used in legal proceedings.

“Mr. President [Assad], Moscow won’t help you more than it helped Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat or Fidel Castro. Nor will China offer you other than it did by way of ‘full-throated’ statements. Precedents, after all, set a formidable pattern.”