162 Members of Congress Demand to be Called into Session, Another Assault on Arab World Risks Escalation and Backlash, U.S. Tried to Derail U.N. Probe
Say No to War in Syria - Demand Congress be Called into Session
- 162 Reps., Including 64 Democrats, Call for Debate & Vote Before War with Syria - Robert Naiman (Just Foreign Policy)
- An Attack on Syria Will Only Spread the War and Killing - by Seumas Milne (The Guardian (UK))
- In Rush to Strike Syria, U.S. Tried to Derail U.N. Probe - Gareth Porter (Inter Press Service News Agency)
162 Reps., Including 64 Democrats, Call for Debate & Vote Before War with Syria
by Robert Naiman
August 29, 2013
Earlier this week, I asked you to sign our petition at MoveOn to President Obama and Congress demanding that Congress debate and vote before any U.S. military strike on Syria, as required by the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution.
More than 25,000 people have taken action. You can see that here:
I'm writing to tell you that Congress has responded. In the last few days, 162 Members of the House, including 64 Democrats, have publicly called for a debate and vote before any U.S. military strike.
I wrote up the news here:
162 Reps., Including 64 Democrats, Call for Debate & Vote Before War With Syria
As I write this, press reports are saying that a strike is still imminent, and that President Obama still has not agreed to allow a Congressional debate and vote before a strike.
It's important to get the news out that 162 Members of the House, including 64 Democrats, are on record saying that there should be a Congressional debate and vote.
Please read the news and share it with your networks:
162 Reps., Including 64 Democrats, Call for Debate & Vote Before War With Syria
If you use Twitter, you can spread this tweet.
Thanks for all you do to help make U.S. foreign policy comply with democracy and the rule of law.
Robert Naiman,
Just Foreign Policy
A full list of signers and a pdf of the Democratic letter can be found here.
Letter to President Obama signed by 54 members of Congress, demanding Congressional debate and approval before
new war is launched
An Attack on Syria Will Only Spread the War and Killing
Instead of removing the chemical weapon threat, another western assault on the Arab world risks escalation and backlash
by Seumas Milne
August 27, 2013
The Guardian (UK)
A victim of an air strike by regime forces on Aleppo is carried away, on August 26 2013. 'Chemical weapons are far from being the greatest threat to Syria's people. That is the war itself and the death and destruction that has engulfed the country.'
credit - Guardian / Abo Al-Nur Sadk/AFP/Getty Images
All the signs are they're going to do it again. The attack on Syria now being planned by the US and its allies will be the ninth direct western military intervention in an Arab or Muslim country in 15 years. Depending how you cut the cake, the looming bombardment follows onslaughts on Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, as well as a string of murderous drone assaults on Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
The two former colonial powers that carved up the Middle East between them, Britain and France, are as ever chafing for a slice of the action as the US assembles yet another "coalition of the willing". And as in Iraq and Sudan (where President Clinton ordered an attack on a pharmaceuticals factory in retaliation for an al-Qaida bombing), intelligence about weapons of mass destruction is once again at the centre of the case being made for a western missile strike.
In both Iraq and Sudan, the intelligence was of course wrong. But once again, UN weapons inspectors are struggling to investigate WMD claims while the US and its friends have already declared them "undeniable". Once again they are planning to bypass the UN security council. Once again, they are dressing up military action as humanitarian, while failing to win the support of their own people.
The trigger for the buildup to a new intervention - what appears to have been a chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta - certainly has the hallmarks of a horrific atrocity. Hundreds, mostly civilians, are reported killed and many more wounded, their suffering caught on stomach-churning videos.
But so far no reliable evidence whatever has been produced to confirm even what chemical might have been used, let alone who delivered it. The western powers and their allies, including the Syrian rebels, insist the Syrian army was responsible. The Damascus government and its international backers, Russia and Iran, blame the rebels.
The regime, which has large stockpiles of chemical weapons, undoubtedly has the capability and the ruthlessness. But it's hard to see a rational motivation. Its forces have been gaining ground in recent months and the US has repeatedly stated that chemical weapons use is a "red line" for escalation.
For the same reason, the rebel camp (and its regional sponsors), which has been trying to engineer a western intervention in the Libya-Kosovo mould for the past two years to tip the military balance, clearly has an interest in that red line being crossed.
Three months ago, the UN Syria human rights commission member Carla Del Ponte said there were "strong concrete suspicions" that rebel fighters had used the nerve gas sarin, and Turkish security forces were reported soon afterwards to have seized sarin from al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front units heading into Syria.
The arms proliferation expert, Paul Schulte, of King's College London, believes rebel responsibility "can't be ruled out", even if the "balance of probability" points to the regime or a rogue military commander. Either way, whatever Colin Powell-style evidence is produced this week, it's highly unlikely to be definitive.
But that won't hold back the western powers from the chance to increase their leverage in Syria's grisly struggle for power. A comparison of their response to the Ghouta killings with this month's massacres of anti-coup protesters in Egypt gives a measure of how far humanitarianism rules the day.
The Syrian atrocity, where the death toll has been reported by opposition-linked sources at 322 but is likely to rise, was damned as a "moral obscenity" by US secretary of state John Kerry. The killings in Egypt, the vast majority of them of civilians, have been estimated at 1,295 over two days. But Barack Obama said the US wasn't "taking sides", while Kerry earlier claimed the army was "restoring democracy".
In reality, western and Gulf regime intervention in Syria has been growing since the early days of what began as a popular uprising against an autocratic regime but has long since morphed into a sectarian and regional proxy war, estimated to have killed over 100,000, balkanised the country and turned more than a million people into refugees.
Now covert support has become open military backing for a rebel movement split into over 1,000 groups and increasingly dominated by jihadist fighters, as atrocities have multiplied on all sides. While the focus has been on Ghouta this week, rebels have been ethnically cleansing tens of thousands of Kurds from north east Syria across the border into Iraq.
Until now, the western camp has been prepared to bleed Syria while Obama has resisted pressure for what he last week called more "difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment". Now the risk to US red line credibility seems to have tipped him over to back a direct military attack.
But even if it turns out that regime forces were responsible for Ghouta, that's unlikely to hold them to account or remove the risk from chemical weapons. More effective would be an extension of the weapons inspectors' mandate to secure chemical dumps, backed by a united security council, rather than moral grandstanding by governments that have dumped depleted uranium, white phosphorus and Agent Orange around the region and beyond.
In any case, chemical weapons are far from being the greatest threat to Syria's people. That is the war itself and the death and destruction that has engulfed the country. If the US, British and French governments were genuinely interested in bringing it to an end - instead of exploiting it to weaken Iran - they would be using their leverage with the rebels and their sponsors to achieve a ceasefire and a negotiated political settlement.
Instead, they seem intent on escalating the war to save Obama's face and tighten their regional grip. It's a dangerous gamble, which British MPs have a responsibility to oppose on Thursday.
Even if the attacks are limited, they will certainly increase the death toll and escalate the war. The risk is that they will invite retaliation by Syria or its allies - including against Israel - draw the US in deeper and spread the conflict. The west can use this crisis to help bring Syria's suffering to an end - or pour yet more petrol on the flames.
[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. He was the Guardian's comment editor from 2001 to 2007 after working for the paper as a general reporter and labour editor. He has reported for the Guardian from the Middle East, eastern Europe, Russia, south Asia and Latin America. He previously worked for the Economist and is the author of The Enemy Within and The Revenge of History and co-author of Beyond the Casino Economy.]
In Rush to Strike Syria, U.S. Tried to Derail U.N. Probe
by Gareth Porter
August 27, 2013
Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS)
After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the U.N. to call off its investigation.
The administration's reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between Syria and the U.N., was reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday and effectively confirmed by a State Department spokesperson later that day.
In his press appearance Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who intervened with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to call off the investigation, dismissed the U.N. investigation as coming too late to obtain valid evidence on the attack that Syrian opposition sources claimed killed as many 1,300 people.
The sudden reversal and overt hostility toward the U.N. investigation, which coincides with indications that the administration is planning a major military strike against Syria in the coming days, suggests that the administration sees the U.N. as hindering its plans for an attack.
Kerry asserted Monday that he had warned Syrian Foreign Minister Moallem last Thursday that Syria had to give the U.N. team immediate access to the site and stop the shelling there, which he said was "systematically destroying evidence". He called the Syria-U.N. deal to allow investigators unrestricted access "too late to be credible".
After the deal was announced on Sunday, however, Kerry pushed Ban in a phone call to call off the investigation completely.
The Wall Street Journal reported the pressure on Ban without mentioning Kerry by name. It said unnamed "U.S. officials" had told the secretary-general that it was "no longer safe for the inspectors to remain in Syria and that their mission was pointless."
But Ban, who has generally been regarded as a pliable instrument of U.S. policy, refused to withdraw the U.N. team and instead "stood firm on principle", the Journal reported. He was said to have ordered the U.N. inspectors to "continue their work".
The Journal said "U.S. officials" also told the secretary-general that the United States "didn't think the inspectors would be able to collect viable evidence due to the passage of time and damage from subsequent shelling."
The State Department spokesperson, Marie Harf, confirmed to reporters that Kerry had spoken with Ban over the weekend. She also confirmed the gist of the U.S. position on the investigation. "We believe that it's been too long and there's been too much destruction of the area for the investigation to be credible," she said.
That claim echoed a statement by an unnamed "senior official" to the Washington Post Sunday that the evidence had been "significantly corrupted" by the regime's shelling of the area.
"[W]e don't at this point have confidence that the U.N. can conduct a credible inquiry into what happened," said Harf, "We are concerned that the Syrian regime will use this as a delay tactic to continue shelling and destroying evidence in the area."
Harf did not explain, however, how the Syrian agreement to a ceasefire and unimpeded access to the area of the alleged chemical weapons attack could represent a continuation in "shelling and destroying evidence".
Despite the U.S. effort to portray the Syrian government policy as one of "delay", the formal request from the United Nations for access to the site did not go to the Syrian government until Angela Kane, U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, arrived in Damascus on Saturday, as Ban's spokesman, Farhan Haq, conceded in a briefing in New York Tuesday.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said in a press conference Tuesday that Syria had not been asked by the United Nations for access to the East Ghouta area until Kane presented it on Saturday. Syria agreed to provide access and to a ceasefire the following day.
Haq sharply disagreed with the argument made by Kerry and the State Department that it was too late to obtain evidence of the nature of the Aug. 21 incident.
"Sarin can be detected for up to months after its use," he said.
Specialists on chemical weapons also suggested in interviews with IPS that the U.N. investigating team, under a highly regarded Swedish specialist Ake Sellstom and including several experts borrowed from the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, should be able to either confirm or disprove the charge of an attack with nerve or another chemical weapon within a matter of days.
Ralph Trapp, a consultant on proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, said he was "reasonably confident" that the U.N. team could clarify what had happened.
"They can definitely answer the question [of] whether there was a chemical attack, and they can tell which chemical was used," he said, by collecting samples from blood, urine and hair of victims. There was even "some chance" of finding chemical residue from ammunition pieces or craters where they landed.
Trapp said it would take "several days" to complete an analysis.
Steve Johnson, who runs a programme in chemical, biological and radiological weapons forensics at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, said that by the end of the week the U.N. might be able to answer whether "people died of a nerve agent."
Johnson said the team, if pushed, could produce "some kind of view" on that issue within 24 to 48 hours.
Dan Kastesza, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and a former adviser to the White House on chemical and biological weapons proliferation, told IPS the team will not be looking for traces of the nerve gas sarin in blood samples but rather chemicals produced when sarin degrades.
But Kastesza said that once samples arrive at laboratories, specialists could make a determination "in a day or two" about whether a nerve agent or other chemical weapons had been used.
The real reason for the Obama administration's hostility toward the U.N. investigation appears to be the fear that the Syrian government's decision to allow the team access to the area indicates that it knows that U.N. investigators will not find evidence of a nerve gas attack.
The administration's effort to discredit the investigation recalls the George W. Bush administration's rejection of the position of U.N. inspectors in 2002 and 2003 after they found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the administration's refusal to give inspectors more time to fully rule out the existence of an active Iraqi WMD programme.
In both cases, the administration had made up its mind to go to war and wanted no information that could contradict that policy to arise.
[Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who specialises in U.S. national security policy. He writes regularly for IPS and has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, the Nation, the American Prospect, Truthout and The Raw Story. His blogs have been published on Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Counterpunch and many other websites. Porter was Saigon bureau chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 and later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service. He is the author of four books on the Vietnam War and the political system of Vietnam. He has taught Southeast Asian politics and international studies at American University, City College of New York and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.]