Bob Dreyfuss | The Nation

Barack Obama in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner.)

If Israel’s bombing of Syria, which apparently killed more than 100 Syrian troops, is meant as a warning to Iran—as various analysts in Israel and The Jerusalem Post suggest—then the message is: We can strike a nearby, war-embattled nation just minutes from our bases. It really says little about Israel’s ability to strike Iran, a far more complex target much, much farther away. But it does put Israel into a firm alliance with Saudi Arabia (and the Sunnis) in a very dangerous Sunni vs. Shiite sectarian conflict.

President Obama, who, as noted in this blog, repeatedly, awkwardly boxed himself in with his off-the-cuff “red-line” comments about Syria’s alleged (and let us repeat, “alleged”) use of chemical weapons, should decline Israel’s violent invitation to take sides in the anti-Iranian crusade. But John McCain, who’s wanted to bomb Syria from the start, is urging Obama to accept Israel’s invitation to join the fight. Unfortunately, too many Democrats, mostly liberal interventionists and allies of the Israel lobby, agree.

Perhaps his readiness to intervene in Syria will be tempered by the fact that it now appears as if the Syrian rebels have used chemical weapons, too, according to the United Nations. But as The New York Times reports, the United States and its allies were, “in secret,” already discussing air strikes against Syria. But Obama should instead seek an immediate cease-fire, with Russia’s support—Secretary of State John Kerry is heading for Moscow—and then work out a political accord.

In any case, it’s hard to take Israel’s assertion that its strikes against Syria on Friday and again on Sunday, more massively, were aimed simply at rockets that may or may not have reached Hezbollah in Lebanon. From early reports, it appears that the attacks were aimed at key bastions of the Syrian government and military in and around the capital, Damascus:

The attack, which sent brightly lighted columns of smoke and ash high into the night sky above the Syrian capital, struck several critical military facilities in some of the country’s most tightly secured and strategic areas, killing dozens of elite troops stationed near the presidential palace, a high-ranking Syrian military official said in an interview.

Last night, speaking on CNN, Syria’s deputy foreign minister said that the new attacks mean that Israel is now firmly in an alliance with Al Qaeda against President Bashar al-Assad. He’s right. It’s an alliance that the United States, already entangled in the war, doesn’t need to join.

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The attacks also create a major public relations problem for the rebels, mostly militant Islamists, Al Qaeda types, Muslim Brotherhood activists, and other Sunni religious folks, all of whom are not enthralled by the idea of getting overt Israeli help in toppling Assad. According to The New York Times, the rebels issued a confused statement noting that they don’t want assistance from “external occupying forces,” that is, from Israeli forces occupying Palestine. Some of them are critical of the Assad government for refusing to confront Israel.

Syria is threatening to retaliate against Israel, but really there isn’t much that they can do, and Iran, too, isn’t likely to allow itself to be provoked by the Israeli attack. That could change though, if Israel continues to bomb Syria in what would be an overt alliance with the rebels. But with Benjamin Netanyahu now in Beijing, it isn’t likely that Israel will continue to attack Syria, for now. However, President Obama, who’s tried, mostly, to stay out of the war, is very likely to do what Senator McCain wants now.

Writing in The New York Times today, Bill Keller says (in an op-ed) that Obama shouldn’t worry about his concern that going to war in Iraq was a bad idea, since “Syria is not Iraq.” Keller, of course, was in favor of invading Iraq in 2003, so we can take his advice with a grain of salt. As he says in the op-ed:

[D]uring an earlier column-writing interlude at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment.

Oh, well—oops! A few hundred thousand dead. Time to move on. And bomb Syria. As Keller says, “Whatever we decide, getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.”

The vast majority of Americans oppose military involvement in Syria, Robert Dreyfuss writes.

Senator Lindsey Graham is one of several Republican lawmakers calling for US intervention. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon.)

Part I of “Stay Out of Syria” can be found here.

Even as a stunning article in The New York Times ripped the cover off Syria’s civil war, neoconservatives—along with “liberal interventionists” such as the aptly named Anne Marie Slaughter—want war.

Let’s start with the Times. In a page-one piece over the weekend, the paper described the true face of the rebels leading the fight against President Assad, reporting in great detail that the vast majority of them are either violent Islamist extremists with ties to Al Qaeda or slightly less militant, but still dangerous, Islamists. The key conclusion of the piece:

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.

Read that again: there is no secular fighting force in Syria. So, who exactly is the United States supposed to back? Added the Times:

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Readers of this blog know that for months I’ve been writing that the anti-Assad forces are mostly right-wing, extremist Islamists. They draw their support from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, especially from ultra-wealthy individuals in those countries who are probably the same people who’ve backed Al Qaeda and the Taliban since the 1980s. Back then, they operated in concert with the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, in support of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Now they’re flexing their muscles once again, in support of an increasingly radical Syrian jihad. A big danger is that if a Sunni-led jihadist movement takes over in Damascus, it will radically exacerbate the Sunni-Shiite conflict across the region, pitting Saudi Arabia and its allies against Iran, with Iraq as the epicenter of the conflict. Iraq is already tilting into civil war again.

Even as Republicans demand direct US intervention in Syria, various liberal interventionists are demanding the same, with Slaughter making a spurious and invidious comparison to—what else?—Rwanda. Just as many pro-Israel radicals constantly invoke the Holocaust, whose mass atrocities occurred nearly seventy years ago, Slaughter and her cohort can’t help but bring up Rwanda every time civilians are being killed. Joining with Slaughter all too often are key allies such as Samantha Power and, unfortunately, Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, who is line to become President Obama’s national security adviser.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post titled, “Obama should remember Rwanda as he weighs action in Syria,” Slaughter waves the bloody flag of “genocide” about the civil war in Syria, and she puts the onus on Obama to makes good on his promise that the use of chemical weapons by Assad’s forces would trigger a game-changing US military action. She writes:

Mr. President, how many uses of chemical weapons does it take to cross a red line against the use of chemical weapons? That is a question you must be in a position to answer.

Lots of people have died in Syria since 2011, perhaps 70,000 or more, but it hardly qualifies as genocide. If Damascus were to engage in the massive, unrestrained use of poison gas against its civilian population, it would be different—although even in that case it’s hard to see what good options the United States might have. So far, at least, the cases of chemical-weapons use, if any, seem to have been extremely limited, and Obama is right to approach the crisis in Syria very, very cautiously—even though he boxed himself in by saying, last year, that use of WMD by Assad would be a game-changer.

Meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah, whose intelligence service is cooperating the CIA to train anti-Assad rebels, Obama made an important shift in rhetoric, saying that what might trigger a US military response is the “systematic use of weapons like chemical weapons on civilian populations.” That’s an important qualification, since so far there’s been no systematic use of such weapons, only a tinyhandful of unconfirmed cases. Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies are uncertain about what the initial reports of poison gas really mean.

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That hasn’t stopped militant right-wingers in the United States, too, from demanding that the United States go to war in Syria. They’ve proposed all sorts of actions, from air attacks to no-fly zones, and they’re using Obama’s own red-line rhetoric against him, as conservative writer Joe Holliday of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) does in a recent piece in Foreign Policy:

You’ve got to hand it to him. Bashar al-Assad may be a cruel and ruthless dictator, but he does know how to play his cards. His careful, incremental introduction of chemical weapons into the Syrian conflict has turned President Barack Obama’s clear red line into an impressionist watercolor, undermining the credible threat of US military intervention. Despite Obama’s statement on Friday that “we’ve crossed a line,” Assad knows that the United States does not want to be dragged into a Middle Eastern civil war and is attempting to call Obama’s bluff.

Perhaps the most bombastic of the critics is South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Bombs-away Graham makes the point that, having warned Assad against use of gas, Obama now has to take action or risk credibility in dealing with Iran and North Korea. Said Graham:

If we keep this hands-off approach to Syria, this indecisive action toward Syria, kind of not knowing what we’re going to do next, we’re going to start a war with Iran because Iran’s going to take our inaction in Syria as meaning we’re not serious about their nuclear weapons program.

Along with Graham, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, that noted expert on Syria, called on Obama to bomb Syria:

Graham and Chambliss agreed there’s no need for the US to send troops there. The US, they said, could intervene by taking measures such as bombing Syrian air bases. “You don’t need to go deep into Syria to do that,” Graham said. “If you could neutralize the air advantage the Syrian government has over the rebels, I think you could turn the tide of battle pretty quickly.”

Well, no, you can’t. What you can do is provide direct assistance to Islamist fighters—and then what?

Of course, it was the selfsame Institute for the Study of War that houses Joe Holliday that recently published an alarming report by Elizabeth O’Bagy that dissected the alarming alliance between Syrian Al Qaeda types and Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch.

Media Matters, which monitors conservative media outlets, has pointed out that Fox News and other publications and broadcast sources are beating the drums for war in Syria without quite knowing what, exactly, to do:

William Kristol wants to go to war in Syria, but he won’t say what that war should look like. Appearing on Fox News Sunday to discuss reports of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the Weekly Standard editor (and noted Iraq war hawk) attacked President Obama as “totally irresponsible” for indicating that he doesn’t want “to start another war,” saying: “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

When host Chris Wallace pointed out to him that there are “no good choices” for intervening in the Syrian conflict and asked, “so what do you do?,” Kristol brushed it off without indicating how he thought the president should respond: “You do what you think is best. You’re commander in chief, you’ve got an awful lot of options.”

Kristol’s call for (non-specific) military action got a boost from Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume, who observed: “There’s something to be said for doing something. That if they cross a line, you’ve got to do something. Now whatever it is may not directly affect the chemical weapons use, but if it directly affects and harms the regime’s prospects in the war, that would at least be a consequence.”

Obama isn’t likely to pay attention to the likes of Kristol. But he is, however, capable of listening to people such as Slaughter, Rice and Power.

The solution that Obama ought to be pursuing, nearly full-time—since the crisis in Syria has risen to Number One on his priority list—is a diplomatic solution. The key is working with Russia, but there’s an emerging diplomatic initiative by Egypt, which sent top-level representatives to Iran in search of a coalition including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt to use its influence on all warring parties to the conflict. The Egyptian delegation met with nearly the entire top-level leadership of Iran’s foreign policy establishment, which is important because Iran is Syria’s main regional ally. Besides talking to Russia, Obama ought to be encouraging the Egyptian initiative, which could be helpful in opening doors into Iran, too.

Read Robert Dreyfuss on why the United States needs to deal with Russia on Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have spoken about the difficulty of drafting a Syria peace plan. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.)

This isn’t exactly a news bulletin, but the United States and Russia need to strike a deal on Syria, and fast. Various analysts, and Secretary of State John Kerry, say that’ll be hard, but them’s the breaks. No one said diplomacy was going to be easy.

From Reuters today:

US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday he and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had agreed to look for ways to revive a Syrian peace plan, but admitted that doing so would be extremely difficult.

Said Kerry:

We are both going to go back, we are going to explore those possibilities, and we are going to talk again about if any of those other avenues could conceivably be pursued. … I don’t think there’s a difference of opinion that [President Bashar al-Assad’s] leaving may either be inevitable or necessary to be able to have a solution.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, was noncommittal over the idea of Assad leaving power. But Lavrov did say, according to CNN, that he’s concerned the Western powers are hyping the threat of weapons of mass destruction (i.e., gas) in Syria:

The NATO ministers also met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who warned that reports of chemical weapons in Syria must be carefully investigated to avoid a repetition of the “Iraqi scenario” in which unconfirmed allegations that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction were the basis for the US-led invasion.

He accused Western nations of trying to “politicize the issue” and broadening the investigation. Experts were supposed to be sent to Syria to study the possible use of chemical weapons in Aleppo; instead, Lavrov said, investigators demanded access to all facilities in Syria and the right to interview all Syrian citizens.

“I believe that is too much,” he said.

Indeed, it’s too much. The prime movers behind charges that Assad is using chemical weapons is Israel’s notoriously provocative intelligence service, which yesterday revealed that it has concluded that Assad’s forces are using poison gas. “To the best of our professional understanding, the regime used lethal chemical weapons against gunmen in a series of incidents in recent months,” said the head of Israel’s army intelligence. But, as The Washington Post reports, the Obama administration isn’t buying it, at least not yet:

The Obama administration expressed caution Tuesday about new claims by Israel that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against rebels.

US officials said they are still evaluating whether the Syrian regime has employed chemical weapons, a step that President Obama has said could trigger direct US involvement in a civil war that has killed more than 70,000 people.

The administration’s caution is in part because Obama has set himself up by saying that any use of poison gas by Syria would change the calculation that so far has kept the United States out of directly intervening against Assad.

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Bob Corker, a right-wing, Republican senator from Tennessee, is one of those in Congress demanding that the United States get directly involved in backing the rebels. But, in an op-ed in The New York Times today, Corker says that a US-Russia accord on Syria is key:

When it comes to Russia, America must display a deeper understanding of Russia’s regional interests and take advantage of our shared concerns about Islamic extremism. Russian leaders believe that Syria is becoming a safe haven for extremists, and we should take that concern seriously while at the same time insisting on sending aid to moderate groups. This could be the basis for a new understanding with Moscow and a shared approach toward Syria.

Only Russia can convince Mr. Assad that he must step aside, which is an essential first step toward a negotiated solution, and only the United States is in a position to persuade the Friends of Syria—a group of 11 nations—to isolate extremists and bring the core of the opposition to the negotiating table.

Of course, it’s not that simple. In recent months, it is true, Russia has quietly been distancing itself from the government in Damascus. Perhaps, Moscow might compromise on seeking some sort of coalition government involving Assad partisans and rebels. But not if it includes the extremist, Al Qaeda–allied forces that seem to have the upper hand in the fighting. Even some of the “moderate” Islamist rebels in Syria will have to be elbowed out of the deal, with more establishment-minded anti-Assad forces coming to the fore.

Meanwhile, as Lavrov pointed out, the hubbub over chemical weapons use in Syria could tip the balance and force Obama’s hand, leading to a direct US intervention, with anything from a no-fly zone to big-time arms support for the rebels to drone strikes. The Washington Post, in yet another neoconservative-influenced editorial, calls on Obama to “honor” the WMD “red line” that he created last year:

Though his policy on Syria has been weak and muddled, Mr. Obama has been very clear that the United States “will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” as he put it last month. He has said that such use would be a “game-changer.”

The Post, like many neoconservatives and Israel, too, is itching for another Middle East war. In 2012, Obama flatly rejected advice from Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus and Gen. Martin Dempsey to arm the rebels. Let’s hope he stays the course.

Did FBI questioning push Tamerlan Tsarnaev toward extremist views? Read Robert Dreyfuss on the Boston bombers.

Vladimir Putin first won political popularity by cracking down on separatist movements in the Northern Caucasus. (Reuters/Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti.)

When President Obama meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in September, they’ll have a lot to talk about. Some things on the agenda will have prime importance: the crisis in Syria, talks with Iran, disarmament and nuclear weapons among them. Far less important are issues on the fringe, including the deplorable state of human rights in Russia and now, after the Boston bombings, terrorism.

Terrorism, all agree, is bad. But marrying the already-overblown US “war on terrorism”—complete with drones, war in Afghanistan and questionable treatment of suspects at home—to Moscow’s heavy-handed, bloody assault on mostly Muslim rebels in the Caucasus just isn’t a good idea. There’s no doubt that Putin and the security services in Russia would love the United States to become an active ally in cracking down on radical and militant Muslim groups from Central Asia to the Caucasus to, well, Syria, where the United States is supporting the very same radical Muslim insurgents that it opposes elsewhere, including in Iraq.

But that’s a terrible idea.

Happily enough, at least one of the Chechnya-based extremist Muslim groups said, in a statement following the revelation that the Boston bombers were former Chechens, that is has no beef with Washington. As quoted in The Wall Street Journal, the Command of the Mujahedeen of the Vilayat in Dagestan said:

The Caucasian Mujahedeen are not fighting with the United States of America. We are at war with Russia which is not only responsible for the occupation of the Caucasus, but also for heinous crimes against Muslims.

The group went on to suggest that the Russian security services themselves might have had a hand in the bombings, although there’s no evidence to support such a conspiracy theory. Said the group:

If the US government is really interested in establishing the true organizers of the explosions in Boston, and are not simply playing along with Russia, they should focus on the involvement of Russian security services in the events.

Incidentally, even though it has been widely reported that the Russians first alerted US authorities to the activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother involved in the marathon attack, the Journal reports that Russia’s intelligence service, the Federal Security Service, itself says that it has been unable to find any connection between the Tsarnaevs and the Mujahedeen.

As The Washington Post reports:

The exact trajectory of Tsarnaev’s journey into radicalism is still emerging, but it first surfaced in 2011 when he somehow entered the radar of the Russian security services. It accelerated in late 2012 upon his return to the United States from a six-month visit to the Caucasus, when friends and relatives noticed a new religious and political fervor.

But, when they interviewed Tsarnaev in 2011, at Russia’s request, the FBI found nothing worrisome.

It isn’t clear how many Russians, Chechens or otherwise, have been flagged by the Russian security services to the FBI over the years, who then found themselves interrogated by the FBI. It’s impossible to believe that Tsarnaev was the only one. But, as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us, the very act of looking at something can alter it. Did the FBI’s interview of Tsarnaev in 2011 contribute to his radicalization? Could it be that the act of interrogating him, while he was already angry and distressed about Russia’s brutalization of Chechnya, intensified his anti-Russian feelings and broadened them to include an anti-American animus, too? Seems likely to me.

If so, it’s a perfect illustration of why the United States should stay out of Russia’s jihad against Chechnya.

What further complicated the US-Russia relationship is America’s very own jihad against the government of President Assad in Syria. There, where Russia supports the government, the United States is quietly intensifying its support to Al Qaeda–linked rebels who are leading the other side of the civil war. (Of course, the United States says that it wants to ally with moderates in the war, not Al Qaeda, but that’s easier said than done!) Both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry say that they want a diplomatic solution to the crisis, and that necessarily would involve a US-Russian concert of power. But, as the Post reports, the after-effects of the Boston bombs make it more difficult. Says the Post:

The possible link between the Boston Marathon bombings and Chechnya’s struggle for independence from Russia is likely to harden Russian opposition to any outside intervention in Syria and complicate the question of whether to arm the Syrian rebels.

Russia fought two wars to put down Chechen separatists and is accused of ongoing brutality involving what it calls terrorist elements in majority-Muslim Chechnya and the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan. The experience underpins Russia’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his two-year fight to put down a rebellion he calls terrorism.

And the paper quotes Mark Katz, a Russia specialist, who says:

Moscow will undoubtedly point to the bombing to further its argument that terrorists are active in Syria as well as Chechnya.

If Moscow does indeed point to that fact, it will be correct.

The United States needs Russia’s cooperation on Syria, on Iran, and in other areas of strategic importance. But there are irritants.

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One irritant in US-Russia relations is, as always, the ill-conceived plan to place US missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Last week, Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, traveled to Moscow to discuss the issue (among other topics), and it seems he didn’t make much progress. According to Reuters:

Russia and the United States remain at odds over US plans for an anti-missile shield in Europe following talks in Moscow this week with President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, a senior aide to President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.

“There is no progress on missile defense,” Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said, according to news agency RIA. … Ushakov said that U.S. proposals he said were laid out in a message delivered by Donilon contained little that was new and “did not make us very happy”, though he added that Russia would examine them further, RIA reported.

And then there is human rights, a long-standing roadblock to better Washington-Moscow ties. The default impulse in Washington is jump up and down and demand that Russia give dissidents and others more political freedom, but inevitably that gets in the way of strategic cooperation.

In an op-ed in The New York Times today, veteran reporter Bill Keller writes of the case of Aleksei Navalny, an activist and blogger—whose platform, Keller notes, backs “free-market libertarianism”—who is being persecuted by the authorities. It’s easy to sympathize with Navalny, perhaps the most celebrated of Russia’s dissidents, and I do. But when he meets Putin in September, let’s hope that Obama doesn’t spend much time on Navalny and other victims of repression in Russia. As Keller himself says, after highlighting Navalny’s case:

For the United States, Navalny’s case calls for calibrated diplomacy. President Obama and Putin have a bilateral summit scheduled in September, and the administration is busily trying to salvage a relationship on the rocks. It would be wrong to let the case impede cooperation in combating terrorism (as the Boston-Chechnya connection reminds us) or the downsizing of nuclear arsenals or possible Russian cooperation in resolving the crises of Syria and Iran, not that much cooperation has been forthcoming so far. But it would be wrong, too, to pretend Navalny’s case didn’t matter.

Personally, I don’t care if the case “impede(s) cooperation in combating terrorism.” But solving Syria, Iran, North Korea, arms control and many other critical issues already gives Obama a long agenda when he sees Putin.

By September, let’s hope, the Boston bombings too will be ancient history.

The Boston bombers Chechen identity has challenged the mainstream media’s terrorist tropes, Leslie Savan writes.