Hillary Clinton makes John Kerry look consistent...
In a sign of [ISIS] confidence, the hitherto secretive Baghdadi made an unprecedented public appearance in the militant-held north Iraq city of Mosul, ordering Muslims to obey him, according to a video distributed online on Saturday.Baghdadi addressed followers in a mosque in Mosul and delivered a Ramadan prayer and call to arms. According to @Francois_Gatete -- here are several excerpts of the video translated into English.
Iraqi Kurdish forces say they have taken full control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk as the army flees before an Islamist offensive nearby. "The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga," Kurdish spokesman Jabbar Yawar told Reuters. "No Iraq army remains in Kirkuk now." Kurdish fighters are seen as a bulwark against Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Today is a travel and meeting day for me. So imagine my consternation to read the comment in the Tip Line from commenter Ragspierre, linking to a National Review post, about Obama's West Point speech today: Have we reached peak strawman…??? I have been an Obama straw man...
Couldn't happen here, but I wish it would....
Foreign fighters recruited by Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are fighting in Syria. What happens when they come home?...
Secretary of State John Kerry issued a statement on Sunday night that blamed the Syrian government for the deadlock in peace talks but asserted that the United States remained “committed to the Geneva process.”Mr. Kerry’s statement followed two rounds of generally fruitless discussions during which the Syrian government continued its attacks on rebel-held areas with crude weapons known as barrel bombs, and came as more than 200,000 Syrians remained cut off from humanitarian assistance.
Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy to the negotiations, underscored the frustration when he apologized to the Syrian people over the weekend and questioned the value of continuing the talks.
The main aim of Mr. Kerry’s statement appeared to be to pressure President Bashar al-Assad and to keep alive the hope that a political settlement might be reached in Syria. He was scheduled to fly on Monday to the United Arab Emirates, which is among the Persian Gulf countries that have supported the rebels.
Kerry's optimism that Bashar Assad would talk himself out of power was naive at best, dangerous at worst. There appears to be no Plan B, as Paul Mirengoff at Power Line notes:
The facts of that event are well-known, but the photographic evidence has been scant. Then, Syria's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood led an uprising centered in Hama, a central city of around 400,000. In response, President Hafez Assad, the father of the current president, ordered 12,000 troops to besiege the city. That force was led by Hafez Assad's brother Rifaat. He supervised the shelling that reduced parts of Hama to rubble. Those not killed in the tank and air assault were rounded up. Those not executed were jailed for years. To this day, the death toll is in dispute and is at best an estimate. Human rights groups, which were not present during the slaughter, have put the toll at around 10,000 dead or more. The Muslim Brotherhood claims 40,000 died in Hama, with 100,000 expelled and 15,000 who disappeared. The number of missing has never been acknowledged by the Syrian leadership.As we know the lessons of the father have been well learned by the son. Kill enough people and no one will make you pay a price. Somehow the UN and Secretary of State John Kerry thought that they could get some sort of agreement to stop the killing in Syria. The latest round of talks ended on Friday, apparently in failure.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia raised expectations in January at a joint news conference in Paris that a way would be found to open humanitarian aid corridors and possibly establish local cease-fires in Aleppo and other cities and towns. But to the dismay of the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations, even those basic steps proved elusive.
Syria has destroyed its declared chemical-weapons production facilities, international inspectors said Thursday, marking a major step in the complex task of ridding the country of the weapons of mass destruction. The declaration came a day before a Nov. 1 deadline as the team overseen by the inspectors hewed to an ambitious schedule for destroying Syria’s entire chemical arsenal by the middle of next year — a far more rapid process than comparable efforts in other countries and one that must be implemented in the middle of a civil war.A week later, Kerry publicly praised Assad.
If Assad wanted to leave power, he could have done so 100,000 dead Syrians ago....
The Iran nuclear deal has significant repercussions. The region’s peoples are the biggest winners from this deal because regional and international forces have been pushing for war with Iran which would have had dangerous repercussions in the region. The deal pushed off the [potential Israeli and US] war [against Iran]. Israel cannot possibly bomb nuclear facilities without the US’ green light. Monopoly of power is no longer present. All American wars have failed. John Kerry made it clear that the US does not want more wars. The US and Europe have failed in the region. It is unlikely that normalization will take place. Iranians wanted to reassure the Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia. [interview in progress, check link for more]More translation at Naharnet:
The killing of at least 70 people around the central town of Homs in the past five days, according to activists, brought to an estimated 1,100 the total toll in Mr. Assad's months-long crackdown and sparked tougher condemnation from the Obama administration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged other Arab states, Russia and China to join in protesting the violence. ... Mrs. Clinton's ambiguity highlights the frustrating U.S. courtship of Bashar al-Assad. For more than two years, Mr. Obama's foreign-policy team has tried to woo Mr. Assad away from America's regional nemesis, Iran, and persuade him to resume peace talks with America's regional friend, Israel. For more than two years, Mr. Assad has frustrated the U.S. with the promise of reform and the practice of repression.One detail in particular about the Obama administration's first term outreach to Syria sticks out, "Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, became Mr. Assad's champion in the U.S., urging lawmakers and policymakers to embrace the Syrian leader as a partner in stabilizing the Mideast." When it came to Syria John Kerry was out in front.
Following a series of military gains, Syrian Kurds in the northeast of the country announced on Tuesday the formation of a transitional autonomous government. The latest declaration comes amid a general strengthening of Kurdish rights in neighboring Turkey, and increasing moves towards independence by Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. Long oppressed under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Kurds view the civil war as an opportunity to gain the kind of autonomy enjoyed by their ethnic kin in neighboring Iraq. The announcement was made after talks in the mostly-Kurdish town of Qamishli, and comes after Kurdish leaders announced plans to create the temporary government in July.Intra-Kurdish rivalries pose a major danger to the autonomy holding. Turkey, which repeatedly has taken military action against Kurdish separatists (resulting in world silence, unlike when Israel defends itself against outside attack), is not pleased:
But you knew that, because we have been following the antics of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for years. Erdogan blames the Jews for Egypt and he has video! (so do we) Turkish Deputy Prime Minister blames “Jewish Diaspora” for Gezi Park protests Turkish Prime Minister drops...
Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region. At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.The article goes on to point out that even Egypt was no longer a priority. In a jab at President Obama's predecessor we learn:
As one former senior White House official put it, “We spent so much damn time navel gazing, and that’s the tragedy of it.”Over the past two years the article describes the various rationales the administration had for not intervening and that sentence turns out to be a very apt theme for the way the administration acted, or, more precisely, chose not to act. Then there was this:
Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.One would have assumed that a Syria policy was one of the two most important foreign policy issues facing the President. (The other is the question of Iran's nuclear policy.) Being "disengaged" during such momentous discussions is worse than being engaged but making bad decisions. https://twitter.com/tobyharnden/status/393025446348349441
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