Your father’s international order, nowhere in sight.
How many warships does it take to remove chemical weapons from Syria? One more this week than it took last week, apparently. If you’re a big, important country with a big, important navy, you want to be involved in the good-citizenship exercise in Syria.
A 31 December deadline for getting some of the chemical stockpile to waiting ships in Latakia was missed, as readers will remember. But it looks like Continue reading “Chinese warship arrives off Syria”
Even greater than JFK?
What a coup it would be, for Team Obama to turn two weeks of dithering and squandering American credibility on the Syria question into a narrative of courage under fire and successful brinkmanship.
Could it happen? It happened for John F. Kennedy. Granted, he had Arthur Schlesinger to write a narrative for him afterward. And his administration did a better job of keeping secrets than the Obama administration does. It was only years later that the public began to realize how big a concession it was to Nikita Khrushchev to resolve the Cuban missile crisis by secretly removing U.S. theater ballistic missiles from Turkey. Continue reading “Obama’s Cuban missile crisis”
It was the regime.
I’ve been hearing about an analysis from Yossef Bodansky, reportedly alluded to by Rush Limbaugh today, in which Bodansky suggests that U.S.-backed rebels were actually behind the chemical attack in east Damascus on 21 August. (Warning: you may not be able to bring the link up on the first try. The avalanche of clicks from Rush’s listeners seems to have the site hammered at the moment.)
I don’t believe the rebels did this (which doesn’t mean I mistake any of them for the Green Mountain Boys or the Bluecoats at Bunker Hill. It just means I don’t think they conducted this attack). The character of the attack continues to finger the Assad regime, a theme developed by France’s recently released national intelligence estimate. If you don’t have the means to read it in French or run translation software on it, Foreign Policy has a pretty good write-up.
Here are the key points from the French assessment Continue reading “Yes, I think Assad did it”
Did they or didn’t they?
Several websites have picked up on a UPI report that the Israeli Air Force attacked a chemical weapons site in the Damascus area on Saturday. The report is unconfirmed by any official source, but it is credible. There are caveats, however.
The site in question, if it was struck, was probably the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), long known to be a key facility in Assad’s chemical and biological weapons program. (See here as well.)
“Mossomo” at Flopping Aces put together an excellent timeline back in February on the events leading up to a previous unconfirmed report that the IAF had struck the SSRC. This strike was reportedly conducted Continue reading “Syria: Israel, at least, is militarily ready”
Toxic.
According to a video reportedly posted by the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian rebels have their own chemical weapons to match Bashar Al-Assad’s – and you get to watch two rabbits die to prove it.
This link is to the video posted at YouTube. But Breitbart has helpfully loaded the video to its post on the topic today, so you don’t have to sign in at YouTube to watch it. Warning: graphic content.
After apparently setting off the chemical agent in a glass box containing the hapless rabbits, the speaker in the video issues this warning (translation cited at Breitbart):
You saw what happened? This will be your fate,
The Optimistic Conservative 