Saturday, June 1, 2013

Sunday Round-Up - June 2, 2013


Syrian Peace Talks in Jeopardy

Wednesday's Guardian reported on the increasing difficulty of getting all the parties to the peace table to end the Syrian conflict: "Plans for Syrian peace talks in Geneva next month appeared in danger of being derailed on Wednesday night as the country's divided opposition movement issued a fresh demand for Bashar al-Assad's government to be excluded from the political process, while Damascus insisted the Syrian president would stay in power until 2014 and possibly beyond...Russia and France also clashed over whether Iran should be allowed to attend the talks, and diplomats suggested that the mid-June target date might have to be pushed back. Turkey warned that if the negotiations failed, it would mark the end of the road for diplomacy and open the gates to the wholesale arming of opposition forces." On the issue of Iran's participation in the talks, the May 19 issue of Al Monitor Week in Review commented: "For the Geneva II conference on Syria to have the best chance of enacting a cease-fire and beginning a transition, Iran needs to be there...It should be a no-brainer to have all parties to a conflict represented at a peace conference. There is no 'transition' in Syria absent a cease-fire, and no cease-fire without Iran, which provides the military and intelligence lifeline to the Assad regime."



A New Arms Race? A New Cold War?

Michael Klare posted an article in Thursday's TomDispatch on the international arms trade titled "The Cold War Redux?" In it, Klare provides some recent examples of "arms deals ...that suggest a fresh willingness on the part of the major powers to use weapons transfers as instruments of geopolitical intrusion and competition." Two such examples of these arms deals are:
 
"In early May, ...Russia ... supplied several batteries of advanced anti-ship cruise missiles to the embattled Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. With those missiles, the Syrians should be in a better position to deter or counter any effort by international forces, including the United States, to aid anti-Assad rebels by sea or mount a naval blockade of Syria."
 
"In April, during a visit to Jerusalem, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a multibillion-dollar arms package for Israel.... At least two of the items, the KC-135 refueling planes and the anti-radiation missiles,...could only be intended for one purpose: bolstering Israel’s capacity to conduct a sustained air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, should it decide to do so."

The recent Global Arms Treaty gave the world some hope to reducing conflict and armed violence but Klare concludes "such expectations will quickly be crushed if the major weapons suppliers, led by the U.S. and Russia, once again come to see arms sales as the tool of choice to gain geopolitical advantage in areas of strategic importance. Far from bringing peace and stability -- as the proponents of such transactions invariably claim -- each new arms deal now holds the possibility of taking us another step closer to a new Cold War with all the heightened risks of regional friction and conflict that entails."

Bachmann Won't Run

On Tuesday night, Michele Bachmann announced her intention to not seek re-election in 2014. Jim Graves, her once and (maybe*) future opponent for the job, said after her announcement: "This is a good day for America." Off-the-deep-end only starts to describe this icon of the lunatic fringe. Known for her outrageous and counter-factual claims about everything from American history to health care to foreign relations, she is "honored" in a May 30 Informed Comment postby Juan Cole titled "Top Ten Michele Bachmann Goofs on the Middle East". Cole notes that "nowhere has she left a trail of mayhem and misinformation more colorful than in regard to the Middle East." From closing the American embassy in Iran (it hasn't existed since 1979) to her "insight" into a plot to give half of Iraq to Iran to her claim that Iraq should reimburse the United States for having invaded and occupied it, the list leads us to wonder as Cole does at one point: "Why she is allowed to serve on the Intelligence Committee, none of us can understand."

* Graves announced Friday that he was indefinitely suspending his 2014 campaign.

The Recession
 

As the Occupy protests become a dim and rather fuzzy memory here in America, conditions in Europe have spawned the Blockupy Movement. As blogged in the Guardian by Graeme Wearden and Katie Allen on Friday: "Thousands of Blockupy demonstrators were out in the rain in Frankfurt to cut off access to the European Central Bank in protest at what they see as its role in imposing austerity measures on southern European nations." The protests come as "Eurozone unemployment hit a fresh record high of 12.2%. Youth unemployment was double that at 24.4%." In another Guardian post on Friday, Larry Elliott warns that "Europe now faces a triple crunch: an interlocking human, economic and political crisis that will have devastating consequences if left unattended" and that the "mistakes now being made in the eurozone mirror those in the United States and Germany early in the Great Depression." Meanwhile in the US, a Federal Reserve report Thursday states that American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth (45%) they lost during the recession. Most of this recovery has been in the form of increased stock prices and Mother Jones quotes a Washington Post reporter: "Recent gains in the stock market mean that the recovery of wealth is nearly complete for white and Asian households and older Americans." I guess he meant older Americans who own a lot of stock. Not good news for anyone else though - especially those whose home was their sole source of wealth. "Because the housing market is improving overall, there is less of an incentive for the government to push any new measures to help underwater homeowners. Prominent economists say that allowing initiatives that would reduce borrowers' loan principle balances is the single most important thing the administration could do to help the Americans who lost all that home wealth."

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