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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