Thread: Syria crisis: Russia and China step up warning over strike

BBC
8/27/2013

Syria crisis: Russia and China step up warning over strike

The UN Security Council is divided, with Russia and China opposing military intervention and the UK and France warning that the UN could be bypassed if there was "great humanitarian need".

The UN team spoke to witnesses and survivors in Muadhamiya

Russia and China have stepped up their warnings against military intervention in Syria, with Moscow saying any such action would have "catastrophic consequences" for the region.

The US and its allies are considering launching strikes on Syria in response to deadly attacks last week.
The US said there was "undeniable" proof of a chemical attack, on Monday.

UN chemical weapons inspectors are due to start a second day of investigations in the suburbs of Damascus.
The UN team came under sniper fire as they tried to visit an area west of the city on Monday.

A spokesman for UK Prime Minister David Cameron says the UK is making contingency plans for military action in Syria.
Mr Cameron has cut short his holiday and returned to London to deal with the Syrian crisis.

Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich has called on the international community to show "prudence" over the crisis and observe international law.

"Attempts to bypass the Security Council, once again to create artificial groundless excuses for a military intervention in the region are fraught with new suffering in Syria and catastrophic consequences for other countries of the Middle East and North Africa," he said in a statement.

Late on Monday, the US said it was postponing a meeting on Syria with Russian diplomats, citing "ongoing consultations" about alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Hours later, Russia expressed regret about the decision. The two sides had been due to meet in The Hague on Wednesday to discuss setting up an international conference on finding a political solution to the crisis.

The Russian deputy defence minister, Gennady Gatilov said working out the political parameters for a resolution on Syria would be especially useful, with the threat of force hanging over the country.

UN chemical weapons inspectors spent nearly three hours in the suburb of Muadhamiya in western Damascus on Monday.

On Monday, Mr Cameron spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin who said there was no evidence yet that Syria had used chemical weapons against rebels, Mr Cameron's office said.

The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said Western powers were rushing to conclusions about who may have used chemical weapons in Syria before UN inspectors had completed their investigation.

UN visit Both the Syrian government and rebels have blamed each other for last Wednesday's attacks.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said three hospitals it supported in the Damascus area had treated about 3,600 patients with "neurotoxic symptoms", of whom 355 had died.

Models for possible intervention

• Iraq 1991: US-led global military coalition, anchored in international law; explicit mandate from UN Security Council to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait
• Balkans 1990s: US arms supplied to anti-Serb resistance in Croatia and Bosnia in defiance of UN-mandated embargo; later US-led air campaign against Serb paramilitaries. In 1999, US jets provided bulk of 38,000 Nato sorties against Serbia to prevent massacres in Kosovo - legally controversial with UN Security Council resolutions linked to "enforcement measures"
• Somalia 1992-93: UN Security Council authorised creation of international force with aim of facilitating humanitarian supplies as Somali state failed. Gradual US military involvement without clear objective culminated in Black Hawk Down disaster in 1993. US troops pulled out
• Libya 2011: France and UK sought UN Security Council authorisation for humanitarian operation in Benghazi in 2011. Russia and China abstained but did not veto resolution. Air offensive continued until fall of Gaddafi

• Models for possible intervention

US officials said there was "little doubt" that President Bashar al-Assad's government was to blame.

UN inspectors spent nearly three hours in the western district of Muadhamiya on Monday where they visited two hospitals and interviewed survivors, eyewitnesses and doctors.

A UN spokesman said they had collected some samples.

Earlier in the day, the UN convoy came under fire from unidentified snipers and was forced to turn back before resuming its journey.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the shooting and asked the UN team in Syria to register a complaint.

'Accountability'

In the most forceful US reaction yet, US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday described the recent attacks in the Damascus area as a "moral obscenity".

He said the delay in allowing UN inspectors to the sites was a sign the Syrian government had something to hide.

He said Washington had additional information about the attacks that it would make public in the days ahead.

"What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality," Mr Kerry said at a news conference on Monday.

"Make no mistake, President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world's most heinous weapons against the world's most vulnerable people."


John Kerry: "There is a clear reason that the world has banned entirely the use of chemical weapons"

Washington has recently bolstered its naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean and military leaders from the US, UK and their allies have convened a meeting in Jordan.

Analysts believe the most likely US action would be sea-launched cruise missiles targeting Syrian military installations.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on Monday the West had not produced any proof that President Assad's forces had used chemical weapons.

He was responding to suggestions from some Western countries that military action against the Syrian government could be taken without a UN mandate.

Mr Lavrov said the use of force without Security Council backing would be "a crude violation of international law".

Earlier, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague told the BBC an international military response to the suspected use of chemical weapons would be possible without the backing of the UN.

The UN Security Council is divided, with Russia and China opposing military intervention and the UK and France warning that the UN could be bypassed if there was "great humanitarian need".

In a column in The Times newspaper, former UK PM Tony Blair has written that if the West does not intervene to support freedom and democracy in Egypt and Syria, the Middle East will face catastrophe

The UN says more than 100,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Assad began more than two years ago. The conflict has produced more than 1.7 million registered refugees.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23845800

Syria says Kerry is a liar...

... Denies chemical attacks

Vows to defend itself if attacked...

Press corps blurs Obama's 'red line'...

Peace envoy Blair on super-yacht in Med...

POLL: 9% support military action...

We should listen to Russia and China on this and keep our noses OUT of Syria! Obama promised to bring our troops home, which he hasn't done, and now he's going to send more to the Middle East!!! In spite of their use of chemical weapons, attacking Syria is the absolute worst thing we can do right now!!

Originally Posted by imblest

We should listen to Russia and China on this and keep our noses OUT of Syria! Obama promised to bring our troops home, which he hasn't done, and now he's going to send more to the Middle East!!! In spite of their use of chemical weapons, attacking Syria is the absolute worst thing we can do right now!!

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We see a pattern here of scandalized U.S. presidents creating wars to detract impeachment away from them in their times of deepest public disapproval ratings. It boosts their approval and removes the heat of impeachment at the same time. A winning combination!

Flashback: BBC News uses ‘Iraq photo to illustrate Syrian massacre’

Jerome R. Corsi - Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies

Originally Posted by HAPPY2BME

-----------------------------------

We see a pattern here of scandalized U.S. presidents creating wars to detract impeachment away from them in their times of deepest public disapproval ratings. It boosts their approval and removes the heat of impeachment at the same time. A winning combination!

Flashback: BBC News uses ‘Iraq photo to illustrate Syrian massacre’


Jerome R. Corsi - Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies

Can I vent here? I just wanted to say,

"F*** THE PRESIDENT, F*** THIS GOVERNMENT, F*** ALL THE POLITICIANS IN DC! NO ONE THERE REPRESENTS US. THEY CAN CALL GO TO HELL!!!"

There. Feel much better. And all of you NSA creeps reading this can go to hell too.

When the f*** are we going to wake the f*** up??? In 100years? What is it going to take for the sheeple to wake up????

All this will accomplish is further destablization in the middle east, higher oil prices, the lowering of American crediblity even further on the world stage (more gunboat deplomacy). Relations with China will stay the same, but we're entering a new cold war era with Russia. Add this to the long list of American Foriegn policy failures based on securing oil rights for banking interest, chiefly the Rothchilds.

Obama’s Red Line: Will It be Drawn by American Blood?



Dr. Sharon Schuetzview more articles
27 August 201317:20

By: Dr. Sharon SchuetzGeorge Bush will go down in history as beloved/hated, and highly controversial president. During most of his presidency, he insisted that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”, or WMD and that we had to go in and get them. He was convinced that Saddam Hussein had them because everyone knew he had used chemical weapons in the 1980s against his own people. He also had large biological and nuclear weapons programs, although they never found any bombs.

By late 2003, after failing to find evidence of WMD, many of Bush’s strongest defenders started to question whether he had been right. When Julian Assange of WikiLeaks’, released his large cache of nearly 400,000 Iraq war documents, he revealed that U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction for years.In August 2004, American troops bought containers from Iraqi civilians of what they thought was liquid sulfur mustard, a blister agent, the documents revealed. When they discovered what it was, they triple-sealed the containers and took them to a secure site. That same year troops found a chemical lab in a home, in Fallujah, and they also found a chemical cache in the same city during that time.Many believed that it was one of 550 shells the Saddam Hussein couldn’t account for in his weapons declaration of 2003. He also failed to account for 450 aerial bombs with mustard gas. In all, there was about 80 tons of mustard gas gone.

The 155 howitzer can launch high capacity shells over several miles; current models used by the United States can fire shells as far as 14 miles. One official told Fox News that a conventional 155-mm shell could hold as much as “two to five” liters of sarin, which is capable of killing thousands of people under the right conditions in highly populated areas.”According to the White House the “chain of custody” of the chemicals is not clear, and intelligence analysts can’t verify the circumstances under which the sarin was used, including the role of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.The Obama administration said it is working to gather more information on the reports, and called for a thorough United Nations investigation into what happened. “Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our own recent experience, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient — only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making,” the letter said.In January, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “if the Syrians did want to use their chemical weapons, the U.S. military could do little to stop them.

“The effort or the act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable, because you would have to have such clarity of intelligence, persistent surveillance, you’d have to actually see it before it happened, and that’s unlikely, to be sure.”

In April General Dempsey, told Congress that he didn’t feel confident that the U.S. forces could secure the chemical weapons caches within Syria because they’ve been moving it and it’s been put in too many sites.

“The administration disclosure came two days after Secretary of State John Kerry urged NATO members to prepare for the possible use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime…”The Syrian Free Army leader General Salim Idrissreported to CNN in April that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in various places, including Homs, Aleppo, and Otaiba, near Damascus.Doctors examined some of the people exposed to chemicals. They also took soil and blood samples that clearly showed Syria had used chemical weapons.

Everyone agrees that someone in Syria has crossed the “red line” again, and they are discussing it at the highest levels of government. The United States is divided. This is the second time in just a few months that someone supposedly gassed the Syrian population. The question on everyone’s mind is, by who? Russia says it was the al-Qaeda backed rebels and Obama says Assad did it. Sadly, the American people can’t believe a word that comes out of Obama’s mouth, and many believe the Russian leader, Putin. Will we ever find out who gassed the Syrian population? I don’t know, but we can be sure of one thing. Barack Obama’s red line will soon have a lot of blood spilled on it, and, unfortunately, it looks like much of it will be American.

Meet the Author Dr. Sharon Schuetz


Dr. Sharon Schuetz has written 47 post in this blog.Dr. Sharon Schuetz has a PhD in clinical Christian counseling. She was Administrator for Cornerstone University, Lake Charles, LA while teaching the graduate program classes for two-years. She served as the national Women’s Ministry Director for her denomination's and District Youth President for the state New Mexico. She organized and spoke at youth camps, marriage retreats, and women's retreats. Dr. Schuetz had a local weekly television show, in Farmington NM Issues of Our Time, where she interviewed state and local politicians, educators, as well as leaders from Indian tribes. Dr. Schuetz counseled abused and neglected children and teens for the Four Corners Home for Children in Farmington, NM. This was the state's largest children’s home. She has helped hundreds of couples build stronger relationships through counseling, seminars, workshops, conferences, retreats, and books. She and her husband, Michael have three children and nine grandchildren. She and her husband, Michael, recently found out that grandbaby #10 is on the way.

Dr. Schuetz is a former writer for PolitiChicks.tv.

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