Syria Crisis: Russia, The Peacemonger

[Purveyor]

The myths about the agreement between the United States and Russia on chemical weapons in Syria should not be allowed to distract us from its importance. The idea that Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, could avoid military action by giving up his chemical weapons was more than an “off-the-cuff remark” by John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, on Monday. It had been discussed by Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, Assad’s main sponsor, at the G20 summit the week before (or so it was claimed).
So the idea that President Putin has outsmarted his country’s historical adversary by exploiting Mr Kerry’s “blunder” is mistaken. This is a deal that the US wanted too, and that the world should welcome.

We do not have to be starry-eyed about the prospects of the terms of the deal being met to see that it is a step in the right direction. The deal provides for the destruction of Assad’s chemical arsenal under United Nations supervision by the middle of next year.

Mr Kerry yesterday talked up the prospect of the UN authorising military action if Assad failed to comply, but those words are not in the text of the agreement, and Russia would in any case have to agree that the terms of the deal had been breached.

MORE...

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/syria-crisis-russia-the-peacemonger-8816799.html

[Tx4obama]

1. Pres Obama has been talking to Putin regarding a diplomatic solution re Syria since June 2012

I wonder why the media keeps forgetting to mention that!

-snip-

According to a senior Senate aide, Obama told Democrats that he had asked Kerry to reach out to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and offer the diplomatic solution.

"He mentioned that that occurred during the G-20 meeting (a year ago), when he met with (Russian President Vladimir) Putin -- that he would assign Kerry to discuss diplomatic alternatives," added Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.).

A senior administration official confirmed to The Huffington Post that Obama and Putin first discussed the concept in Los Cabos at the G-20 in June 2012. After the first plenary session, while world leaders were mingling, Obama and Putin went to a corner of the room and spoke for nearly half an hour about Syria.

-snip-

Full article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/10/john-kerry-syria-solution_n_3901863.html

[Pirate Smile]

2. Here's why Russia wanted to stop any US strikes - it's not about peace, it's about not losing their

trump card in the UN. The threat of strikes without UNSC approval flipped their calculus:

Russia’s Syria Calculus: Behind Moscow’s Plan to Avert U.S. Missile Strikes

-snip-
Previously, Syria’s chemical weapons, which are largely based on Russian or Soviet technology, helped defend the Assad regime. “They have served as a certain deterrent against Israel,” says Leonid Kalashnikov, a member of the foreign-affairs committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament. Though Israel has conducted at least one air strike against Assad’s forces during the civil war, the presence of chemical weapons would likely discourage Israel or any other foreign armies from using ground forces in Syria. But after Aug. 21, when the Syrian military was accused of using these weapons against its own people, including hundreds of women and children, they became a major liability — allowing the U.S. to justify its own proposed intervention in Syria.

Russian diplomats say this changed their calculus on Syria’s chemical weapons dramatically. From Moscow’s point of view, a U.S. military strike on Syria would not only cripple its long-standing ally, but it would also undermine Russia’s biggest trump card on the international stage — its veto power in the U.N. Security Council. In the past few days, world leaders have decried the ineffectiveness of the Security Council, which has been unable to pass any meaningful resolutions on Syria because of repeated vetoes from Russia and China. “Two and a half years of conflict in Syria have produced only embarrassing paralysis in the Security Council,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said at a press conference on Monday, Sept. 9. This echoed the frustration of U.S. and European leaders, as well as their allies in the Arab world, who jointly vowed last week to take strong action against Syria even if it means circumventing the U.N.

That would be a dangerous precedent for Russia. Kalashnikov, a lawmaker from the Communist Party, compared it to the incident in 1939 when the League of Nations kicked out the Soviet Union, a permanent member of the organization, in response to the Soviet attack against Finland. This not only hurt the aims of Soviet diplomacy but also precipitated the collapse of the world’s then most powerful intergovernmental organization. “Today you can draw this analogy, because the U.N. and its Security Council can already be called useless,” says Kalashnikov. “That is awful for Russia,” he says, because the Security Council is still Moscow’s main tool in achieving “parity, or at least balance, with the West. And rupturing this balance is not in Russia’s interests.”

With that in mind, Russia set about making itself as useful as possible in the Syrian crisis over the past week, so that it could not be dismissed and sidelined as a spoiler on the international stage. (Indeed, some U.S. experts have begun suggesting the creation of a new club of world leaders that would leave Russia and China out.) The result was this week’s proposal to have Syria put its chemical-weapons stockpiles under international control or even to destroy them. The Russians pushed hard on the Syrian government to accept such a move. “When the Russian side announced it [on the morning of Sept. 9], as far as I understand, our Syrian partners were not yet sure to what extent they were ready to confirm this. But everyone was interested in a quick resolution of this issue,” says Klimov, who has traveled to Syria numerous times during the civil war in his role as chairman of the foreign-affairs committee of Russia’s upper house of parliament.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/09/10/russias-syria-calculus-behind-moscows-plan-to-avert-u-s-missile-strikes/#ixzz2ew3I5sNH