Iran in focus ....
Not that this is over with, however, it’s business as usual, and for Israel that means insisting that the latest round of talks proves the need for a war. Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz is demanding that the US and other Western nations immediately issue an ultimatum to Iran to submit entirely or face invasion.
Syria in focus.....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22045451
The number of Syrian refugees in Zaatari camp is expected to rise to 1.2 million by the end of 2013
Israel: US, West Must Threaten to Attack Iran Within Next Month
Steinitz: Iran Must Halt Entire Program or Face Attack
by Jason Ditz, April 07, 2013
The latest round of talks between the P5+1 and Iran came screeching to a halt this weekend when Iran offered a proposal to settle the issue once and for all, a proposal which appears to have made Western nations, which were hoping to milk these do-nothing summits for many more years, exceedingly uncomfortable.
Not that this is over with, however, it’s business as usual, and for Israel that means insisting that the latest round of talks proves the need for a war. Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz is demanding that the US and other Western nations immediately issue an ultimatum to Iran to submit entirely or face invasion.
Steinitz’s comments center on a long-standing divide between the US and Israel on whether the regular US threats to attack Iran are enough, or if threatening them somewhat more often and with more specificity would be a better idea.
Steinitz wants this next round of threats to be really specific, insisting the US must set a red line of Iran totally abandoning its civilian nuclear program in “a few weeks, a month” at the most, and that it would face immediate attack if it did not do so.
The US seems to be taking the bait, with Secretary of State John Kerry reiterating that the talks “cannot last forever.” Since the US seems uncomfortable with the idea of ever accepting a deal with Iran, it seems the only alternatives left are to start a war or just talk forever.
The threats may set the stage for the coveted “June war” that Israeli officials have talked up in the past, but the who process must not be overstated, since of course every single time the P5+1 meets with Iran it is followed by a flurry of hysterical war-mongering, instigated by some Israeli official or another, and doesn’t necessarily mean anything beyond those officials hoping to score points with their hawkish constituents.
Syria in focus.....
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2013-04/05/c_132285245.htm
|
| English.news.cn 2013-04-05 06:03:04 |        |
DAMASCUS, April 4 (Xinhua) -- Amid reports that Syria has turned the main destination of the world's Jihadists, Damascus warned that unless those Jihadists are denied access, the crisis it has sustained for over two years will spill over across its border and set the entire region ablaze.
Syria, via its state-controlled newspaper al-Thawra, warned Jordan on Thursday against training foreign fighters on its territory and accused it of espousing the policy of a double ambiguity.
Al-Thawra said Jordan is now "closely feeling the meaning of drowning into anarchy, which even does not need a matchstick to ignite in all directions." It added that Jordan is getting closer to the "volcanic crater."
The report came just two days after the Washington Post said the United Stats is currently training some 3,000 rebels in Jordan to send them later to Syria "to escalate the crisis."
A new study conducted by the International Center for Studies on extremism at King's College in London said the number of European fighters, who joined the armed terrorist groups in Syria, has exceeded 600.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Ukashevic stressed that Syria's turning into a magnet for international terrorists has become a terrifying reality, expressing Moscow's deep concern over the news about the involvement of people from other countries in terrorist acts in Syria.
Ukashevic stressed that his country will continue its hectic efforts to begin urgent political settlement in Syria, pointing out that Moscow has made it clear to its Western and international partners the dangers of encouraging the opposition to rely on a military solution to the Syrian crisis.
The unrest in Syria spilled over into neighboring Lebanon once again this week, with reports saying a Syrian helicopter had fired two rockets into the outskirts of the Lebanese town of Ersal in the Beka'a Valley without causing any casualty.
Since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, the Lebanese government has officially sought to distance the country from the conflict. However, several deadly clashes have erupted between pro- and anti-President Bashar al-Assad's government.
Syria has often complained that gunmen are crossing via several sites along the long joint borders into Syria to carry out terrorist acts in the country, and there are daily reports in Syria's official media about the army foiling infiltration attempts by gunmen from Lebanon. It has furthermore warned that its jet fighters will cross the borders and target those terrorists inside Lebanon.
So as to stop the extremist fighters from damaging the stability of the entire region, some countries have started to take actions. For instance, Tunisia has pledged to continue hunting extremist groups at a time when the authorities have started taking security measures to prevent the travel of young Tunisians across Libya to join the armed groups in Syria.
and....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22045451
UN agency 'broke' as Syria refugee funds run out
The number of Syrian refugees in Zaatari camp is expected to rise to 1.2 million by the end of 2013
A UN agency has said it will soon be unable to provide "life-saving" aid to Syrian refugees in Jordan and other countries due to funds running out.
"The needs are rising exponentially and we are broke," said Marixie Mercado, a spokeswoman for children's charity Unicef.
Some 1.2 million Syrians have fled since the uprising began in March 2011.
Around 385,500 have escaped to Jordan, with figures set to triple by the end of the year, Ms Mercado said.
This would bring the number of Syrian refugees there close to 1.2 million - the equivalent of one-fifth of Jordan's total population.
"Since the beginning of year, more than 2000 refugees have streamed across the border [into Jordan] every day," Ms Mercado told reporters at a UN news conference in the Swiss city of Geneva on Friday.
"We expect these numbers to more than double by July and triple by December."
Many of the refugees are children, the spokeswoman added.
'Unmanageable'
Unicef is currently providing water, sanitation, vaccines, education and other essential services in Jordan's Zaatari camp, which houses nearly 150,000 refugees.
So far the agency has only received $12m (£7.8m), or 19%, of the $57m it appealed for to fund its Jordan operations this year.
As a result, it will soon need to "scale back life-saving support", Ms Mercado said.
"In concrete terms, this means that by June, we will stop delivering 3.5m litres of water every day to Zaatari camp."
She added that the money shortage also meant Unicef would be unable to provide supplies to two new camps slated to open in the coming weeks.
UN officials said the lack of funding did not only apply to Jordan, but also to other countries hosting large numbers of Syrian refugees, including Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq.
The head of the UN's refugee agency, UNHRC, echoed Ms Mercado's warning, saying Syria's conflict was on the verge of overwhelming the UN.
"This is the type of crisis that humanitarian agencies at some point cannot handle," Filippo Grandi told the New York Times on Thursday.
"It is unmanageable and dangerous."
The UN estimates that at least 70,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began, just over two years ago.
Libya in focus....
http://www.libyaherald.com/2013/04/06/libya-has-split-into-three-parts-vladimir-putin/
Libya has “split into three parts”: Vladimir Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin interviewed ahead of his visit to Hannover this weekend by ARD’s Chief Editor Jörg Schönenborn (Photo: ARD video clip)
Tripoli, 6 April 2013:
The Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Libya has “split into three parts” as a result of the revolution.
Comparing the situation in Syria with that of other countries where there had been change, he said in a television interview with German public broadcasting corporation ARD that as a result of the changes in the region aided by Western governments, it was “unclear where Libya will go. In fact, it has already split into three parts.”
Bashir Assad should stay, he said in the interview broadcast yesterday, Friday, ahead of his visit to Hannover Fair in Germany this weekend. Russia did not want to see the same situation in Syria as had happened in other Arab countries where there had been dramatic changes which he blamed on the West. “We do not want to have the situation of the same difficulty as we still have in Iraq. We do not want to have the situation of the same difficulty as in Yemen, and so on.”
Putin did not say what the three parts in Libya were, although he was probably referring to the country’s historic regions: Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan.
Despite the demands by Cyrenaica federalists for a return to the 1951 constitution, they and few others in Libya do not want to split the country.
It is not clear if the Russian president’s misrepresentation of the political reality in Libya was deliberate, in an attempt to justify Russia’s support for the Assad regime, or the result of genuine if willful ignorance.
Militants storm hospital lab
Benghazi, 5 April 2013:
A group of 25 militiamen, reported to be members of Ansar Al-Sharia, forced their way into the laboratory testing centre of Benghazi Medical Centre (BMC) yesterday morning, Thursday. They claimed that there were out of date materials on the premises.
Orthopedic specialist at the centre, Dr Salem Naqqi, said that staff and patients alike were shocked at the intrusion which forced staff to stop work and leave, according to Solidarity Press. The laboratory was closed for three hours as a result.
Naqqi was reported as saying that SSC guards had unsuccessfully tried to prevent the intruders for entering.
The militiamen reportedly found some equipment that had an expiry date of two day’s earlier – 2 April 2013. However, the doctor said these were not used on patients. In any event such materials, he noted, could be used for between six months and a year after expiry date, and the GNC’s medical committee were aware of it.
Expressed resentment at the storming of the laboratory, Naqqi said the closure had put the lives of patients in intensive care patients at risk because of delayed test results.
An incident such as this, he said, shook the public confidence in the BMC. The laboratory was a sterile environment, he added, and should never be entered, let alone stormed, by anyone without official permission. He added that it contained classified patient information which should never be compromised.
If anyone had complaints, he said, they should submit them to the professional bodies responsible who could then take necessary action.
TV news strike over militia guards
Tripoli, 3 April 2013:
There were still no live broadcasts last night from Al-Wataniya, the state TV news channel, after staff went on indefinite strike at the behaviour of the militia guarding their building.
According to one broadcaster, quoted by Associated Press, an employee was seriously assaulted by one of the militiamen and the formation’s commander dismissed the complaint and refused to investigate. Another worker at the station, said the assault was the culmination of a string of incidents.
Staff have declared they are no longer content to have their offices protected by an armed group that is supposedly under government control. They have vowed that they will only return to work when police or army units have replaced the militiamen. Yesterday (Tuesday), the station was broadcasting archive recordings. The channel’s management have so far declined to comment.
Tripoli gunmen free murder suspect
By Ashraf Abdul-Wahab.
Tripoli, 4 April 2013:
Gunmen today attacked a police vehicle today, Thursday, which was taking a murder suspect from Tripoli’s Bab Ben Gashir police station to the public prosecutor’s office nearby. Armed with Kalashnikovs, which they reportedly started firing into the air, as well as RPG firearms, they seven assailants forced the police to hand over the suspect and then escaped with him in two 4X4 vehicles.
The suspect, who has been allegedly linked to a number of murders of revolutionaries during the revolution and other killings since, is now the leader of a “brigade” of his own but which has no legal status.
He was arrested on Tuesday in the capital’s Bu Sleem district, a day after the Justice Minister Salah Al-Marghani declared that illegal brigades would be pursued and brought to justice if involved in crimes.
Meanwhile, also today, masked gunmen attacked the police station in Bu Sleem. They dowsed the interrogation and investigation section where evidence is kept with petrol and set fire to it.
The police are not formally linking the two incidents, however, the centre is where the suspect was first interrogated.
http://original.antiwar.com/lobe/2013/04/05/libya-intervention-more-questionable-in-rear-view-mirror/
Libya Intervention More Questionable in Rear View Mirror
by Jim Lobe, April 06, 2013
While the tenth anniversary last month of Washington’s invasion of Iraq provoked overwhelmingly negative reviews of the adventure except among its most die-hard neo-conservative proponents, a more recent – albeit far less dramatic and costly – intervention has faded almost completely from public notice.
Nonetheless, nearly 18 months after Western-backed rebels killed Moammar Gaddafi in the city of Sirte, the intervention by the U.S. and its NATO allies in the civil war in Libya appears increasingly costly on several levels.
That assessment applies not only to Libya and its North African neighbours, especially Mali, but also to relations among the great powers – most immediately with respect to Syria, where Russia and China have firmly resisted any western effort in the U.N. Security Council to undermine the government of President Bashar al-Assad or support the insurgency against him.
While the decision of China’s new president, Xi Jinping, to make his first overseas visit to Russia last month was by no means attributable only – or even primarily – to Western intervention in Libya, their strong objections to the way NATO interpreted a Security Council resolution to protect civilian lives as licence for “regime change” in Tripoli certainly contributed to a renewed sense of solidarity between the two former Communist rivals.
“We are living through an era of flux and change,” Xi told a university audience in Moscow in a thinly veiled reference to the West. “No country or bloc of countries can again single-handedly dominate world affairs.” For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the two countries’ “strategic partnership” on the Security Council.
Indeed, the Libya precedent was even evoked during this week’s crisis on the Korean Peninsula.
“This land is neither the Balkans nor Iraq and Libya,” boasted the official North Korean news agency in a reference to three other recent U.S. interventions against countries that, unlike Pyongyang, either lacked or, like Gaddafi, abandoned their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons that could presumably have been used to deter external attack.
Acting on a verbal threat by Gaddafi to exterminate rebels in their stronghold of Benghazi in the early stages of the civil war, the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 1973 by a vote of 10-0 with five abstentions – Russia, China, Germany, Brazil, and India – on Mar. 17, 2011.
Pursuant to the emerging “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) legal doctrine, the resolution authorised member nations to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians under threat of attack, including by creating a “no-fly zone” over the country’s air space.
As the civil war intensified – albeit inconclusively – over the following months, however, some Arab and key Western governments, notably Britain, France, and the U.S., took more aggressive measures in support of the rebels. These ranged from on-the-ground training to supplying arms and providing real-time tactical intelligence, until Tripoli fell in late August and Gaddafi was killed two months later.
Thus, an operation undertaken purely for humanitarian reasons eventually became one dedicated to regime change.
While a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits is premature, an initial balance sheet would appear to confirm the notion that military intervention often reaps unintended – and negative – consequences.
On the positive side with respect to Libya itself, a long-ruling and ruthless dictator is no longer in power, and the country’s oil production has bounced back with surprising speed.
On the other hand, the central government has proved unable to reassert its control over much of the nation, leaving a huge security vacuum filled by a multitude of militias – including radical Islamists who may have been responsible for the killing of the U.S. ambassador and two of his staff in Benghazi last September.
“Libya has gone from being a tyrannical state to being barely a state at all,” according to Robert Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in an article published Thursday “…(A) descent into worse chaos cannot be ruled out.”
That vacuum also permitted the wholesale looting of Gaddafi’s massive arsenals. “The weapons proliferation that we saw coming out of the Libyan conflict was of a scale greater than any previous conflict – probably ten times more weapons than we saw going on the loose in places like Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan,” Peter Bouckhert of Human Rights Watch told the Washington Post earlier this year.
That looting resulted in the first instance in the destabilisation of Mali where Tuareg mercenaries previously employed by Gaddafi returned home to northern Mali, quickly evicted the army, which, in turn, overthrew Bamako’s democratically elected government.
With the intervention of French and Chadian military forces earlier this year, Bamako has since retaken control of the more populous parts of northern Mali. But the region, now being patrolled by U.S. drones, is still subject to attack by Islamist forces aligned with Al-Qaeda, and the country’s future and unity remain uncertain at best.
Nor has Mali and other Sahelian countries been the only destination for Gaddafi’s former arsenal.
Substantial amounts of Libyan weapons have been traced to Syria, fuelling that civil war, and to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where Bedouin tribes – some with ties to radical Islamists – have defied local authorities and occasionally even challenged the army in the tumultuous post-Mubarak period.
But the Libyan intervention may have wrought its most consequential damage on great-power relations, particularly with respect to the prospects for future agreement among the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to authorise military intervention in civil wars, even for humanitarian purposes.
“The operation took place under the auspices of the Responsibility to Protect,” noted Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “but it turned into a mission of regime change, and that has made the Russians and Chinese feel that they were deceived.
“And that perception in Moscow and Beijing has fed into their position on Syria and makes it unlikely that China and Russia will anytime soon again approve a humanitarian intervention,” he told IPS.
And just as North Korea feels Gaddafi’s fate vindicated its decision to risk international isolation by building a nuclear weapon, hard-liners in Iran, who are convinced that Washington also seeks to overthrow the Islamic Republic, have been citing the Libya precedent in the run-up to this week’s talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan, with the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, to argue against any concessions on the fate of its nuclear programme.
According to former top CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar, Iranian leaders have only to look at Washington’s intervention in Libya “…that overthrew a Middle Eastern regime after it had reached an agreement with the United States to give up all its nuclear and other unconventional weapons program.
“In hindsight, the intervention in Libya makes clear that even interventions that appear successful in the short term can have negative knock-on effects that call into question their value,” according to Kupchan.
and...
http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/true-costs-of-iraq-war-whitewashed-by-fuzzy-maths#full
True costs of Iraq War whitewashed by fuzzy maths
'So many', wrote TS Eliot, reflecting on the waste land left by the First World War. "I had not thought death had undone so many."
This notion is unlikely to cross the minds of those surveying the devastation left by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most frequently quoted fatality figure - about 115,000 Iraqis killed - is shocking. But compared to major conflicts of the past century, it is a relatively modest toll. The 1916 battle of the Somme alone killed three times as many. More than that were killed by a single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.
Former British prime minster Tony Blair, and then-US vice president Dick Cheney, were perhaps conscious of this when they expressed "no regrets" on the 10th anniversary of the war last month.
That the perpetrators of an aggressive war should accept the lowest costs for their folly is unsurprising. What is less explicable is why so many supposed critics of the war are crediting the same estimate. Brown University's Costs of War project and the Centre for American Progress's Iraq War Ledger use it as their main source.
This is particularly puzzling when there are two peer-reviewed epidemiological surveys that give a far more comprehensive accounting of the war's human cost. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Survey published in the Lancet, and the Iraq Public Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, gave figures of 655,000 and 400,000 excess deaths respectively. (Both were concluded in June 2006, a month before the violence peaked, suggesting the actual toll is even higher).
It is odder still that when epidemiological surveys have come to be accepted as the standard method for estimating conflict fatalities - the method has been used without controversy in Congo, Bosnia and Darfur - an exception is made in the case of Iraq.
The method involves a household survey to establish current mortality rates and comparing them with pre-war ones. The difference, extrapolated for the whole population, yields an estimate of the number of people who would still be alive had the war not happened.
By comparison, the most commonly cited source, the UK-based online initiative Iraq Body Count (IBC), uses a passive surveillance method to estimate what it calls "violent civilian deaths", relying mainly on media reports, initially only in the English language. Current total: between 111,842 and 122,326.
Distinguishing a civilian from a combatant in an urban war zone is itself a fraught business. But the IBC methodology makes two further assumptions that raise questions: that war kills only by violence, and that the media records every death in every part of the country.
If we accept the first assumption, then we would also have to revise our estimates of history's other major atrocities. Those who died of exhaustion or starvation during the Nazi death marches cannot be considered casualties of war using IBC criteria since they did not die of violence. One would also have to omit those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising since, by virtue of taking up arms, they forfeited their right to be counted.
War in most cases means collapse of state institutions and health care systems; it means social disintegration, food shortages and lawlessness. It kills by starvation, scarcity, contamination, shock, abandonment - and a host of other causes that don't involve bullets. There was a four-fold increase in traffic accidents alone in the years following the invasion of Iraq. IBC's methods make no allowances for such consequences.
Page 2 of 2
The second assumption appears to ignore both Iraqi reality and media practices. No journalist made a commitment to report every death in Iraq. Most were based in politically significant locations. During the most violent period, all but a few were confined to Baghdad's Green Zone. There is no reason to assume that every violent death, let alone every war-related death, was being reported.
Despite such limitations, IBC has become the primary, if not the only, reference for Iraqi deaths. It speaks to the political serviceability of its numbers. It also speaks to a lack of seriousness among its user about establishing the actual costs of war. The manner in which the Lancet study has been buried attests to this.
It is telling that the critics of the Lancet study are mainly journalists, politicians and bureaucrats. On the other hand, the study was endorsed by scientists, statisticians, epidemiologists and, in internal discussions, even some government officials.
The soundness of the method and the rigour of the Lancet's research were acknowledged by Sir Roy Anderson, the British Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser. In an internal memo obtained by the BBC, Mr Anderson wrote: "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to 'best practice'."
One can understand the appeal of IBC for the credulous, the conformist, the cowardly or the plain ignorant. But there is no excuse for those who have allowed Iraq's dead to be erased rather than buried.
The solemnity of even a single headstone can be a poignant warning against the folly of war. But there can't be an epitaph on a grave that does not exist. Every Iraq dead must be counted.
No comments:
Post a Comment