The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #151984   Message #3560461
Posted By: Jim Carroll
22-Sep-13 - 08:06 PM
Thread Name: BS: chemical weapons in Syria
Subject: RE: BS: chemical weapons in Syria
"are the very same people who are slaughtering civilian men, women and children in Nairobi"
Two places at once - that's clever! -or maybe all Muslims are all the same?
You have evidence that the opposition to Assad are all extremists and we should just let them get on with it I suppose?
Who knows - they may all be gay so you can claim two birds with one stone
Jim Carroll

From last week's Times
NO DOUNTS, BUT ASSAD CAN CARRY ON KILLING
Anthony Lord
Commentary
The Syrian war's mid-term future and the survival of the Assad regime has been decided as much by the timing of yesterday's UN report into the chemical attack in Damascus as by its contents.
Though stopping short of decisively laying blame for the attack on the regime, in its every detail the report suggests beyond reasonable doubt that sarin nerve agent was used and that the regime was responsible. Yet had the finding been released in time to influence parliamentary debate on Britain's intervention — itself a fulcrum event that shaped President Obama's hesitation in launching strikes— punitive military action might have already occurred.
The report's timing has instead dealt a new hand to every player at the diplomatic table, though at the expense of Syrian civilians.
President Assad's survival has been guaranteed, for the while at least, and he can continue to wage war using the same conventional weapons that have killed the vast majority of the 100,000 dead so far.
Russia, Iran and China can feel relief that their ally—whose continued tenure of power is now a default necessity by which to implement the Geneva deal—has bounced back in strength.
In the meantime, Israel, America and Europe, deeply worried as much by the possibility that Syrian chemical weapons might fall into the hands of Islamic radicals as that they may be used again by the regime, may now address those concerns.
The strength of wording in the Security Council resolution being drafted to back the Geneva plan will decide the strategies of each of these players. What it will not influence, though, is the emerging strategic threat posed by thousands of al-Qaeda-linked militants in the country, possibly the greatest conglomeration of radical militants since Afghanistan in the Taleban era.
Nor is it likely to affect the fate of Syria's population, who will continue to face the ravages of war, the rockets, missiles and bullets that allow them to be killed each day in the conventional way.