The problem with miscalculating, as the Americans have over Syria, is that you end up mired in double-speak. To translate Kerry’s bizarre “war on terror” rhetoric: if you don’t negotiate with Al Qaida, who have no intention of negotiating with you, then we will increase our support for Al Qaida. In practice, of course, the Americans will come up with some more or less respectable “opposition” leader to front negotiations with Assad but are worried that the Syrians won’t bother to show up since they are winning anyway. The Americans need the peace conference to cover for their defeat

More Help to Rebels If You Do Not Negotiate

John Glaser

Antiwar

Secretary of State John Kerry warned the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad that if it chooses not to participate in upcoming international negotiations aimed at ending the country’s two-year conflict, then “the opposition will be receiving additional support.”

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British journalists of integrity are few and far between: Neil Clark is one of them.

Neil Clark

RT

15th May, 2013

The prospects of a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis is still a long way off. We won’t get an end to the violence until the foreign powers who have been fuelling the conflict, the US included, radically change their policies towards the country.

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Could this be the beginning of the long role-back against corporate encroachments into every aspect of British society and economy. As always there is some unaccountable body, here the so-called The Office of Fair Trading playing a somewhat questionable role. There is an obvious prima facie case for price fixing since pump prices only go up whilst oil prices go up and down. Instead of politician-bashing all the time we urgently need to focus attention on regulatory and supervisory bodies

Telegraph

15th May, 2013

The Prime Minister said he will urgently look at “extending criminal offences” to cover market manipulation in the energy sector, after BP and Shell were raided by European authorities on suspicion of rigging oil prices.

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Austria says UK push to arm Syrian rebels would violate international law

Guardian

14th May, 2013

“Die Briten sind not amused,” is how Die Presse reported it today. “The Brits are not amused.” The Austrian foreign ministry circulated a discussion paper (known in Brussels jargon as a non-paper) among the EU member states yesterday forcefully rebutting British and French arguments for amending the European embargo on Syria to allow weapons shipments to the rebels.

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Cailean Bochanan

13th May, 2013

The Russian position on Syria remains exactly what it always has been but our prime minister, David Cameron is suddenly “heartened” by it.

“British sources say a great deal of work remains to be done and that Russia is far from abandoning support for the Al Assad regime. But the prime minister has high hopes for the peace conference which is designed to involve Syrian rebels and representatives of the Al Assad government.”

Cameron has had a lightening conversion to the idea of talks with the Al Assad government , the same one he has strenuously been trying to overthrow for some time now. We should rejoice that he has seen the light or, rather, seen that there is no light at the end of the tunnel of the unipolar world project. Having sought to surround himself with Churchillian aura at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher he can now demonstrate his understanding of the Churchillian maxim that “politics is the art of the possible”. In doing so he follows in the wake of Obama who has already grasped that the regime change project in Syria, to say nothing of Iran, Russia and China, has no mileage. And for a while Britain, uncharacteristically, seemed to be intent on going it alone with many inept and hot-headed comments emanating from the foreign secretary, William Hague. but now we have, as I say, seen the light and are singing off the same hymn-sheet as the Americans.
This is not just any old policy change but a fundamental and historic shift and as such is fraught with dangers. Certain lobbies, certain elements within the deep and dark recesses of the imperial state will react to an outbreak of peace which could undermine their interests and normal modus operandi. We saw a similar dynamic during the Irish peace process in the nineties when the Irish republican movement was brought in from the cold. Here it is the legitimate government of Syria and behind them Russia who are to be embraced. Russia has truly emerged as a central pillar of the new multipolar world order and it is welcome to see that we are entering into a warm and collaborative relationship with them.
The Syrian peace conference represents the chance of a new beginning, of a multilevel peace process, opening up the possibility of resolving the Palestinian question and , ultimately, a global peace process. This process is both the end of empire and the emergence of the new structures of governance of the post-imperial world. It will, if the Irish process is anything to go by,  be long and torturous. In abandoning our hegemonic pretensions we will seek a series of quid pro quos which will alleviate our distressed economic position and facilitate a relatively soft-landing. Cameron has already begun this by obtaining concessions for British oil interests while negotiating away are support for the Syrian “rebels”. In fact, Cameron with his effortless double-speak and impeccable City of London credentials may be the ideal man to shore up the home front while he “sells out” to the Russians, Chinese et al.
We must prepare for an entirely new political dynamic to emerge. The post-Cold War, post Wolfowitz memorandum saw the burdgeoning power of the unnaccountable state: the think tanks, the lobbies, the Murdoch state within a state- the deep state. In the post-unipolar world we can expect the sovereign state to come to the fore. Already, in the whole period from the Benghazi bombings we have seen the return of the FBI and the federal government whilst Homeland Security is nowhere in sight. This will be strangely unfamilar in the Anglo-Saxon world where democracy is defined as a movement within civil society, against the state, as epitomised in the leftist world-view, rather than as a sovereignist movement. Syria is showing the way here too where precisely such a sovereignist popular movement has defeated our own machinations to create a “state of nature” anarchy.
A new political dynamic means new opportunities for those who have long striven, largely in vain, against a corporate agenda which is in the end inextricably linked to the imperial one. As the imperialists retreat on the Syrian front they will also retreat on their various sinister domestic and environmental agendas. Democracy may become a reality and the term “activist” may shed its defunct ideological, even CIA connotations acquired in the recent period and return to signify the engaged citizen.

M.K.Bhadrakumar

Indian Punchline

12th May, 2013

The British prime minister David Cameron’s weekend visit to Sochi and his meeting with President Vladimir Putin evidently injects new vitality into the Russian-American diplomacy over Syria earlier in the week when the US secretary of state John Kerry paid a “working visit” to Moscow.

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