In These New Times

The Week

17th June, 2013

DAVID CAMERON is looking increasingly isolated in his desire to arm the rebels in Syria after the plan was attacked today by leading Conservative Boris Johnson as “mad” and the BBC reported that President Barack Obama had gone cold on the idea.

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“And no real shift in western policy has occurred either: the US deputy national security adviser has said there will be no escalation in the weapons supplied to the insurgents and that there will be no no-fly zones.”

Alistair Crooke

Guardian

16th June

On examining the US assessment of Syria’s alleged chemical weapons use, Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said: “What was presented to us by the Americans does not look convincing. It would be hard to even call them facts.”

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In a desperate corner and fearing the fate of Erdogan and the Qatari Emir, Morsi decides to rally all his forces to survive

Egyptian president cuts ties with Syria and calls for no-fly zone over country

Guardian

15th June, 2013

Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi said he had cut all diplomatic ties with Damascus on Saturday and called for a no-fly zone over Syria, pitching the most populous Arab state firmly against Bashar al-Assad.

PressTV

16th June, 2013

A former French foreign minister says Britain had been planning a war against Syria some two years before to the unrest broke out in the Arab country.

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The Local

15th June, 2013

Rainer Stinner, the FDP faction speaker, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper on Friday that he was “exceptionally skeptical” that the weapons delivery would help and thinks it would cause more problems than it solves.

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In a rare show of independence Ban Ki Moon quietly pours water on US WMD claims and Obama’s decision to do what he’s already been doing

Anadolu Ajansi

15th June, 2013

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon opposed sending weapons to Syria rebels fighting to topple the country’s president, saying that increasing the flow of arms to either side would not be “helpful.”

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True to form the Guardian simply accepts Obama’s claims on chemical weapons as being true. But it also notes that no game-changing element has been brought into play and hints that the peace conference is still on. The path to peace is a tortuous one but Obama’s only real alternative is full-scale war: the takfirist option has failed militarily and has been an unprecedented propaganda disaster .

Ian Black

Guardian

14th June, 2013

It has taken a long time for the US to confirm that Barack Obama‘s famous “red line” in Syria has in fact been crossed – but it is still unclear whether the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad‘s regime will lead to a significant shift in American and western policy.

Obama’s decision to provide non-specific armed support for the “rebels” may stem from this:

“The Syrian opposition will not agree to take part in the proposed peace conference unless its forces get new weapons, a top opposition military commander told New York Times on Saturday’

Obama needs at least a token “rebel” presence at the peace conference and it would be difficult for them to attend without a bit more enthusiasm for their cause from Obama. At the same time as this response from Fox News shows the cat is out of the bag regarding the truth about the “rebels” and the propaganda war is being lost disastrously. Hence, Obama’s need to “discover’ that Assad has been using WMDs, which everyone knows is complete rubbish, to justify his decision. The support itself is, as Debka has pointed out too, little , too late to make a difference. The “rebels” will  defeated at which point the conference will be convened. The only realistic alternative is a full-scale US intervention which has been repeatedly ruled out by Obama and would be complete madness

Fox News

14th June, 2013

As the White House appeared poised to send military aid to Syrian rebels, new concerns arose that the weapons will inevitably fall into the hands of terrorist groups who count themselves among hundreds of factions that form the rag-tag Free Syrian Army.

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Stratrisks

13th June, 2013

Berlin, (SANA)- German “Die Welt” daily said that only 5% of the armed terrorists in the so-called Free Army are Syrians, while 95% of them are extremist groups which came from several African countries to jihad in Syria backed by the Gulf and Arab countries.