WarSclerotic

Obama’s Appeasement Speech On War Only Emboldens Jihadist Enemy – Investors.com.

War On Terror: As jihadists bomb Boston, behead a soldier in London and firebomb police in Sweden, President Obama has decided America’s actions have offended them and it’s time to retreat.

In arguably the weakest national security speech by a commander in chief, Obama denied Thursday that our terrorist enemy is inspired by Islam — while at the same time appeasing Islamic critics by apologizing for drone strikes and agreeing to throttle back on such precision bombings, and close down the terrorist prison at Guantanamo.

He vowed to wind down further military actions in the war on terror, arguing he can protect America through law enforcement actions, instead, as if the threat comes from bank robbers or other common criminals.

His mea culpas and capitulations will only embolden the Islamist enemy. In case you missed the interminably long and rambling speech, here are some of its many pusillanimous lowlights:

• “Force alone cannot make us safe. We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war — through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments — will prove self-defeating.”

• “So the next element of our strategy involves addressing the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism.”

• “In Iraq and Afghanistan … thousands of civilians have been killed.”

• “Much of the criticism about drone strikes understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties … It is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties. And for the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss … those deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred throughout conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

• “By the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection (in the Afghanistan theater), and the progress we’ve made against core al-Qaida will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.”

• “America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists; our preference is always to detain, interrogate and prosecute.”

• “America does not take (drone) strikes to punish individuals” for past terrorist acts; “we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people.”

• “Targeted action against terrorists, effective partnerships, diplomatic engagement and assistance — through such a comprehensive strategy we can significantly reduce the chances of large-scale attacks on the homeland.”

Israpundit » Blog Archive » Obama’s willful blindness.

By Michael Ledeen, PJ MEDIA

He’s actually getting worse. This president will not admit that we are in a war, as President George W. Bush defined it, with various terrorist organizations and with countries that support them. In his overlong, rambling speech to the National Defense University on terrorism and national security, the president never even mentioned Iran, which happens to be our main enemy and the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism. Not one word.

You may well ask how it is possible for the president to talk about his counterterrorism “strategy” without addressing the main source of terrorism. You would be right to ask, and you should also ask how it is possible that, so far as I can see, not one of the pundits, experts and commentators noticed the omission. They were so busy with the future of Gitmo and where captured terrorists should be tried, and how many drones can fit on the head of a jihadi, that they missed the biggest thing.

Talk about a dog that didn’t bark!

The speech was bizarre, to put it mildly. It was often incoherent, as when he gritted his teeth and actually admitted that there is an ideological conflict between us and the terrorists. “Most…of the terrorism we face,” he said, ”is fueled by a common ideology…that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West.” Without taking a deep breath, he hastily added that the “common ideology” was “based on a lie.” Why? Because “the United States is not at war with Islam…”

It’s typical of the president’s world-view that he would assume any such war to be instigated by us, but in this case the jihadis have it right, and he’s got it backwards. There is indeed a war, it is theirs, the jihadis’ war, and they are waging it because they firmly believe they are commanded to do so by the Almighty. They aim to destroy or dominate Western infidels and apostates. Those commands are in the Koran, and are repeated by a great mass of imams, ayatollahs and mullahs. Those thousands of Iranians or Hezbollahis who chant “death to America” mean just that. It’s the reason for their jihad against us.

But President Obama could not bring himself to mention that. Indeed, the one time he used the words “violent jihad” he wasn’t talking about the Quds Force, or Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad, or the other terrorist organizations. He was talking about–listen very carefully–”radicalized individuals here in the United States.” Yes, if we take the text seriously, he’s saying that violent jihad is a homegrown American thing.

I know it’s hard to believe, but here’s the full context:

…we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States. Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin; a plane flying into a building in Texas; or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City – America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our time. Deranged or alienated individuals – often U.S. citizens or legal residents – can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. That pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon. (my emphasis)

Notice the sly use of “appears to have led” in the last sentence. And notice that he is only talking about “deranged or alienated” individuals. Lone wolves. Disturbed people. Not a mass movement that intends to destroy us.

A grand retreat from confronting Iran? | JPost | Israel News.

( This piece is convincing and scary.  It reinforces the meme that Israel is ALWAYS on its own.  Israel needs to destroy the threat from Iran.  Nobody else will do anything.  Crossing my fingers that we have secret tech advances that will make it possible.  – JW )

West concerned as Europe Muslims join Syria fight | JPost | Israel News.

Intelligence information indicates a rise in European Muslims traveling to Syria to join Islamic groups fighting the Assad regime.

Russia-Syria S-300 sale still on, senior Israeli official says | The Times of Israel.

Sunday Times report that says arms deal was canceled in return for Israeli pledge not to attack Syria dismissed as ‘fairy tale’

A Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missile system on display in an undisclosed location in Russia (photo credit: AP)

A senior Israeli official on Sunday denied emphatically a report that Jerusalem and Moscow have struck a deal under which Russia would withhold a Syrian-bound shipment of advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles. However, the official assessed that Russia would ultimately renege on its agreement with Syria.

According to the piece in the London-based Sunday Times, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed, during a meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi earlier this month, to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin of the risk such a deal posed to regional stability and Israeli civilians, leading to the cancellation of the planned sale of six batteries to Bashar Assad’s regime.

Reports of this cancellation have “no basis in reality,” the official said. “It’s a fairy tale. There was no agreement between Putin and Netanyahu.”

Still, the official assessed, “It’s likely that the Russians will try to stall for time and use this as a bargaining chip without following through on the deal [with Syria].”

Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin, who was present at the Netanyahu-Putin meeting as a translator, neither confirmed nor denied the report, although he noted that in the wake of the conversation between the two leaders, he had consistently maintained that “it would be wrong to classify the meeting as a failure.”

The Ukrainian-born Elkin told Army Radio that Israel’s sizable population of immigrants from former Soviet Union states was “clearly” a factor in Russian policy in the region. He noted, however, that Russian expats in Israel have “not prevented the Russian leadership from taking stands against Israel’s security… [and] supporting Israel’s enemies in the Middle East.”

In their meeting, Netanyahu reportedly warned Putin that Moscow’s sale of the sophisticated missile defense system to Assad could push the Middle East into war, and argued that the S-300 had no relevance to Assad’s internal battles against rebel groups.

Netanyahu and his national security adviser, Yaakov Amidror, explained to Putin that planes landing or taking off from Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv would be within the 200-kilometer (125-mile) range of the S-300 system, the report said.

“We are very much concerned about this; the large Russian community in Israel is a major factor in our attitude to Israel, and we will not let this happen,” a Russian official told The Sunday Times.

In return, the official said, the Russians expected Israel to refrain from carrying out additional airstrikes in Syria, like the two the IAF reportedly conducted but never confirmed earlier in May, destroying shipments of advanced Fateh-110 missiles en route via Damascus to the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.

Israeli officials have stated repeatedly over the past few weeks that Israel was not interested in a war with Syria but would do whatever it took to prevent the transfer of game-changing and nonconventional weapons from the Assad regime, or from Iran via Syria, to Hezbollah.

“The Israeli government has acted responsibly and prudently to ensure the security of Israeli citizens and to prevent advanced weapons from reaching Hezbollah and [other] terrorist organizations… and we will do so in the future,” Netanyahu said during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem last Sunday.

“The Middle East is in one of its most sensitive periods in decades, primarily Syria,” the prime minister added. “We are monitoring the changes there closely and are prepared for any scenario.”

During a visit to the Atlit naval base last Tuesday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said that Israel’s policy on Syria was clear: “We do not interfere in the civil war, but we will not allow it to enter our territory.”

The Times report on Sunday contradicted earlier statements by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who declared following the Netanyahu-Putin meeting that Moscow would honor existing contracts with its regional ally, including for the air defense systems.

“We’ve already carried out some of the deal,” Lavrov said, “and we will carry the rest of it out in full.”

A failure to honor signed contracts, Lavrov added in a television interview, would “harm the credibility” of Russia in other arms sales contracts. The deal was said to be worth $800 million.

Israel, on Monday, was set to begin a major defense drill preparing for the possibility of a chemical weapons attack on population centers.

Report: Putin nixes Syria missile deal – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Sunday Times reports Netanyahu explained to Putin that if S-300 anti-aircraft missiles reached anti-Israel rebel groups, planes taking off from Ben Gurion Airport or landing there would be at risk. Israeli officials dismiss report

Attila Somfalvi, Yoav Zitun

Russia will not fulfill a deal to sell advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria for fear they could fall into the wrong hands and be used to attack civilian aircraft at Israel’s main airport, a senior Russian official told The Sunday Times.

In return, he told the British newspaper, the Russians expected Israel to refrain from further airstrikes on Syria.

Israeli government officials dismissed the report. “This story is detached from reality. A fairytale. There was no agreement or understanding achieved between Putin and Netanyahu. That’s another piece of fantasizing,” one of the officials told Ynet.

“It’s likely there would be a great deal of foot-dragging by the Russians, who would use it as a bargaining chip without following through with the deal. Only time will tell,” he said.

“We are very much concerned about this; the large Russian community in Israel is a major factor in our attitude to Israel, and we will not let this happen,” the official told The Sunday Times.

According to the report, the deal was apparently struck at a “tense” meeting this month between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Netanyahu, with his national security adviser, Ya’akov Amidror, is said to have explained that if the missiles fell into the hands of rebel groups opposed to Israel, planes taking off or landing from Ben Gurion Airport would be within their 125-mile range, The Sunday Times reported.

Syria signed a contract to buy four S-300 systems in 2010. The deal is worth a reported $800 million. At the request of Israel, Russia postponed delivery of the first batch last year.

S-300 missile (Photo: AFP)

The Sunday Times said that after the alleged Israeli raid on targets near Damascus earlier this month, the Russians were furious, and Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, said the contract would go ahead.

The Russians are now said to be convinced that Israel plans no further attacks, according to the report.

Netanyahu (L) and Putin during meeting in Sochi (Photo: EPA)

“It will take months to manufacture the missiles and to assemble them into an integrated operating system,” Ruslan Aliev, a Russian weapons researcher, told the newspaper.

In addition, Syrian troops would have to fly to Russia to train on the missiles because it would be impractical to send experts into the Syrian conflict zone, he said.

According to the report, there are also doubts whether Syria, battered by more than two years of conflict, still has the means to pay.

Russia had previously cancelled the shipment of high-altitude Mig-31E interceptor jets to Syria and the supply of the Iskander-E tactical ballistic missiles.

The Russian official told The Sunday Times his country’s primary aim was to keep Syria as a single entity. Damascus has agreed in principle to attend an international peace conference scheduled to be held in Geneva next month.

“The Syrians are willing to arrive without preconditions, but so far the rebels are insisting that President Bashar Assad must step down as a precondition. This is unacceptable, and we’re waiting for the US to solve this problem with the rebels,” said the official.

The official said that Russia had no plans to provide refuge for Assad in Moscow. “We are telling the West: if Assad agrees to go we’ll accept it, of course. But we’re not going to suggest this to him. We’ll not give him asylum in Russia, as he will be wanted for sure for a trial at the Hague.”

The official further told The Sunday Times that although Assad had made some progress against the rebels in recent months, it would be “an illusion to think that Assad will be able to put down the uprising.”

Obama refocusing terror threat to pre-9/11 level | The Times of Israel.

President who says US ‘cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root’ is unlikely to commit troops in large numbers to any conflict, including Syria

US President Barack Obama talks about national security, at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, May 23 (photo credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some call it wishful thinking, but President Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.

Obama is not claiming final victory over extremists who still seek to kill Americans and others. Instead, he is refocusing the long struggle against terrorism that lies ahead, steering the United States away from what he calls an equally frightening threat — a country in a state of perpetual war. In doing so, Obama is recasting the image of the terrorists themselves, from enemy warriors to cowardly thugs and resetting the relationship between the U.S. and Islam.

His speech Thursday was designed to move America’s mindset awy from a war footing and refine and recalibrate his own counterterrorism strategy, Obama asserted that al-Qaida is “on the path to defeat,” reducing the scale of terrorism to pre-Sept. 11, 2001, levels. That means that with the Afghanistan war winding down, Obama is unlikely to commit troops in large numbers to any conflict — in Syria or other countries struggling with instability in the uncertain aftermath of the Arab Spring — unless, as his critics fear, he tragically has underestimated al-Qaida’s staying power.

“Wishing the defeat of terrorists does not make it so,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

In Thornberry’s view, Obama is pushing the idea that “we can simply declare al-Qaida beaten and go back to the pre-9/11 era.”

From the beginning of his presidency, the centerpiece of Obama’s national security strategy has been a desire to move beyond the wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the shadowy spaces occupied by al-Qaida and its offshoots now creeping up in North Africa and elsewhere.

Those endeavors consumed enormous amounts of his administration’s time and attention during his first term, not to mention the incalculable costs paid by military members and their families.

“This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

As Obama edges toward a new approach to national security, his political opponents are quick to raise doubts.

“Too often, this president has sought to end combat operations through rhetoric rather than reality,” Republican Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Friday.

“He has declared the war in Iraq over, but the insurgency there continues. He has declared an end to combat operations in Afghanistan, but the Taliban fight on. He has now declared the war on terrorism over, despite a terrorist attack in Britain this week, a terrorist attack in Boston last month and a terrorist attack in Libya that left a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead last year.”

Yet the president cautioned against a return to what he called a complacency in counterterrorism before Islamic extremists hijacked U.S. jetliners and slammed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Make no mistake,” he said, “our nation is still threatened by terrorists,” noting that the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September and in Boston last month were tragic reminders.

But he also left little doubt that he thinks it is time to turn the page on the post-9/11 approach. He was referring not only to the controversial use of armed drones to target terrorists in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries, but also the commitment of tens of thousands of U.S. ground troops in conventional fighting.

“For all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe,” he said. “We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root,” adding that “a perpetual war — through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments — will prove self-defeating and alter our country in troubling ways.”

Some counterterrorism experts long have argued that the global war on terror should be brought to a close, and that some of the policies and programs put in place after 9/11 should be reconsidered and possibly changed.

James Lewis, a national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues for a more traditional approach to battling terrorism, largely through law enforcement and the intelligence community.

Lewis said that ending the fight against terrorism will help reinforce the administration’s message that America is not at war with Islam.

“It helps, because it delegitimizes the terrorists,” said Lewis. “They want to think of themselves as warriors. We want the world to think of them as crooks. We want everyone in every country not to think of them as terrorists defending Islam, but as people who are psychos. They are criminals, and that’s what we want to paint them as.”

That is closely in line with Obama’s description of what remains of the terrorist threat.

He said core al-Qaida, the organization formerly led by Osama bin Laden, is “a shell of its former self.” The president said that while one of its most troublesome affiliates, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, is a force to be reckoned with, “in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al-Qaida will pose a credible threat to the United States.”

He also cautioned against the threat of homegrown extremists and said terrorism may never go away entirely.

“But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11,” he said.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut hit by rockets | The Times of Israel.

( Too bad, so sad… – JW )

At least 4 wounded in unprecedented attack that comes after Lebanese terror group’s leader admitted his men were fighting Syrian rebels

A Lebanese army officer investigates part of a rocket which struck a car exhibit on a street at the Mar Mikhael district, south of Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday May 26, 2013 (photo credit: AP/Hussein Malla)

BEIRUT (AP) — Rockets slammed Sunday into two southern Beirut neighborhoods that are strongholds of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, wounding at least four people, security officials said.

The incident raises fears that Syria’s civil war is increasingly moving to Lebanon, whose sectarian divide mirrors that of Syria. One leader of Syria’s overwhelmingly Sunni rebels had threatened to strike Hezbollah strongholds to retaliate against the Iranian-backed Shiite group for sending fighters to assist Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Street fighting between rival Lebanese groups has been relatively common since the end of the country’s 1975-1990 civil war, but rocket or artillery attacks on Beirut neighborhoods are rare.

One rocket fired Saturday landed in the Mar Mikhael district on the southern edge of the capital, striking a car exhibit on the street and causing all four casualties. Another struck the second floor of an apartment in a building in Chiyah district south of Beirut, about two kilometers (one mile) away from Mar Mikhael. The apartment’s balcony appeared peppered with shrapnel, but no one was wounded.

The officials said it was not clear from where the rockets were fired. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The state-run National News Agency said among the wounded in the Mar Mikhael blast were three Syrians. Interior Minister Marwan Charbel blamed “saboteurs” and said: “We hope what is happening in Syria does not move to Lebanon.”

An ongoing battle in Syrian town of Qusair on the Lebanese border, which government troops backed by Hezbollah pounded with artillery on Saturday, has laid bare the Shiite group’s growing role in the Syrian conflict. Hezbollah initially tried to play down its involvement, but could no longer do so after dozens of its fighters were killed in the town and buried in large funerals in Lebanon.

Col. Abdul-Jabbar al-Aqidi, commander of the Syrian rebels’ Military Council in Aleppo, appeared in a video this week while apparently en route to Qusair, in which he threatened to strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs in retaliation for Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria.

“We used to say before, ‘We are coming Bashar.’ Now we say, ‘We are coming Bashar and we are coming Hassan Nasrallah,’” he said, in reference to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

“We will strike at your strongholds in Dahiyeh, God willing,” he said, using the Lebanese name for Hezbollah’s power center in southern Beirut. The video was still online on Youtube on Sunday.

On Saturday, Nasrallah vowed to help propel Assad to victory in Syria’s bloody civil war, warning that the fall of the Damascus regime would give rise to extremists and plunge the Middle East into a “dark period.”

A Lebanese investigator takes pictures at a balcony where a rocket struck an apartment in a building at Chiyah district, south of Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday May 26, 2013 (photo credit: AP/Hussein Malla)

In a televised address, he also said Hezbollah members are fighting in Syria against Islamic radicals who pose a danger to Lebanon, and pledged that his group will not allow Syrian militants to control areas along the Lebanese border. He pledged that Hezbollah will turn the tide of the conflict in Assad’s favor, and stay as long as necessary to do so.

“We will continue this road until the end, we will take the responsibility and we will make all the sacrifices,” he said. “We will be victorious.”

The Hezbollah leader’s comments offered the clearest public confirmation yet that the Iranian-backed group is directly involved in Syria’s war. They also were Nasrallah’s first remarks since Hezbollah fighters have pushed to the front lines of the battle for the strategic Syrian town of Qusair near the Lebanese frontier.

The Syrian conflict poses a threat to the stability of Lebanon, and the fighting next door has repeatedly spilled over the border. For the past week, Assad’s opponents and supporters have been clashing in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, using mortars, grenades and machine guns to attack densely populated areas.

Syria’s main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, slammed Nasrallah’s speech as an “an attempt to pit the Lebanese people against their Syrian brothers and sisters who have revolted against the brutal dictator.” In a statement issued Sunday, it said his speech “has the potential for serious ramifications in the region.”

“It explicitly declares Iranian interests as superior to the basic, inherent rights of people across the region,” the statement said.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Nasrallah pledges tens of thousands of volunteers to fight for Assad.

Funerals in Beirut of Hizballah Syrian war dead

Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed Saturday night, May 25, to expand his movement’s military role in the Syrian civil war. “With just two words, I can muster tens of thousands of volunteers to fight for Bashar Assad,” he said, claiming that he receives daily letters from parents begging him to send their only sons to fight in Syria. Al Qaeda fighters were streaming into Syria and Israel planned more attacks, he warned, in a speech marking the 13th anniversary of Israel’s military withdrawal from South Lebanon.

The Hizballah leader said if Sunni Islamists took over in Syria, they would pose a threat to the entire Lebanese population. If Assad falls, so too will the “resistance front” against Israel – as well as the Palestinian people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. “Hizballah will not let that happen!” Nasrallah declared.
debkafile’s military sources: Nasrallah’s speech denotes his movement’s plunging ever deeper into the Syrian conflict. From limited involvement, he has undertaken to fight for Assad to the end, for better or for worse.

The issue is no longer, as Israeli officials insist, whether he can get hold of the advanced Iranian weapons supplied him through Syria, only whether Hizballah can fulfill its two twofold goal. One is to tip the scales of the war in favor of the Syrian army and the other is to contribute enough troops to the various war sectors to free Syrian forces for battling Israel in the war of attrition, which Assad and Nasrallah have both declared.
Hizballah’s Deputy Secretary Sheikh Naim Qassem said Friday that President Assad is absolutely serious about opening a front against Israel from the Golan. It only remains to be done, he said. “Syria is fully capable of implementing this decision on its own. If necessary, we’ll help, but it’s up to Syria.”

As a bonus, Nasrallah’s expanded intervention in the Syria war assures him that the advanced weapons – whose transfer into the Lebanese terrorist group’s hands Israel has vowed to prevent – will in fact be handed over on Syrian soil.

Friday, May 24, debkafile disclosed that two competing terrorist movements, Shiite Hizballah and Sunni al Qaeda, were pouring troops into Syria, while US Secretary of State John Kerry remained focused an the elusive Israel-Palestinian peace process.

After spending 48 hours in Jerusalem and Ramallah, trying to talk Israeli and Palestinian leaders into reviving the long-stalled Middle East peace process, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s exit line Friday, May 24, was: “We’re getting toward a time now when hard decisions need to be made.”

That was all he had to say about Israel’s comments on US proposals on the subject as unworkable and the Palestinian view that American ideas were still unformed and conditions for reviving talks non-existent.
In any case, the Syrian crisis hurtling forward heedless of its disastrous potential for its neighbors is fully exercising their leaders’ attention at this time and confronting them with much more urgent “hard decisions.”
The Secretary himself had just come from a Friends of Syria meeting Thursday in Amman, which was attended by a sparse 11 members compared with the original 80. The meeting ended with a demand that the international conference on Syria, which Kerry is trying to convene in Geneva in the first week of June in partnership with Russia, will not accept Assad regime representatives with blood on their hands.
Moscow took exception to this demand Friday by means of a Russian Foreign Ministry statement that Syria has agreed in principle to participate in the conference, but obstacles to a date were still raised by the Syrian opposition.
It can’t therefore be said that Washington and Moscow see eye to eye on the key issues of Syrian representation at the conference they are jointly sponsoring.

The US still insists that Bashar Assad must go before a political solution can be broached, while Russia continues to champion and arm him.

The most conspicuous feature of Kerry’s current Middle East tour is the strong dichotomy between his public statements and mission and the events taking place in the real world around him.
debkafile analysts assign this gap between the Secretary’s perceptions and reality to US President Barack Obama’s own evasiveness on the “hard decisions” he needs to take for determining the level of US involvement in the acute crises shaking this highly volatile region.

This was evident in the speech he delivered  Thursday, March 23, in which he stressed the effort to pull the United States away from its inclusive “post 9/11 war on terror” and “return to normalcy.”

He said “lethal force [such as drones] will only be used against targets who pose a continuing imminent threat to Americans.”
Obama’s message was totally unrelated to the rising militancy of the two most virulent Islamic terrorist movements of the present day.

As he spoke, Al Qaeda, on the one hand, and the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah, on the other, continued to pour fighting strength into Syria and feed the flames of a calamitous civil war which has claimed more than 80,000 lives in a little more than two years.
Our military sources report that Hizballah brigades are forming up with the Syrian army for their next decisive battle, after their al-Qusayr victory, for the capture of the northern city of Homs; Al Qaeda jihadis are streaming across the border from Iraq to cement rebel control of the Deir a-Zor region of eastern Syria.

The aggressive actions of both Hizballah and al Qaeda in Syria are outside the bounds of the US president’s revised objectives for the US war on terror – hence, the rationale for US non-involvement in any part of the Syrian conflict.
At the same time, both these movements are at war, declared or undeclared, on Israel, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Their destabilizing impact extends to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah too.
In terms of timing and immediacy, therefore, the ”hard decisions” John Kerry called for are right outside the current Middle East context. Israel’s leaders must decide urgently how to address Syria’s headlong descent into more bloodshed at a time that Iran, Russia, Al Qaeda and Hizballah are in charge of events.

The initiative led by the US Secretary of State and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for an international conference to hammer out a political solution for the Syrian crisis in no way slowed its momentum.
Israel’s leaders might perhaps best be advised to prioritize attention to determining how best to handle the perils looming from Syria ahead of Kerry’s bid for a return to talks with the Palestinians.

Hezbollah admits its troops fighting in Syria | The Times of Israel.

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah says his group’s fighters are battling ‘Islamist extremists’ in Syria that pose a threat to Lebanon

By AP and Times of Israel staff May 25, 2013, 7:58 pm

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. (photo credit: image capture from Channel 2/Al Manar)

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah admitted for the first time Saturday that his Shiite terrorist group had deployed fighters to Syria, saying his group would not stand idly by while its chief ally Syria is under attack.

In a televised speech commemorating Resistance and Liberation Day, which marks Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Hezbollah members are fighting in Syria against Islamic extremists who pose a danger to Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s comments Saturday marked the first time he has publically confirmed his men were fighting in the Syrian civil war. They are also his first statement since Hezbollah fighters have become deeply involved in the battle for the strategically critical Syrian town of Qusair.

He said tens of thousands of Islamic extremists from all over the world have been sent to Syria to fight the regime, but Hezbollah sends “a few” fighters and it is accused of intervening in the conflict.

The Shiite leader accused the United States of planning to invade Syria, and of backing takfiris – radical Sunni Islamist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, which he claimed constituted the majority of the Syrian opposition. At the same time, he attempted to assuage fears that Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian civil war against Sunni rebel groups was driven by sectarian motives.

“We are not evaluating the matter from a Sunni or Shiite perspective, but from a perspective joining all Muslims and Christians together because they are all threatened by this takfiri project that is financed by the US,” he said.

Nasrallah warned his followers that the Assad regime’s downfall would have disastrous consequences for the region. “If Syria [falls] in the hands of America, Israel and the takfiris, the future of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and the whole region would be dark,” Hezbollah’s al-Manar news site quoted Nasrallah saying.

“If Syria falls, the Palestinian cause will be lost,” he said.

Igniting fears of Israel’s military presence in Lebanon, which ceased 13 years ago to the day, Nasrallah also claimed that Israel would invade Lebanon should Syria fall to American and radical Islamist forces.

Nasrallah told his followers that in the divisive civil war in neighboring Syria, “You can be with whoever side you want… but Hezbollah can be neither with the American side nor with the side of murderers who dig [up] grave or rip [open] chests,” referring to a grotesque video in which a Syrian rebel appeared to eat the internal organs of a dead soldier.