Anthony Shadid Was A Fine Reporter

Anthony Shadid died yesterday of asthma triggered by an allergy against horses while traveling on a smuggling route between Syria and Turkey. Shadid was one of the most objective reporter on the Middle East in the western media. I read every piece I stumbled upon that carried his byline.

Shadid was nearly killed some 10 years ago. But not by an allergy. The American Journalism Review wrote about it back in 2002 and the story captures Shadid's human qualities quite well:

On a gray Sunday, Boston Globe reporter Anthony Shadid made his way to the epicenter of one of the world's hottest stories--the Israeli assault on Yasser Arafat's compound in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Shadid wore a white flak jacket emblazoned with "TV" in bold red letters, the universal symbol for the press in conflict zones.
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Around 5 p.m., Shadid tucked away his notebook and began the trek back to the hotel.
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Shadid felt pleased with his day's work, particularly making it past Israeli Defense Forces troops dug in around Palestinian Authority headquarters. He was walking down the middle of a deserted street, talking with a colleague, as someone in the shadows took aim. The high-velocity bullet tore through his left shoulder, missing his spine by a centimeter.

The reporter crumpled into a heap, unable to move his arms or legs. "At first I thought I was hit by a stun grenade because my whole body locked up," recalls Shadid, 33, a veteran Middle East reporter. Suddenly, the white flak jacket was soaked with blood. The bullet entered at the edge of the protective gear and exited through his right shoulder, leaving two gaping wounds.

Israeli medics administered morphine and stopped the bleeding. They put Shadid on a stretcher and wheeled him across the street to the Arab Care Hospital. His ordeal was far from over.
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Cont. reading: Anthony Shadid Was A Fine Reporter

How The Profit Motive Drives U.S. Policy

Jeremy Scahill story on Yemen provides insight into the mechanisms that drives U.S. policies.

There is no moral aspect in it. The mechanism is solely driven by an ideology of profit for the few which gets implanted into its various clients with the intent to provide a motive for more of the same.

The privatization in prisons in the U.S. is one example. If you have a private prison you want to further indictments to get it filled to, in the end, make more profit.

If you are hired for fighting terrorism you want it to stay, or even to increase, to continue your income.

The United States “funds the Political Security and the National Security [forces], which spend money traveling here and there, in Sanaa or in the US, with their family. All the tribes get is airstrikes against us.” He adds that counterterrorism “has become like an investment” for the US-backed units. “If they fight seriously, the funds will stop. They prolonged the conflict with Al Qaeda to receive more funds” from the United States.

That, in a nutshell, is how many Yemenis see the US role in their country. The United States “should have never made counterterrorism a source of profit for the regime, because that increased terrorism,” asserts Iryani. “Their agenda was to keep terrorism alive, because it was their cash cow.”

If an analyst in Yemen can figure this out why can't the U.S. electorate?

Iran Sanctions Europe, Uses Self Made Fuel And Returns To Talks

UPDATED below

The sanctions against Iran are a self inflicted wound for the west as they increase economic pain on Europe.

The decision of the EU to no longer buy Iranian oil starting in July was ridiculous. Oil will become more expensive for those who sanction Iran and cheaper for those who do not, primarily India and China. Iran will not feel any significant pain over this.

But the U.S. is still pressing for even more sanctions. All banks in the word use the technical telecommunication provider SWIFT to exchange data between them. The U.S. now wants to cut Iran out of that. This is quite extreme economic warfare:

Representatives from SWIFT are scheduled to meet with European Union officials this week, according to US official familiar with the talks. The meeting is expected to result in the EU ordering SWIFT to expel at least some of its sanctioned banks. It is unclear, however, whether the order will extend to Iran's Central Bank.

It would be crazy for the EU to allow such a precedent. SWIFT has never been used for sanctions as it is simply a technical exchange. What is next? Stopping all telephone lines to Iran or anyone the U.S. doesn't like?

But two can play the game. Iran will not wait until July to stop oil delivery to Europe:

In response to the latest sanctions imposed by the EU against Iran's energy and banking sectors, the Islamic Republic has cut oil exports to six European countries.

Iran on Wednesday cut oil exports to six European countries including Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Portugal.

The southern European countries, if they can get crude oil from other sources at all, will have to reconfigure their refineries significantly to be able to process other than Iranian crude. It is likely that this immediate stop of Iranian oil delivery will lead to shortages of gasoline in those countries. That will come on top of anti-austerity riots and high unemployment in the southern European countries and will certainly hurt their stability.

Iran also announced today that it put its first self-made 20% enriched fuel elements into the Tehran Research reactor and that it sent a letter to the EU "welcoming" the P5+1, the UN Security Council veto members plus Germany,  readiness to return to the negotiating table.

This three part message, pressure on Europe through Iran's own sanction, success with its civil nuclear program despite sanctions from Europe and the readiness for new talks might soften the European position towards Iran.

This could be a chance for the EU to stop the stupid urge of some of its politicians to follow U.S. bellicosity against Iran. Publicly rejecting to push further sanctions on Iran through manipulating SWIFT would now be the right thing to do. But will the EU politicians understand that?

UPDATE: Iran oil ministry denies state media reports on EU oil stop

(Reuters) - Iran's Oil Ministry denied state media reports on the Islamic state stopping its crude exports to six European countries on Wednesday.

"We deny this report ... If such a decision is made, it will be announced by Iran's Supreme National Security Council," a spokesman for the ministry told Reuters.

Hmmm - and who told Press TV the opposite? Who is playing this psy war?

Rieff On Liberal Interventionism

This polemic by David Rieff against liberal interventionism is spot on: Save Us from the Liberal Hawks

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of (humanitarian) war. That, at least, is what much of the U.S. policy elite seems to be pushing for these days in Syria.
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What is surprising, though, is that despite the disaster of Iraq, looming withdrawal in what will amount to defeat in Afghanistan, and, to put it charitably, the ambiguous result of the U.N.-sanctioned, NATO-led, and Qatari-financed intervention that brought down Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime, is how nearly complete the consensus for strong action has been even among less hawkish liberals, whether what is done takes the form of the United States and its NATO allies arming the Free Syrian Army, opening so-called humanitarian corridors, or encouraging Turkey and a coalition of the willing within the Arab League to do so.
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Nothing is wrong with intervention, it seems (just as there is nothing wrong with drone strikes), just as long as it is done by good U.N.-loving, multilateralism-oriented Democrats from the coasts, rather than by ignorant, war-worshipping, vulgarly nationalistic Republicans from flyover country.
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It is this religious quality to the support for R2P that helps account for the odd reaction among those who believe that something must be done to stop the Assad regime's war against much of its own people despite the Russian and Chinese vetoes.
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Safely out of government, Slaughter was able to go further, demanding that the United States and its allies do something to bring the carnage in Syria to an end. Otherwise, she wrote, R2P would be exposed as a "convenient fiction for power politics or oil politics."  [...] Like the iconic U.S. officer in Vietnam who told a reporter that his troops had been obliged to burn the village in order to save it, Slaughter seems to be willing to undermine the structural foundations of international order, which, for better or worse, is based in large measure on the Security Council, in order to further it. Peace is war; war is peace. George Orwell, call your office.
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Meanwhile, despite the astonishing propaganda barrage in the media (for once, CNN, the BBC, and Al Jazeera were all on the same page!) that for all intents and purposes endorsed the claims about dead and wounded made by the anti-Assad insurgents (the disclaimers tended to come at paragraph three or four of a print piece, or the tail end of a video segment), the reality on the ground in Syria was far more complicated. [...] These nightmare scenarios are anything but far-fetched. What is taking place in Syria may have begun in part as a democratic insurrection, but it has become a low-level (at least for the moment) interconfessional civil war.
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But in the brave new world of R2P, this does not seem to matter very much to a born-again liberal interventionism eager to flex its muscles.
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Rieff should have extended it to the western Europeans where many such liberal internventionist have their home in the green and the former social-democratic parties. Typically they have no experience in anything military, but call for bombing this or that country as soon as someone there kicks a cat around.

Humanitarians they are not.

How Will Israel Respond To The Bombs In India And Georgia?

Today someone put a bomb onto an Israeli embassy car in India which then wounded the wife of a diplomat and a driver. A simple handgrenade in a bag was found under an Israeli embassy car in Tbilisi, Georgia, and defused. A reported third bomb attempt in Amsterdam is unconfirmed.

Within less than an hour the Israeli prime minister Netanyahoo blamed Iran for these assassination attempts. Others blame Hizbullah who's deputy chief Imad Mughniyah was killed by Israel about four years ago. One must also consider the possibility of an Israeli false flag operation.

Independent of who did this the Netanyahoo and his fascist side-kick Lieberman will feel the need to do something about it.

So will they again bomb Gaza as they did when Egyptian Bedouins, completely unrelated to Gaza, attacked a group of Israeli soldiers on its boarder to Egypt? Or will they start another war against Hizbullah in Lebanon? A Hail Mary attack on Iran?

Your guess is a good as mine.

But whatever might happen the temperature in the Middle East just increased another few degrees and that is not encouraging.

The West Should Help Assad

The western media are finally starting to report the fact that the uprising in Syria is sectarian and led by salafi forces.

This was obvious to independent observers at least since April 10 2011 when first attacks on the military were reliably reported. Then western media claimed that these were soldiers shot by the government which was not a convincing explanation.

Now a much clearer picture of the danger of this conflict evolves and it becomes clear that Assad's claims of foreign terrorist involvement are true.

Foreign fighters have been streaming into Syria for some time:

Iraqi officials told reporters on the weekend that for the past four months, there has been a stream of Iraqi fighters and weapons flowing into Syria from Iraq to support the anti-Assad movement.

The fighters and weapons “are being smuggled from Mosul through the Rabia crossing to Syria, as members of the same families live on both sides of the border,” said Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Assadi.

“We have known about the jihadists’ role for months,” said Alastair Crooke, the Beirut-based director of Conflicts Forum. “People have just chosen to turn a blind eye to it.”

Jihadi forums claim that these are coming from all over the Middle East:

The page also referred to the death of Abu al-Buraa al-Sulti in Aleppo, saying he was the first fighter who came from Jordan to fight in Syria.

"The first (jihadist) who died was Abdullah Dulaimi," known by the nickname Abu Tabarik, in the area of Abu Kamal, a city in Syria near the Iraqi border, the page said. The Dulaim are a major Sunni tribe in western Iraq.

The page also referred to "the arrival of Abu Hudhaifa al-Kuwaiti in Al-Sham, where the ground was blessed with his soul, from his country (Kuwait)."
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Abu Abdullah al-Makhzumi said on the same page that "the fight has come and the doors of heaven are open. Let's go to jihad, let's go to jihad."

The Libyan AlQaeda leader Belhadj has met the expat Syrian National Council and some Libyan salafis were also killed in Syria.

Weapons are flowing freely:

The man said he was selling mortars, grenades and rifles, and that his contact in Syria was also an Iraqi.

The Jordan Muslim Brotherhood is openly calling for Jihad in Syria:

“Supporting the Syrian people and Free Syrian Army is a duty, as they are facing the injustice and oppression of the regime,” the group said on its Web site.

U.S. intelligence services believe that AlQaeda was responsible for the suicide attacks in Aleppo and other places. Al Qaeda's leader Zawahiri has released a video message titled “Onward Oh Lions of Syria”.

With all these data points finally coming out into the open one wonders what the reaction of the west will now be to this.

Will the Senator for Israel Joe Lieberman continue to argue for arming these jihadis? Will the neo-conservative Zionist mouthpiece Michael Weiss continue to call for a western military attack on the side of the salafis against the Syrian government?

The threat now is not regime change in Syria but regime destruction as has happened in Libya. A Syrian state crumbling under terror followed by large sectarian slaughter and refugee streams with certain spillover of fighting into all neighboring countries. That can not be in anyone's interest.

It is time for the west to not only step back from this cliff but to turn around and to help Assad to fight the terrorists that want to bring down his country.

The State Department Lies With Its Satellite Pictures Of Syria - No Artillery "Deployed"

There is A note from Ambassador Ford on recent events in Syria which shows a satellite picture of Homs, Syria, titled "Security Operations Escalate in Homs" and "Bab Amr Neighborhood". The picture was allegedly taken on February 6, 2012 though the copyright mark says "© 2011 Digital Globe".

A deeper look at the ambassador picture reveals that it does not show what its labels say. In fact the picture shows only ambiguous stuff from the very border edge of Bab Amr not from within the city.

There are additionally satellite pictures at the State Department's website allegedly showing "operational deployment" of Syrian artillery.

Analysis of the State Departments satellite pictures, which were promoted by news agencies and various papers, clearly shows that these pictures of artillery guns "operational deployed against XYZ" were all taken of guns training within military barracks or well known training areas and not in active deployment.

(A Google Earth KMZ file with the localities of the State Department pictures and the military areas marked is provided below.)

There is so far no proof that any artillery has been deployed at all though it is known that mortars have been used by the rebel side. The State Department obviously knows what the pictures really show but is trying to use the lie of artillery deployment against the rebels as a pressure argument for military intervention.

The ambassador's picture:

bigger

Certain areas of the picture are marked as "Fires", "Military vehicles" and "Smoke". But when one compares the bigger version of the picture with older pictures of those places from Google map and Google Earth all marked areas seem to be outside of Bab Amr and depict nothing that is obviously of military nature.

Cont. reading: The State Department Lies With Its Satellite Pictures Of Syria - No Artillery "Deployed"

Syria, Nir Rosen And Ignoring Ideologies

As the Angry Arab, Professor As'ad AbuKhalil, wrote:

Western media (of course you can add Saudi and Qatari media) are involved in the biggest propaganda spectacle that I have ever seen.
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Have you read one report in the Western press about the political orientations of the rebels and the Free Syrian Army? (I am sure that Nir Rosen would soon tell you that they are not really Salafites but that they are all Marxist-Leninists with deep feminist principles).

Shortly after that Nir Rosen, just back from Syria, publishes at the Qatari Al Jazeera: The battle for Homs - Government forces appear determined to regain control of opposition-held areas in restive Syrian city.

Well - in my view that is what government forces are supposed to do. Would the U.S. leave Denver in the hands of hostile armed religiously extreme revolutionaries?

In his report Nir say's nothing about the ideological background of the fighters among which he reports. Why not?

But there is an interesting detail in his generally pro revolutionaries tale:

Members of the Revolutionary Council said fighters in the Homs province had taken advantage of the presence of Arab League monitors in December and January to reinforce themselves and bring supplies in from Lebanon, knowing the regime would be limited in its ability to obstruct them at that time.

Fighters announced that they attacked security forces in Rastan, expelled them from Talbiseh, and took control of more territory in Homs city, launching two attacks on the State Security and Military Security headquarters.

The terrorists, after 28 dead and many more wounded in car bomb attacks in Aleppo today I am more willing to call them such, have used the visit of Arab League monitors to get more arms and salafi Libyan fighters into the country. That is of course a good argument for the Syrian regime to never again allow such an Arab League or similar mission. The report of that last mission was suppressed by the western and Arab media because it admitted that the terrorist gangs the Syrian government complained about did exits and killed people all around. Nir quotes some of those folks:

"Homs will not surrender. They are bombing us from a distance, they don't dare to enter the city. They think they will destroy our will and resistance.

"We are waiting for them and we will defeat them in our neighbourhoods. Finally they will enter the city. We are waiting for them."

Did they ever hear of Grozny?

U.S. Welcomes Another Puppet-Dictator

Maldives President and Climate Advocate Forced at Gunpoint to Step Down

Maldives leader Mohamed Nasheed, called the “world’s most environmentally outspoken president” because of his calls for drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions, was forced to resign—at gunpoint, he claimed. He had used stunts such as an underwater cabinet meeting to highlight his island nation’s vulnerability to sea-level rise.

His resignation followed weeks of protests and was apparently motivated by internal politics unrelated to his environmental views.

In 2008 Mohamed Nasheed was elected president. The coup against him was by the military and a former president.He is calling for outside intervention to restore democracy.

What is the U.S. reaction one might ask? What is "democracy promoter" Obama going to do about this?

Yeah. You guessed that right. He recognizes the new military supported dictatorship:

The United States on Thursday recognized the new government of Maldives President Mohamed Waheed as legitimate and urged him to fulfill a pledge to form a national unity government.
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Nasheed, the Indian Ocean country's first democratically elected president who has hunkered down at his modest family home in the capital Male since losing the presidency on Tuesday, has appealed for urgent foreign help.

The United States is "also encouraging him, as we encouraged President Waheed that this needs to settled now peaceably through dialogue and through the formation, as the new president has pledged, of a national unity government," Nuland said.

Three Must-Reads On The Political Economy

A World Flying Blind - Andy Xie - Caixin Online  

The outlook for the global economy is gloomy and leaders lacking vision are to blame. Eventually, this will come back to haunt all of us

At the annual World Economic Forum in Davos we again saw familiar faces from the West, but some different characters from emerging economies. Some of the last year's bunch went to jail amidst the revolutions engulfing the Middle East. They were discussing how to fix capitalism. Apparently, the same people who blew up the world and got their governments to bail them out are now again making millions and talking about how to fix things. Not many people see the irony in this. The tragedy of the global financial crisis is that it didn't sweep away the old order.
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The world is a dangerous place because it is being led by the wrong people like the Davos crowd. Monetary and fiscal measures merely prolong the stagnation and stoke inflation down the road. This muddling-through equilibrium will blow up in our faces when inflation causes social turmoil.

David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words - Aaron Bady - The New Inquiry

[I]f “debt” doesn’t seem simple and quantifiable and reducible to numbers, some of the more irreducibly complex moral vocabularies that other human societies have used to think about the problem start to come into view. Another world isn’t just possible, but other worlds have happened, almost nothing but other worlds. And this is, I think, the richest and most engrossing part of the book (and to which I must, by necessity, give shortest shrift), Graeber’s survey of the vast anthropological record which is available to us, but so often unread, describing or at least suggesting how different human societies have considered these questions, human societies who did not believe that paying one’s debts or facing the consequences was the very highest of moral imperatives.

Valediction - on saying farewell to Tony Judt - G.J. Meyer - LA Review Of Books

Towards the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century’s last chapter, Judt suggests the chillingly plausible possibility that we are, perhaps, in the process of becoming China: of becoming, that is, “an unfree capitalist society” in which the government stays out of the economy except at the loftiest strategic levels (eliminating competition from outside, for example) while remaining brutally repressive politically, systemically corrupt, and, yes, indifferent to injustice. He notes that American voters, in expressing their preferences at election time, seem to be indicating that they prefer the Chinese model not only to European social democracy but even to the genuinely democratic achievements of their own still-recent past.

That, Judt says, is what he finds “terrifying.”

Cont. reading: Three Must-Reads On The Political Economy

The Western Logic Of Intervention In Syria

1. China and Russia vetoed the recent western UN Security Council resolution because they feared that the west's intention, despite denials, was regime change in Syria by force.

The west has now decided to disprove their "disgusting" fears wrong by attempting regime change by force in Syria.

2. It is feared that a prolonged internal struggle in Syria could create problems in countries surrounding Syria.

The west must therefore act to intensify and prolong the struggle in Syria by destabilizing countries surrounding Syria.

3. The best way to better human rights in a multi-faith country ruled by a secular plutocracy is to weaponize those backward religious forces that will provide for the most savaging sectarian-dictatorial rule possible.

Further Embassy Downsizing In Iraq - Is H.R. Clinton The Problem

When in October 2011 the total retreat of U.S. military from Iraq was officially confirmed plans continued for a massive embassy and several consulates with some 10,000 staff and some 5,000 security personal. I found that unlikely:

But that embassy is a fixed target which can easily be harassed with by rocket and mortar fire. Its logistic lines of communication are also open to permanent challenges. The mercenaries guarding it will have severely restricted rules of engagement and will not be able to prevent attacks.

Aside from those problems I find it dubious to believe that Iraqi politicians and government functionaries are willing to talk to all those diplomats. Why should they?

In the end most of the diplomats will sit in their offices with nothing to do but to be ready to jump up and head to the bunkers when the next rocket alarm goes off. Additonally there is pressure from Congress to reduce the State Department's budget.
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A year from now that presence may very well come down to more normal levels of just a few hundred people.

Security, logistics, Iraqi officials resisting, no one to talk to, costs were the reasons I foresaw.

A first reduction of the gigantic plans was announced a week later to a total of some 5-10,000. I insisted that the numbers would go down further.

It now seems that this was right:

Less than two months after American troops left, the State Department is preparing to slash by as much as half the enormous diplomatic presence it had planned for Iraq, a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.
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[T]he Americans have been frustrated by Iraqi obstructionism and are now largely confined to the embassy because of security concerns, unable to interact enough with ordinary Iraqis to justify the $6 billion annual price tag.
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Convoys of food that were previously escorted by the United States military from Kuwait were delayed at border crossings as Iraqis demanded documentation that the Americans were unaccustomed to providing.
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At the Kirkuk airport, an Office of Security Cooperation, which handles weapons sales to the Iraqis and where a number of diplomats work, is frequently attacked by rockets fired by, officials believe, members of Men of the Army of Al Naqshbandi Order, a Sunni insurgent group.

All the problems I saw coming are there. They will continue to be there and will lead to further reductions, much more than now planned, until the embassy staff reaches a normal level of maybe 50-100 people.

But if an amateur writer on the Internets with no experience in diplomacy or Iraq could predict this why couldn't the U.S. State Department?

More: Is there anything the State Department got right during the last years? That "reset" with Russia where the Cyrillic inscription on the button Clinton presented actually spelled "overload" and which was no reset at all? The humiliation Israel provided Obama? The catastrophic relations with Pakistan? The recent UNSC debacle?

Asked differently: Is Hillary Clinton the worst (and thereby probably most dangerous) Secretary of State Obama could have chosen?

Libyan Salafis Killed In Syria

Borzou Daragahi is the Middle East and North Africa correspondent for the Financial Times. He just tweeted:

borzou Borzou Daragahi
Wow - Misurata revolutionaries announce combat deaths of three #Libyan fighters in #Syria on.fb.me/z8a6kV

This is the first confirmation of what former CIA agent Philip Giraldi reported back in December:

Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional National Council who are experienced in pitting local volunteers against trained soldiers, a skill they acquired confronting Gaddafi’s army.

Giraldi, without naming any sources, also claimed:

French and British special forces trainers are on the ground, assisting the Syrian rebels while the CIA and U.S. Spec Ops are providing communications equipment and intelligence to assist the rebel cause, enabling the fighters to avoid concentrations of Syrian soldiers.

The obvious attempt of regime-change the U.S., its European followers and its Arab stooges are engineering in their service to Israel, could eventually push Syria into the direction of a civil war. The Israelis believe that a weakened Syria will be good for them.

But, like nearly always, the blowback of such a campaign is likely larger than the gain and in the end will disappoint the instigators.

UN: "More Afghans Got Killed" - ISAF: "Good News!"

UN: Afghan Civilian Deaths Up for 5th Straight Year (VOA, Feb 4)

A United Nations report says more than 3,000 civilians died in Afghanistan's conflict last year, the worst annual toll in the decade-long war.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said Saturday that 3,021 civilians were killed in 2011, an 8 percent increase over the previous year, and the fifth year in a row that the death toll has risen.

News: ISAF commander encouraged by UNAMA report findings (DVIDS, Feb 6)

KABUL, Afghanistan - Gen. John R. Allen, commander, International Security Assistance Force, welcomes the latest report from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan that shows a reduction in coalition-related civilian casualties.

“Every citizen of Afghanistan must know ISAF will continue to do all we can to reduce casualties that affect the Afghan civilian population. This data is promising but there is more work to be done,” said Allen.

China On Pollution Taxes - A Reverse NIMBY

Hypocrisy is a typical characteristic of all kinds of governments. So it is no wonder to find that the Chinese government can be just as inconsistent in its behavior and words as any western one.

A top headline on the Chinese official English language paper, the Chinese Daily, today is: Airlines barred from EU carbon scheme:

BEIJING - China's airlines are not allowed to pay a charge on carbon emissions imposed by the Europe Union (EU), and neither to hike freights nor to add other fees accordingly without government permission, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said Monday.

The CAAC said in a statement that it had been authorized by the State Council, China's Cabinet, to notify the ban to all domestic airlines.
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"China objects to the EU's decision to impose the scheme on non-EU airlines, and has expressed its concerns over the scheme through various channels," the statement said.

While the Chinese governments expects its carrier's planes to be welcome in Europe, it does not want them to pay a pollution tax for the dirt they produce there.

But on the same day it publishes this decision, the China Daily official editorial recommends that: Polluters should pay the bill:

The cadmium polluting the Longjiang River in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region has highlighted the issue of who should pay for pollution cleanups and the damage they cause to the environment.
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It is common sense that the party responsible for the pollution, usually the companies that discharge the pollutants, rather than public money should pay the cleanup costs and any compensation.
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The ingrained belief that polluters should pay the bills and it is dauntingly costly to discharge pollutants not only forces the enterprises to consistently adopt new cleaner technologies, but also promotes the development of a green economy.

So what is it? Should polluters pay for the mess they make or should they not? The Chinese positions seems to be reverse NIMBY one. If the mess they make is not-in-my-backyard they shall not pay. Otherwise they must. That not a consistent position and also not a sustainable one.

Text Of The UNSC Draft On Syria With Russian Changes

Updated below.

There is supposed to be a hot discussion today about a UN Security Council with regard to Syria. To support it the Syrian rebel's Human Rights mouthpiece in London had reported a huge attack by government forces on Homs with alleged over 200 killed. That totally unconfirmed report was widely repeated in the western press but will have little to do with UNSC outcome.

The western countries at the UN Security Council want a hard resolution against Syria. Russia, China and other states fear that a resolution, if not formulated very well, could eventually be interpret as a demand for regime change in Syria or as permission to use of force against the Syrian government.

After a Russian draft resolution was earlier rejected a one draft was put forward officially by Marocco. But in fact the new draft had been edited by a member of the British UN delegation.

This draft refers to a plan by the Arab League that demands Assad to step down and to give the power to his vice president who would then head a somehow installed "unity government".  A few month ago Saudi Arabia had put forward a similar plan for Yemen which was eventually officially agreed to but which predictably ended in chaos. The Arab League plan is the main point where Russia and others object. The current western draft is "in accordance with" the Arab League plan. Russia wants the resolution to refer to the Saudi plan only as "taken into account."

A showdown was planned for last week when the Foreign Ministers of France, the UK and the United States showed up a SC to push their resolution through. The planned party went awry as the Russian foreign minister did not show up as the west had planned for. Lavrow, travelling down under, simply did not pick up the phone for over 24 hours when Clinton tried to call him to demand his attendance.

The western resolution has been discussed for several days now but Russia and China still promise to veto it in its current form. Russia has now put forward changes it demands before it to sign onto it. Below I show parts (the complete text can be found here) of the western resolution in green and the changes Russia is demanding as strike-outs or in red. Judge for yourself if they are justified.

The Security Council,

pp1 Recalling the presidential statement of 3 August 2011,

[...]

pp11 Welcoming the engagement of the Secretary-General and all diplomatic efforts aimed at addressing the situation, and noting in this regard the offer of the Russian Federation to host a meeting in Moscow, in consultation with the League of Arab States,

pp11b Expresses support for the broad trend of political transition to democratic, plural political systems in the Middle East,

1. Condemns the continued widespread and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities, such as especially the use of force against civilians., arbitrary executions, killing and persecution of protestors and members of the media, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, interference with access to medical treatment, torture, sexual violence, and ill-treatment, including against children;

Cont. reading: Text Of The UNSC Draft On Syria With Russian Changes

Open Thread 2012-04

News & views ...

An Example Of NYT Reporting On Iran

As the New York Times reported: C.I.A. Says Iran Makes Progress On Atom Arms:

A draft Central Intelligence Agency report on Iran concludes that the country is making progress on a nuclear arms program and could develop a nuclear weapon ...
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But Iran's leaders deny interest in developing a nuclear weapon. "We have no need for nuclear weapons," Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Mohammad Besharati was quoted as saying on Iran's official radio on Friday. He described press reports that Iran was planning to acquire nuclear weapons as "a lie and a plot."
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But the report, which goes further than the last formal estimate on Iran, is expected to be fiercely contested when it is reviewed for approval by the nation's other intelligence agencies this week. The earlier report, written late last year, concluded only that at least some of Iran's revolutionary leaders were intent on developing nuclear weapons, but that the program was disorganized and in an early stage of development.
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Another example of the current dispute centers on a classified Pentagon overview of Iran's military buildup that concludes that by the end of the decade, Iran will have enough naval equipment to "dominate" Persian Gulf waters and threaten commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Administration officials familiar with the report.

The report, prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency late last summer, also concludes that over the next eight years, Iran will double the number of tanks and armored vehicles in its arsenal and try to service and even build tanks itself. The country is expected to replace its aging American warplanes with the same number of some of the most advanced planes and related weapons systems from Russia and China, to buy more missiles from China and North Korea and to increase its chemical weapons stockpiles.

But parts of the report are viewed as overblown by other Pentagon experts, who say that the naval buildup is being matched by the gulf Arab states, and that the most Teheran might be able to do by 2000 is to threaten -- but not dominate -- the region.