Secretary of State Kerry held a pretty ridiculous press conference (see at 2.43pm BST) in Britain today which was mocked widely for some unfortunate remarks.
There are three points to discuss. First two minor ones with the big blunder that Lavrov used to checkmate Kerry and a U.S. attack on Syria at the end.
Starting at 4:20 Kerry describes the way the Obama administration wants to attack Syria:
…in a very limited, in a very targeted short term effort that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war. That is exactly what we are talking about doing. Unbelievable small limited kind of effort. Now that has been engaged in previously on many different occasions. President Reagan had a several hours or whatever effort to send a message to Ghadaffi in the wake I think of Pan Am 103 and other terrorist activities.
Aside from the laughable “unbelievable small” attacks (which will cost Republican votes in the Senate) the lesson to draw from Reagan’s attack on Libya is exactly the other way around.
Reagan did not attack Libya over the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie but the destruction of Pan Am 103 in a terrorist attack in December 1988 came after Reagan had carried out a “message sending” attack on Libya and Ghaddafi’s family in 1986.
The bombing of Pan Am 103 was the consequence of Reagan’s strikes, not their cause. If the comparison of the planed strikes on Syria to Reagan’s strikes is to hold, one would expect additional terrorist attacks on planes as a consequence of U.S. attacks on Syria. Pan An 103 is an argument not to strike Syria but Kerry has some “unbelievable small” historic knowledge and does not see that.
A second minor point is in Kerry’s remarks in which he mocks the Syrian president Assad’s credibility (at 1:25):
I personally visited him once on the instruction of the White House to confront him on his transfer of Scud missiles to Hizbullah which we knew has taken place and all kinds of facts and he set there and simply denied it to my face not withstanding the evidence I presented him and what we showed him.
While the Israelis and U.S. officials at one point claimed such, there is serious doubt that Syria did transfer Scuds to Hizbullah. Scuds are liquid fueled and therefore difficult to handle in the battle field. They need several trucks to carry the missiles and the corrosive fuels and take hours to prepare. If Syria or Iran supplied Hizbullah with missiles in the payload/range capacity of Scuds those would have been more modern solid fueled Fateh-110 which are much easier and faster to handle.
The third and biggest blunder in Kerry’s speech starts at 0:04 into the video:
… [Assad] could turn over any single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn its over. All of it. And without delay and allow the full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to to do it and it can’t be done obviously.
That seemed like an off remark but there have been mentions in the Israeli press of some plans to press Syria into giving up all its strategic weapons which would of course leave it without any retaliation measure against an Israeli attack.
Shortly after Kerry made the remarks about Syria giving up its chemical weapons the State Department tried to walk things back:
The State Department sought Monday to clarify comments from Secretary of State John Kerry about how Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could prevent a military strike from the United States.
Al-Assad “could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week,” Kerry said during a press conference with British Foreign Secretary William Hague. “But he isn’t about to do it and it can’t be done, obviously.”
…
A spokeswoman for Kerry sought to put his remarks in context moments later.
“Secretary Kerry was making a rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied he used,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
But that “rhetorical argument” was taken up by the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov:
Russia has urged Syria to put its chemical weapons under international control for subsequent destruction to avert a possible military strike.
“We are calling on the Syrian authorities not only agree on putting chemical weapons storages under international control, but also for its further destruction and then joining the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” Lavrov said. “We have passed our offer to Al-Muallem [Syrian Foreign Minister] and hope to receive a fast and positive answer,” he added.
It is unclear if Syria will support the offer, but if it helps to avoid a military strike, Russia is immediately prepared to work with Damascus, Lavrov said.
One could imagine Syria agreeing at least to the first part of Russia’s idea. Why not have Russian “international control” officers on the ground of the chemical weapon sites and thereby have quasi human shields who will prevent these sides from being attacked? Why not agree to this minor inconvenience when it will prevent an open U.S. engagement in the war on Syria? Why not use such “international control” to refuted future false flag attacks?
It will anyway take a looong time until those chemical weapons would some day really be destroyed. It takes probably a decade to build the special facilities needed to do so and both, Russia as well as the U.S, are many years behind in fulfilling their own commitments of destroying their chemical weapon stocks.
The Syrian Foreign Minister Moallem welcomed the Russian proposal.
Kerry unconsciously set himself a trap and Russia used it to checkmate him and a U.S. attack on Syria. How can Obama convince Congress to allow him to bomb Syria when there is such an easy (though still to be negotiated) way to avoid starting another war?
