One from FP, one from Al Jazeera America.
There's reason to be hopeful
Paul Rogers latest commentary:http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-ro...nd-negotiation
Quote:
Even good cooperation between the former cold-war adversaries, however, would leave in place the other ingredients of the double proxy. Iran and Saudi Arabia ......But the position of Qatar and especially Saudi Arabia presents a difficulty to this evolving equation, for their support for Islamist rebels has a strong strategic basis. These states believe that Assad has to be defeated, as part of a wider war to prevent the establishment of a powerful Shi'a crescent stretching from the Mediterranean through southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran to the Indian Ocean.
Ordinary Syrians, let alone Russian-American diplomats, need real friends, not those who appear to regard them as unwilling pawns in a struggle way beyond their country.
Syria meets first step deadline
Syria turns over list of chemical arsenal in 1st step of disarmament (by Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Foreign Staff, 20 Sep 2013):
Quote:
BERLIN — Syria met the first deadline of its pledge to surrender its chemical weapons arsenal on Friday, delivering its initial disclosure to the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, Netherlands, by the time limit that Russia and the United States had set last weekend.
In a statement on its website, the organization said it had received the filing but it revealed nothing else, except that the disclosure “is now being examined by the Technical Secretariat,” the group’s experts.
Reaction from the U.S. State Department, which has voiced skepticism that Syria would abide by the U.S.-Russia deal, was muted. When she was asked whether it was an encouraging sign that Syria had submitted the document on time, spokeswoman Marie Harf said she didn’t want “to get ahead of the process.”
“But you are right that there has been a document submitted,” she said, adding, “We’ve said all along that we need to see forward momentum within these timelines that we’ve set up in the framework.”
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons website has a number of relevant documents, including the as distributed US-Russian framework with Annex A.
The Syrian list was submitted in accord with John Kerry's demand that it be submitted within 7 days of Syria's accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention. That Convention (Overview) allows 30 days for that submission and 10 years to destroy the weapons. Syria is going to be held to a much faster track according to Mr Kerry and other Obama administration spokespeople.
Regards
Mike