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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 02 2016, @12:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the didn't-get-an-invite dept.

The New York Times has obtained a recording of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry voicing his frustration over the Syrian civil war:

Secretary of State John Kerry was clearly exasperated, not least at his own government. Over and over again, he complained to a small group of Syrian civilians that his diplomacy had not been backed by a serious threat of military force, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

"I think you're looking at three people, four people in the administration who have all argued for use of force, and I lost the argument."

The 40-minute discussion, on the sidelines of last week's United Nations General Assembly in New York, provides a glimpse of Mr. Kerry's frustration with his inability to end the Syrian crisis. He veered between voicing sympathy for the Syrians' frustration with United States policy and trying to justify it. The conversation took place days after a brief cease-fire he had spearheaded crumbled, and as his Russian counterpart rejected outright his new proposal to stop the bombing of Aleppo. Those setbacks were followed by days of crippling Russian and Syrian airstrikes in Aleppo that the World Health Organization said Wednesday had killed 338 people, including 100 children.

At the meeting last week, Mr. Kerry was trying to explain that the United States has no legal justification for attacking Mr. Assad's government, whereas Russia was invited in by the government.

"The problem is the Russians don't care about international law, and we do." [...] "We're trying to pursue the diplomacy, and I understand it's frustrating. You have nobody more frustrated than we are."

Also at Reuters.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Sunday October 02 2016, @05:39AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Sunday October 02 2016, @05:39AM (#408991) Journal

    An interesting passage begins 9 minutes and 48 seconds in, when Kerry says

    Well the problem is the Russians don't care about international law and we do. uh, and we don't have a basis, our lawyers tell us, unless we have a UN Security Council resolution, which the Russians could veto and the Chinese, or unless we are under attack from the folks there, or unless we are invited in. Russia is invited in by the legitimate regime--well it's illegitimate in our mind--but by the regime. And so they were invited in and we're not invited in. We're flying in air-space there where they can turn on the air defence and we have a very different scene. The only reason they're letting us fly is because we're going after ISIS. If we were going after Assad--those air defences--we'd have to take out all the air defences, uh, and we don't have a legal justification, frankly, for doing that, unless we stretch it way beyond the law on a humanitarian basis, which some people argue we should, by the way. Uh, but so far American legal theory has not bought into the so-called right to protect and we don't even have what we had in Kosovo, where we had a, you know, existing resolution and so forth, uh, even though we went alone. Um, so it's complicated, uh, it's uh it's not, not easy. And we've been fighting. How many wars have we been fighting? We've been fighting in Afghanistan; we've been fighting in Iraq; we've been fighting, you know, in the region for 14 years...and a lot of Americans don't believe that we should be fighting and sending young Americans over to die in another country. That's the problem. Uh, Congress won't vote to do it. And you can be mad at us, but what we've been trying to do is help Syrians to fight for their own country. And we've been spending a lot of money, a lot of effort to try to help do this. So, there's an opposition there. The opposition is doing very well. Russia came in then. That's a problem, I know, because, you know, we uh, we don't behave like Russia. It's just a different standard. So we're trying to see whether we can put to test whether Russia is serious about a political solution. And if they're not serious, then we will help the opposition more. But I don't think you're gonna, you know, I don't think that's particularly good for the citizens of Syria in the end because it means more fighting.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday October 02 2016, @09:28AM

    by inertnet (4071) on Sunday October 02 2016, @09:28AM (#409020) Journal

    I'll refer to an older comment of mine, which shows that a genocide could happen if Kerry gets his way: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?cid=310915&sid=12396 [soylentnews.org]