This deployment of military force against civilians who were protesting is a war crime, and part of a pattern that by now amounts to crimes against humanity.

The first thing that comes to mind at these horrific images is that something should be done.

But what? Sen. John McCain has called for arming the rebels, as has the The New Republic, which appears to be veering again toward Neoconservatism.

My wise colleague Marc Lynch has raised important questions about the wisdom of this course.

I would argue an even stronger case against. Once you flood a country with small and medium arms, it destabilizes it for decades.

Ronald Reagan spread weapons all around northern Pakistan, and in my view began the destabilization of that country, which now has an endemic problem with armed tribes, militias and gangs. I saw the same thing happen in Lebanon shortly before, during the civil war that threw that country into long term fragility. More recently, we saw a civil war in Algeria (1991-2000) that left 150,000 people dead, which is really no different than what has been going on in Syria except that it was on a much larger scale and the West at that time decided to support the secular generals against the rebelling Muslim fundamentalists. The arming of Iraq post-Saddam has left it a horribly violent society for the foreseeable future (a plethora of US arms given to the new Iraqi military and police were often sold off to guerrillas). And while the war would have been longer in Libya if Qatar and France had not secretly armed the rebels, it likely would have had a similar outcome (what was really important was NATO attrition of Libyan armor). And in that case the problem the country now faces, of militia rule and fragmentation, would have been much less severe.

If people don’t think a flood of arms into the hands of Syrian fighters will spill over onto Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel/ Palestine, they are just fooling themselves. The Palestinians in the region have largely given up or been made to give up arms, in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. But if small and medium arms become widespread and inexpensive, it will take us back to the late 1960s and early 1970s when Palestinian guerrillas shook Jordan, Lebanon and Israel. The Palestinians themselves always suffered from a resort to arms, and are best served by a peaceful movement of protest, and a remilitarization of their struggle would produce further tragic setbacks.

Turkey, it should be noted, is against letting arms in to either side. They do not want another ‘dirty war’ in their heavily Kurdish southeast, as happened in the 1980s-1990s.

Ultimately, the problem of legitimate action here lies in the UN Security Council. My critics have sometimes suggested that I support Democratic but not Republican Party wars, but they, like most Americans, just don’t understand the UN Charter. First of all, my default position is to oppose war under most circumstances, what I can “the option for peace.” War should not be a war of choice, but should be a very last resort. But large scale armed aggression by one country on another, or genocide, need to be opposed by arms where that is practical. As for legitimate use of force, I am against wars that do not stem from either self-defense or from a UN Security Council resolution. I wouldn’t necessarily support any old war the UNSC authorized, but its authorization is a sine qua non. Thus, I opposed the Bush invasion of Iraq once it became clear that there would be no UN authorization; unfortunately that did not become clear until late in the day. I supported a no-fly zone over Libya and an air intervention against armor used on civilians, but was critical of NATO bombing of Tripoli; i.e. I supported the UNSC resolution 1973.

I attended a meeting on Syria late last November in Europe of Europeans and Syrians attempting to think through what might be accomplished, and the lack of UN authorization cast a shadow over the conference. A seasoned European diplomat who had a long posting in Syria attended, and I pressed him on whether strong measures were possible. I fear my passion for the victims was more in evidence than my understanding of international law.

The first thing the diplomat underlined is that there is no United Nations Security Council authorization for the use of force, so no European country will use force. It was a refreshing reminder that in Europe the UN Charter and international law is still taken seriously. In the US, mention of international law is usually greeted with gales of derision.

Could, I asked, the Diplomat, Syrian ships be boarded to prevent arms shipments to the regime?

No. That would be piracy if they were on the high seas.

But, by way of analogy, I asked, can’t North Korean ships be boarded at will by the ships of the international community?

He replied that he’d been involved in the North Korea resolution. A) It is more complicated than that and B) those measures depend on a UN Security Council resolution; no such resolution has been passed with regard to Syria.

What if the Syrian ships were within 12 miles from the shore of a European country?

Then they could be boarded, but they are not so stupid as to ply those waters. Few military goods go to Syria in Syria-flagged ships, anyway.

Then I asked, undeterred, what about indicting Bashar al-Assad at the International Criminal Court for war crimes?

The Diplomat reminded me that the court can only take up a matter if it concerns a signatory to the ICC.

But, I say, Libya was not a signatory.

In that case, the Diplomat wearily reminded me, the UN Security Council referred the Qaddafis to the ICC, which is the only way a case concerning a non-signatory can be sent to the court. But Russia and China are preventing such a referral in the instance of Bashar al-Assad.

I gradually realized that if any semblance of the international rule of law were to be maintained, the international community could do nothing kinetic as long as Russia and China were running interference for the Baath regime in Syria. The logjam here is the Security Council, and its archaic veto privileges for the 5 permanent members, essentially the victors of WW II who still make policy for the whole world.

I am all for finding a way to get humanitarian aid to the dissident towns in Syria, but that step alone will not stop the regime’s violence against its people. Further sanctions on Baath regime officials would be all to the good, but the planned European Union boycott of Syrian phosphate and other exports will likely hurt the Syrian people more than the regime; boycotts that make people poor actually strengthen the regime, as we saw in Iraq in the 1990s.

I don’t think the notion of establishing protected zones for Syrian dissidents inside Syria is legal or practical. It would require that someone send troops into a sovereign country to establish the perimeter and then protect residents from the Syrian army. As the Diplomat reminded me, there is no UNSC authorization of the use of force. Any such zones would clearly immediately become war zones. Regional governments that backed these zones, whether Turkey or Jordan, would almost certainly themselves be attacked by the Syrian army (especially tiny Jordan).

If you want practical action or even military intervention in Syria beyond financial and economic sanctions, there are only two ways to get it legitimately. That would be to find a way to pressure Russia and China to stop protecting Bashar al-Assad. The other possibility would be to find a way to abolish the one-country veto on the UNSC.

I remember my anger and despair, as a teenager, at the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968. I feel the same way about Syria today. But in both cases, great power sphere of influence politics made it impossible to do anything practical about it. The hope lies only in the longer term. Prague got its spring when the Soviet Union got a reformist premier, who was influenced by decades of Soviet dissident thinking and writing. Syrian dissidents will just have to keep up a non-violent struggle for the truth that might go on for a while. If they can prevail non-violently, their revolution would immediately be more well-grounded and likely to succeed.

trans. Juan Cole
from Whinfield 12

Silent State
The Campaign Against Whistleblowers in Washington
By Peter Van Buren

On January 23rd, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort.

Kiriakou’s plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don’t go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does. How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy.

Punish the Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has already charged more people — six — under the Espionage Act for alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. (Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history.)

Kiriakou, in particular, is accused of giving information about the CIA’s torture programs to reporters two years ago. Like the other five whistleblowers, he has been charged under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act.

That Act has a sordid history, having once been used against the government’s political opponents. Targets included labor leaders and radicals like Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Debs, a union leader and socialist candidate for the presidency, was, in fact, sentenced to 10 years in jail for a speech attacking the Espionage Act itself. The Nixon administration infamously (and unsuccessfully) invoked the Act to bar the New York Times from continuing to publish the classified Pentagon Papers.

Yet, extreme as use of the Espionage Act against government insiders and whistleblowers may be, it’s only one part of the Obama administration’s attempt to sideline, if not always put away, those it wants to silence. Increasingly, federal agencies or departments intent on punishing a whistleblower are also resorting to extra-legal means. They are, for instance, manipulating personnel rules that cannot be easily challenged and do not require the production of evidence. And sometimes, they are moving beyond traditional notions of “punishment” and simply seeking to destroy the lives of those who dissent.

The well-reported case of Thomas Drake is an example. As an employee, Drake revealed to the press that the National Security Agency (NSA) spent $1.2 billion on a contract for a data collection program called Trailblazer when the work could have been done in-house for $3 million. The NSA’s response? Drake’s home was raided at gunpoint and the agency forced him out of his job.

“The government convinced themselves I was a bad guy, an enemy of the state, and went after me with everything they had seeking to destroy my life, my livelihood, and my person — the politics of personal destruction, while also engaging in abject, cutthroat character assassination, and complete fabrication and frame up,” Drake told Antiwar.com. “Marriages are strained, and spouses’ professional lives suffer as much as their personal lives. Too often, whistleblowers end up broken, blacklisted, and bankrupted,” said the attorney who represents Drake.

In Kiriakou’s case, the CIA found an excuse to fire his wife, also employed by the Agency, while she was on maternity leave. Whistleblower Bradley Manning, accused of leaking Army and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks, spent more than a year in the worst of punitive conditions in a U.S. Marine prison and was denied the chance even to appear in court to defend himself until almost two years after his arrest. Former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Morris Davis lost his career as a researcher at the Library of Congress for writing a critical op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and a letter to the editor at the Washington Post on double standards at the infamous prison, as did Robert MacClean for blowing the whistle on the Transportation Security Administration.

Four employees of the Air Force Mortuary in Dover, Delaware, attempted to address shortcomings at the facility, which handles the remains of all American service members who die overseas. Retaliation against them included firings, the placing of employees on indefinite administrative leave, and the imposition of five-day suspensions. The story repeats itself in the context of whistleblowers now suing the Food and Drug Administration for electronically spying on them when they tried to alert Congress about misconduct at the agency. We are waiting to see the Army’s reaction to whistleblower Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who documented publicly this week that senior leaders of the Department of Defense intentionally and consistently misled the American people and Congress on the conduct and progress of the Afghan War.

And this remains the most partial of lists, when it comes to recent examples of non-judicial government retaliation against whistleblowers.

Government bureaucrats know that this sort of slow-drip intimidation keeps people in line. It may, in the end, be less about disciplining a troublemaker than offering visible warning to other employees. They are meant to see what’s happening and say, “Not me, not my mortgage, not my family!” — and remain silent. Of course, creative, thoughtful people also see this and simply avoid government service.

In this way, such a system can become a self-fulfilling mechanism in which ever more of the “right kind” of people chose government service, while future “troublemakers” self-select out — a system in which the punishment of leakers becomes the pre-censorship of potential leakers. At the moment, in fact, the Obama administration might as well translate the famed aphorism “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to remain silent” into Latin and carve it into the stone walls of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, or the main office of the State Department at Foggy Bottom where I still fight to keep my job.

Silent State

I am told that, in its 223 years of existence, I am the only Foreign Service Officer ever to have written a critical book about the State Department while still employed there. We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People exposed what State did not want people to know: that they had wasted enormous amounts of money in Iraq, mostly due to ignorance and a desire for short-term successes that could be trumpeted back home. For the crime of writing this book and maintaining a blog that occasionally embarrasses, State Department officials destroyed my career, even as they confirm my thesis, and their own failure, by reducing the Baghdad Embassy to half its size in the face of Iraq’s unraveling.

“The State Department was aware of Mr. Van Buren’s book long prior to its release,” explains attorney Jesslyn Radack, who now represents me. “Yet instead of addressing the ample evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse in the book, State targeted the whistleblower. The State Department’s retaliatory actions are a transparent attempt to intimidate and silence an employee whose critique of fraudulent, wasteful, and mismanaged U.S. reconstruction efforts in Iraq embarrassed the agency.”

Without allowing any rebuttal or defense, State suspended my security clearance, claiming my blogging was an example of “poor judgment,” transferred me from a substantive job into a meaningless telework position, threatened felony conviction over alleged disclosure of classified information, illegally banned me from entering the building where I supposedly work, and continues to try to harass and intimidate me.

My travel vouchers from as far back as the law allows have come under “routine” re-examination. My Internet activity is the subject of daily reports. My credit reports have been examined for who knows what. Department friends who email me on topical issues have been questioned by agents of Diplomatic Security, the State Department’s internal police. My Freedom of Information Act request for documents to help defend myself and force State to explain its actions has been buried.

Without a security clearance, and with my Diplomatic Passport impounded, I will never serve overseas again, the lifeblood of being a Foreign Service Officer (FSO). A career that typically would extend another 10 years will be cut short in retaliation for my attempt to tell the truth about how taxpayer money was squandered in Iraq.

All of this has taken place in such a way that I cannot challenge it (except by writing and speaking about it in public — at additional risk). The State Department has standard disciplinary procedures that it could have invoked against me, but those leave room for public challenges and, in some cases, would allow me to force documents into the open that State would rather not share with you.

Hall Walkers: Ghosts in the Machine

Before “telework” existed as an option that allowed undesirable employees to be sent home and into a kind of benign house arrest, people like me at State were called “hall walkers.” They were the ones whom the Department no longer wanted as employees, but who could not be fired due to lack of evidence. So they would have their security clearances suspended without recourse, be removed from their assignments, and yet told that, to get paid, they needed to be physically present in the main State building eight hours a day.

Since they were not assigned to an office, State was wholly unconcerned about how they occupied themselves during those long empty days. And though as a “teleworker” I am not one, the hall walkers are still with us.

The main State building is enormous, with literally miles and miles of corridors, and the hall walker might wander them, kill time at the library, have a long lunch, stop in to chat with former colleagues still willing to be seen in his or her company. Even in the first FSO training course called A-100, young diplomats are advised that the most ignominious end to a career is not failing at your job, but being thrown into the purgatory of hall walking — still on the payroll but no longer a member of the tribe. Disowned, shunned, exiled in the ancient Greek tradition.

Hall walking is a far cry from being dragged through a trial or spending two years in solitary, but it exists on the same continuum. No one at State will say how many employees still exist in the shadow world of hall walking, but at least dozens is a reasonable guess.

I am told as well that State Department officials are increasingly moving to suspend security clearances for acts wholly outside the realm of security, like blogging they find offensive. One State Department Human Resources employee confided to me that this has, in fact, become the go-to strategy for winnowing out unwanted employees in the too-hard-to-fire category, a sad evolution, given the sorry history of the State Department in the McCarthy era.

Fighting Back

For a government employee being punished extra-legally by an agency ignoring its own rules, there is still one recourse: the Office of the Special Counsel. Created in 1979, it was to be an ombudsman meant to keep an eye on governmental nastiness and ensure the implementation of the Whistleblower Protection Act. Empowered, among other things, to investigate and “make right” instances of federal retaliation against legitimate whistleblowers, the office was sidelined through several administrations.

Under George W. Bush, it was embroiled in scandal when its head, Special Counsel Scott Bloch, instead purged its staff of lawyers who disagreed with him and announced that he would not follow up on cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Last summer, Bloch pleaded guilty to deleting evidence from his computer while under investigation for retaliating against his own staff.

At a moment when government extra-legal retaliation against whistleblowers and leakers is on the rise, call it ironic, but the Office of the Special Counsel has seen a rebirth under its current head, Obama appointee Carolyn Lerner. As the Washington Post recently described her, Lerner has “gone to the mat and tried to expand the boundaries of the law’s protections for whistleblowers. She has lifted long-sagging morale at an agency that, instead of behaving as an independent watchdog, has treaded water for much of its existence.”

Specifically, Lerner reassigned staff members to review a backlog of cases against whistleblowers facing reprisals, including “veterans’ hospital staff members reporting poor lab procedures [and] air traffic controllers claiming flight-pattern dangers.” She has enforced a 60-day limit on responses from federal agencies. The Office seems to have re-embraced its mission. “She’s a pit bull,” says Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, which defends whistleblowers.

There are other signs of resistance in Washington to the urge to cloak the government in silence. For example, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) launched an investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s secret email monitoring of scientists warning that unsafe medical devices were being approved over their objections. Whistleblowers, said Grassley, often are treated “like skunks at a picnic.”

The Senator demanded that FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg disclose who authorized the monitoring, how many employees were targeted, and whether the agency obtained passwords to personal email accounts, allowing communications on private computers to be intercepted. He also wants to know whether the agency’s two-year surveillance campaign is still ongoing.

In another recent case, the Office of the Special Counsel formally asked the Air Force to take harsher disciplinary action against supervisors at the Dover mortuary who had tried to fire two whistleblowers who raised accusations about the mishandling of soldiers’ remains.

The Government Accountability Project has filed a complaint on my behalf with the Office of the Special Counsel demanding that the State Department cease its retaliatory personnel practices against me. The Department is particularly vulnerable, given its drumbeat of support for the rights of bloggers and other dissidents in the Middle East and China. State has already been forced to readmit me to the building and return my access badge. I remain an optimist, believing that my complaint will succeed and that, someday, I will return to work at a State Department where employees can talk openly about the bad as well as the good.

It Matters

Americans, who elect and pay for their government in Washington, deserve to know exactly what it does there — and elsewhere around the world — with their dollars. As in my case in Iraq, such information often is only available if some insider, shocked or disturbed by what he or she has seen, decides to speak out, either directly, in front of Congress, or through a journalist.

The Obama administration, which arrived in Washington promoting “sunshine” in government, turned out to be committed to silence and the censoring of less-than-positive news about its workings. While it has pursued no prosecutions against CIA torturers, senior leaders responsible for Abu Ghraib or other war crimes, or anyone connected with the illegal surveillance of American citizens, it has gone after whistleblowers and leakers with ever increasing fierceness, both in court and inside the halls of various government agencies.

There is a barely visible but still significant war raging between a government obsessed with secrecy and whistleblowers seeking to expose waste, fraud, and wrongdoing. Right now, it is a largely one-sided struggle and the jobs of those of us who are experiencing retaliation are the least of what’s at stake.

Think of those victims of retaliatory personnel practices and imprisoned whistleblowers as the canaries in the deep mineshaft of federal Washington, clear evidence of a government that serves its people poorly and has no interest in being held accountable for that fact. This administration fears the noise of democracy, preferring the silence of compliance.

Peter Van Buren, a 23-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq as Team Leader for two State Department Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Now in Washington and a TomDispatch regular, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), has recently been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses what it means to be a governmental whistleblower, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, or any other entity of the U.S. government. The Department of State most certainly does not approve, endorse, or authorize this article.]

Copyright 2012 Peter Van Buren

Kevin Bullis explains that many villagers use expensive kerosene for cooking and heating, and to fuel lamps for light. Cell phones have spread rapidly in Africa and Asia (where often there is no grid of copper wires or underground fiber optic cables and so mobile phone towers allow them to leapfrog to a newer technology). But given that many villagers do not have electricity, they have to take their phones to private charging centers and pay an arm and a leg for the recharging.

Both kerosene and the private charging stands can be replaced right now, in the present, with cheaper solar batteries. For light, solar-powered light-emitting diode (LED) panels are much cheaper than light bulbs powered by burning kerosene.

Even the Economist agrees that for the 1.6 billion human beings not already connected to the electrical grid, renewable energy is now cheaper for them than carbon-fueled electricity. Kenyan families, for instance, pay $10 a month for kerosene, and $2 a month to charge their cell phones. A British company is now allowing them to buy via an installment plan a solar set that costs them less than $12 a month, so that in 18 months they will own it. They can then, if they like, take some of their savings and get a larger solar set with more power generating ability.

In India, too, the poorest are getting access to solar cells. Since 2007, India has doubled its green power ability, from 10 gigawatts to 22 gigawatts. It may be investing more in research on renewable energy than any other nation. In 2011, India put $10 billion into this sector.

Likewise, Nicaragua’s commitment to green energy is such that that Central American country is hoping to get almost all its electricity from renewables by 2016. Admittedly, it will accomplish a good deal of this goal with a traditional hydro-electric generating plant rather than primarily with wind and solar. But the latter are an important part of the energy mix in Nicaragua. Going green is not only cheaper than increasingly expensive oil, but has other benefits as well. It discourages villagers from burning down the forest for wood to burn.

It is likely that the cost of solar power generation will cross with that of hydrocarbons sometime in the next 5-10 years, even for the advanced countries. Because they dont’ have a built-out grid and because even an electric light is expensive for them, the villagers of the global South are pioneers of the new, renewable world.

trans. Juan Cole
from Whinfield 8

On Wednesday morning, more persons were killed in Homs, as the Syrian military invaded strongly Sunni neighborhoods and drove toward the city center. Tanks and artillery barrages have been used against civilian crowds. The BBC suggests that some 32 adults were killed Wednesday morning, along with 18 premature babies in hospital who died with the electricity was cut.

Aljazeera English reports:

The Gulf Cooperation Council group of Arab oil monarchies expelled their Syrian ambassadors and called their own envoys home on Tuesday, out of disgust at the ongoing massacre.

The use of tanks and artillery against non-combatant, civilian populations in rebel districts is a war crime. Systematic deployment of war crimes in turn become crimes against humanity.

The Statute of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court defined crimes against humanity as follows:

“Article 7: Crimes against humanity

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

(a) Murder;

(b) Extermination;

(c) Enslavement;

(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;

(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;

(f) Torture;

(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;

(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;

(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;

(j) The crime of apartheid;

(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”

If the regime has in fact been targeting Sunni neighborhoods in Homs that had engaged in peaceful demonstrations, that would be a crime against humanity right there. The evidence is that Homs residential neighborhoods are being intensively bombarded.

Because of the Russian and Chinese veto at the UN Security Council, there is no authorization for the use of force by international actors. In the absence of such authorization, the US has been reduced to trying to target individual regime figures for financial sanctions and for prosecution if they ever leave Syria.

‘Exclusive’ Interview With PRC Special Envoy: Veto ‘To Safeguard’ Syrian Interests…
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Beijing, 7 Feb (Xinhua) — “Proceeding from Syria’s actual conditions, China vetoed the UN Security Council draft resolution on the Syrian issue, to safeguard the fundamental interests of Syria and its people,” Wu Sike, Chinese special envoy on the Middle East issue, said during an interview with Xinhua reporters.

On 4 February, China and Russia voted against the UN Security Council draft resolution on the Syrian issue submitted by Morocco and drafted by Western countries and some relevant Arab states. This was the second time that China and Russia voted against a draft resolution on the Syrian issue subsequent to their veto of the draft resolution on the Syrian issue submitted to the UN Security Council by France, Britain, and other European countries on 4 October last year.

Wu Sike said: Respecting a country’s sovereignty is the basic principle of the UN Charter. China has always observed and stressed this principle in dealing with international affairs. The Syrian issue is, in essence, an internal affair of that country. Syria’s development and reforms should be decided by the Syrian people. External forces should not exceed their functions to interfere. Otherwise, this will be violating Syria’s sovereignty and disrespecting the Syrian people.

He noted that finding solutions to the Syrian issue must proceed from Syria’s actual conditions. He visited Syria after the UN Security Council voted on the Syrian issue on 4 0ctober last year. During his visit, he conducted in-depth conversations with leaders of the two opposition organizations. They said that they understood China’s veto and explained that if external interference was allowed, be it the Iraq type of land attacks or the Libya form of air strikes, the ultimate victims will be Syria and its people. Resolving the Syrian crisis through its own efforts may be a little slow and take longer, but it involves much smaller risks and aftermaths. In the long run, this conforms with the interests of Syria and its people.

Wu Sike stressed: As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China is a responsible country. China supports an “early initiation of an inclusive political process led by the Syrian people and participated by various parties, peacefully resolving conflicts through dialogues and consultations to restore Syria’s situation to normal as early as possible.” He added: “Some Western media reports assert that China and Russia are supporting ‘dictatorship.’ This is misleading and confusing the essence of the issue. On the contrary, China is safeguarding the entire interests of the Syrian people, instead of protecting one side and opposing the other.” Time and history will make a fair judgment, he said.

Wu Sike said that he held a meeting with Arab League Secretary General Araby in Cairo in the second half of December last year, during which he stressed that China supported the idea of resolving the Syrian issue under the Arab League framework. Syria and its people as well as the Arab League should be the main factors in resolving the Syrian issue, whereas the international community should do something positive and useful to push the work forward and play a constructive role, instead of imposing measures on a country.

When commenting on China’s veto of the current draft resolution that includes the Arab League’s new proposal, Wu Sike pointed out: China supports the Arab League’s efforts within its framework to promote dialogues between the relevant parties. But the UN Charter and UN regulations must be respected when doing something under the UN framework. It would be unreasonable for the United Nations to accept any proposal just because it is put forth by the Arab League.

Wu Sike noted that the Syrian crisis involves the stability of the entire region. He called on the relevant parties to sensibly consider problems and respect the civilians’ demands for reforms, development, and progress. He added: In the next step, China will continue to maintain contact s and communication with the Syrian authorities, the opposition factions, Arab states, the Arab League, and various relevant parties, promote dialogues between various Syrian factions to prevent the use of violence, reduce casualties among the innocent civilians, peacefully resolve the crisis, and bring about security and stability in Syria and this region. This is not only conducive to creating welfare for the Syrian and Middle East people, but also greatly beneficial to world peace and development.

(Description of Source: Beijing Xinhua Asia-Pacific Service in Chinese — China’s official news service (New China News Agency) to the Asia-Pacific region, established to replace Xinhua Hong Kong Service. The new service includes material previously carried by Xinhua Hong Kong Service and additional material specific to the Asia-Pacific region)

The Great Carbon Bubble
Why the Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard
By Bill McKibben

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history — 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

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Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben