Oklahoma voters need to get past the pathos, however, to reconsider the politicians they keep electing to office, who adopt policies that harm Oklahomans and directly contribute to such tragedies. Oklahoma has among the more corrupt and more despicable politics in the country, obsessed with hating gays and local Muslims (all three of them), with stingy and mean-spirited government, with controlling women, and with dirty oil and gas that is destroying our environment.

The sequestration, which your GOP politicians support, will cut funding for the National Weather Service, which performs little duties like… warning about tornadoes. Is that really what you want? If not, tell them so, and at the next polls, throw the bums out.

The hatred of government regulation (i.e. of good government) by Oklahoma’s political class impedes regulations like ensuring that there are shelters in all public schools. All they’d have to do is not give Big Oil $200 million in tax breaks a year, and they’d have the money to implement it.

Oklahoma’s senators, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, voted against relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York. You put them in office. They don’t care about people like you, living through the aftermath of a natural disaster. You should remember their position when they run for reelection.

Inhofe’s special pleading that Oklahoma’s disaster is ‘not like Sandy’ strikes the rest of the country as disgusting. This man is your public face, Oklahoma. Do you really want him there? You do understand that the rest of us have to support Federal relief aid for you in order for you to get it. We won’t hold you hostage to Inhofe’s small-mindedness, but we don’t appreciate your voting for him when you want our help.

And here’s the biggy. The tornado that so harmed you may not have been related to global warming. But it is indisputable that climate change will produce massive storms that will hit the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. By pumping out gas and oil you are dooming other small towns and big cities along the coasts to future destruction and loss of life, including childrens’ lives, of the sort you just suffered, except on a much bigger scale. You are not in any doubt that the climate can be dangerous. Please, please rethink your energy policies and turn in a big way to wind and solar (you have a lot of both) as quickly as possible. You’ve recently made a start with wind energy, but it is frankly a drop in the bucket compared with what you could do — indeed, you’re the state with perhaps the biggest wind power potential in the whole country. You need to build out your grid to supply the rest of us, and you need to put in turbines everywhere they make sense.

Your Senator Inhofe, in the back pocket of Big Oil, denies all this, and makes your state look buffoonish to the rest of the world.

Disasters require policy responses, to forestall them and to deal with the aftermath of the ones that can’t be prevented. Wise policy responses are crafted by caring, educated, wise politicians. You don’t seem to have many of those, and you need to pay more attention when you go to the ballot box. Otherwise, you are harming yourselves and the rest of us.

Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films on the other hand is crowdsourced and can’t be so easily deterred:

Robert Greenwald’s “Koch Brothers Exposed”:

According to the USG Open Source Center, ‘Voice of Israel Network B in Hebrew adds at 1500 GMT that addressing a Haifa University conference, [Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Benny] Gantz said that Syrian President Al-Asad “encourages action against Israel in the Golan Heights.” He asserted that Al-Asad will pay the price if he undermines stability in the area and that Israel will not let him to turn the Golan Heights into what he termed Al-Asad’s comfort zone. Gantz denied Syrian claims that its men destroyed an IDF jeep that had entered its territory. According to him, fire was opened several times at an IDF patrol driving along the border fence from a Syrian position, but none of the soldiers was hurt.”‘

Euronews reports:

At Haaretz, Ahiqam Moshe David observed (via Israel News Today):

“Incidents on Saturday and Sunday nights saw bullets fired at the vicinity of Tel Hazeqa, one of the best-known IDF outposts on the Golan Heights. The IDF believes that that gunfire was accidental, the result of battles between the rebel forces and the Syrian army. Either way, no fewer than five incidents of gunfire at the Golan Heights have been recorded since the beginning of May, more than the number of attacks out of the Gaza Strip at southern Israel communities…

That said, in the aftermath of the attack in Damascus on missiles that were earmarked for Hizballah — an attack that, according to foreign reports, was carried out by Israel — the Israeli policy of retaliation was revised, as IDF officials admit. If in the past the instructions were to retaliate to all fire out of Syrian territory, regardless of whether it was intentional or unintentional, now the army is no longer in any rush to respond with firepower, as part of the effort to reduce tensions. “We’re more cautious and are less interested in clashes,” said one military official. “That’s manifested itself in taking a step back…”

Excerpt:

“Even as Damascus pushes back against the rebels militarily, Putin has swung into action on the international and regional stages. The Russian government persuaded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support an international conference aimed at a negotiated settlement. Putin upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his country’s air attacks on Damascus. Moscow is sending sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries, anti-submarine missiles and other munitions to beleaguered Assad, and has just announced that 12 Russian warships will patrol the Mediterranean. The Russian actions have raised alarums in Tel Aviv and Washington, even as they have been praised in Damascus and Tehran. . .

When sources in the Pentagon leaked the information that explosions in Damascus on May 5 were an Israeli airstrike, Putin appears to have been livid. He tracked down Netanyahu on the prime minister’s visit to Shanghai and harangued him on the phone. The two met last week in Moscow, where Putin is alleged to have read Netanyahu the riot act. Subsequently, the Likud government leaked to The New York Times that its aim in the airstrike had been only to prevent Syrian munitions from being transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon, not to help in overthrowing the Baath government. The Israelis were clearly attempting to avoid further provoking Moscow’s ire, and wanted to send a signal to Damascus that they would remain neutral on Syria but not on further arming of Hezbollah.

Putin, not visibly mollified by Netanyahu’s clarification, responded by announcing forcefully that he had sent to Syria Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles and was planning to dispatch sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft batteries. Both U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey and Israeli military analysts protested the Russian shipments.”

Read the whole thing

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 — and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect.  They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 — at the moment the sequester cuts began — no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested — and won — special relief.  Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a set of manufactured arguments for “austerity,” which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination. In 2011-2012, a Congress that seemed capable of doing little else passed trillions of dollars of what was then called “deficit reduction.” Sequestration was a strange and special case of this particular disease.  These across-the-board cuts, instituted in August 2011 and set to kick in on January 2, 2013, were meant to be a storm cloud hanging over Congress. Sequestration was never intended to take effect, but only to force lawmakers to listen to reason — to craft a less terrible plan to reduce deficits by a wholly arbitrary $1.2 trillion over 10 years. As is now common knowledge, they didn’t come to their senses and sequestration did go into effect. Then, although Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment, the country never turned back.

It wasn’t that cutting federal spending at those levels would necessarily have been devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks would have hurt. Rather, sequestration proved particularly corrosive from the start because all types of public spending — from grants for renewable energy research and disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing — were to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for possible natural disasters like river flooding or an imminent volcanic eruption began to be shut down.  Over time the cuts would be vast: $85 billion in the first year and $110 billion in each year after that, for more than $1 trillion in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place.

Once lawmakers wrote sequestration into law they had more than a year to wise up. Yet they did nothing to draft an alternate plan and didn’t even start pointing out the havoc-to-come until just weeks before the deadline. Then they gave themselves a couple more months — until March 1, 2013 — to work out a deal, which they didn’t.  All this is, of course, ancient history, but even a decade later, the record of folly is worth reviewing.

If you remember, they tweeted while Rome burned. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for instance, sent out dozens of tweets to say Democrats were responsible: “The president proposed sequester, had 18 mo. to prioritize cuts, and did nothing,” he typically wrote, while he no less typically did nothing. For his part, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tweeted back: “It’s not too late to avert the damaging #sequester cuts, for which an overwhelming majority of Republicans voted.” And that became the pattern for a decade of American political gridlock, still not broken today.

Destruction Begins

March 1st came and went, so the budgetary axe began to fall.

At first, it didn’t seem so bad. Yes, the cuts weren’t quite as across the board as expected. The meat industry, for example, protested because health inspector furloughs would slow its production lines, so Congress patched the problem and spared those inspectors. But meat production aside, there was a sense that the cuts might not be so bad after all.

They were to be doled out based on a formula for meeting the arbitrary target of $85 billion in reductions in 2013, and no one knew precisely what would happen to any given program. In April, more than a month after the cuts had begun, the White House issued the president’s budget proposal for the following year, an annual milestone that typically included detailed information about federal spending in the current year. But across thousands of pages of documents and tables, the new budget ignored sequestration, and so reported meaningless 2013 numbers, because even the White House couldn’t say exactly what impact these cuts would have on programs and public investment across the country.

As it happened, they didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first ripples of impact began to spread quickly indeed. Losing some government funding, cancer clinics in New Mexico and Connecticut turned away patients. In Kentucky, Oregon, and Montana, shelters for victims of domestic violence cut services. In New York, Maryland, and Alabama, public defenders were furloughed, limiting access to justice for low-income people. In Illinois and Minnesota, public school teachers were laid off. In Florida, Michigan, and Mississippi, Head Start shortened the school year, while in Kansas and Indiana, some low-income children simply lost access to the program entirely. In Alaska, a substance abuse clinic shut down. Across the country, Meals on Wheels cut four million meals for seniors in need.

Only when the FAA imposed furloughs on its air traffic controllers did public irritation threaten to boil over. Long lines and airport delays ensued, and people were angry. And not just any people — people who had access to members of Congress.  In a Washington that has gridlocked the most routine business, lawmakers moved at a breakneck pace, taking just five days to pass special legislation to solve the problem. To avoid furloughs and shorten waits for airline passengers, they allowed the FAA to spend funds that had been intended for long-term airport repairs and improvements.

Flights would leave on time — at least until runways cracked and crumbled.  (You undoubtedly remember the scandal of 2019 at Cincinnati International Airport, when a bright young candidate for Senate met her demise in a tragic landing mishap.)

And then, of course, the Pentagon asked for an exemption, too. We’re talking about the military behemoth of planet Earth, which in 2013 accounted for 40% of military spending globally, its outlays exceeding the next 10 largest militaries combined.  It, too wanted a special exemption for some of its share of the cutbacks.

Meat inspectors, the FAA, and the Department of Defense enjoyed special treatment, but the rest of the nation was, as the history books recount, not so lucky. Children from middle-class and low-income families saw ever fewer resources at school, closing doors of opportunity. The young, old, and infirm found themselves with dwindling access to basic resources such as health care or even a hot dinner. Federal grants to the states dried up, and there was less money in state budgets for local priorities, from police officers to lowly streetlights.

And remember that, just as the sequestration cuts began, carbon concentration in the atmosphere breached 400 parts per million.  (Climate scientists had long been warning that the level should be kept below 350 for human security.) Unfortunately, as with the groundbreaking research that led to the Internet, it takes money to do big things, and the long-term effects of cutting environmental protection, general research, and basic infrastructure meant that the U.S. government would do little to stem the extreme weather that has, in 2023, become such a part of our world and our lives.

Looking back from a country now eternally in crisis, it’s clear that a Rubicon was crossed back in 2013. There was then still a chance to reject across-the-board budget cuts that would undermine a nation built on sound public investment and shared prosperity. At that crossroads, some fought against austerity. Losing that battle, others argued for a smarter approach: close tax loopholes to raise new revenue, or reduce waste in health care, or place a tax on carbon, or cut excessive spending at the Pentagon. But too few Americans — with too little influence — spoke up, and Washington didn’t listen.  The rest of the story, as you well know, is history.

Mattea Kramer is Research Director at National Priorities Project, where Jo Comerford is Executive Director. Both are TomDispatch regulars.  They wrote A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford

—

Mirrored from Tomdispatch.com

Associated Press reports:

The Sunni-Shiite violence is a legacy of the way George W. Bush and the Neoconservatives governed Iraq in 2003-2008. They deliberately installed the Shiites in power, in an exclusivist sort of way. I remember Neoconservative strategist Marc Gerecht Reuel talking about the goal of putting the Shiites in power. His colleague James Woolsey, a former CIA head, upbraided me at a conference for pointing out that some Iraqi Shiite groups are closely tied to the ayatollahs in Iran. I read somewhere that the Neoconservatives were convinced that unlike the Sunni Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who sympathized with the Palestinians, the Shiite Iraqis as a functional minority would sympathize with Israel’s Jews. The Neocons were real cut-ups, with all kinds of fancy theories unconnected to reality.

The Americans played strong favorites for years. They avoided having a truth and reconciliation process. They castigated the Sunni Arabs, many of whom had had ties to the Baath Party (r. 1968-2003), as little short of Nazis, and encouraged the Shiites to fire thousands of them from government employment. At the same time the Americans closed down state factories and created massive unemployment. A ‘Debaathification Commission’ fired thousands of Sunni schoolteachers and brought in Shiite cronies instead.

Whereas in South Africa the truth and reconciliation commission sought truth over punishment, in Iraq the ascendant Shiites marginalized and victimized Sunnis with ties to the old Baath (or even just ties to Sunnis who had ties to . . .)

Those Sunnis who formed cells to engage in bombings and sniping to get the Americans back out, bequeathed a legacy of such cells, which remain active, now aimed at preventing the Shiite establishment that inherited Iraq from enjoying its ascendancy.

In all of Iraqi history from the Sumerians until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in that country. The technique was adopted to fight Bush’s occupation, having been pioneered by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

And now, having screwed up Iraq royally over years, Americans can’t be bothered to even report on events there in more than a sentence on their television news.

I am sympathetic to attempts to contextualize such violence, but in fact such coordinated bombings have been a feature of Iraqi life for many years. The only remarkable thing about these bombings is that they came so closely on the heels of others– in recent years the big bombing campaigns have been divided by long periods of quiescence.

It is not clear that the violence is especially connected to Syria. Similar bombings were carried out before Syria slipped into civil war. And while the Iraqi military repression of Sunni Arab protesters at Hawija about a month ago, in what some Sunnis called a massacre, has inflamed Sunni-Shiite tensions, the simple fact is that before Hawija there were coordinated bombings in several cities at once. The bombings don’t appear to have a specific political aim but rather an over-all strategic one, and to take place no matter what is happening politically.

Nor is the violence of the past week (or really the last month and a half) like that during the Iraqi Civil War of 2006-2007. Then, most of those killed were victims of neighborhood faction-fighting, and most victims were shot, not killed by bombs. The neighborhood fighting declined when they were ethnically cleansed. It is not likely that that sort of civil war will start back up again now, since there has been so much movement of populations.

What can be said is that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of the Shiite Islamic Mission Party (al-Da`wa) has not exactly been very good about reaching out to Sunni Iraqis and bringing them into his State of Law Coalition.

To be fair, large numbers of Sunni Arab Iraqis seem unreconciled to the rise to power of the majority Shiites, who are more or less allied with the minority Kurds. Small terrorist groups among them carry out these bombings in hopes of deterring foreign investment and of keeping the new order from congealing. They cannot really change the political situation with such bombings, but they can stop nice new buildings from being built or the kind of big increase in prosperity from being achieved that make al-Maliki truly popular.

They are having some success in this strategy. When I was in Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that there were not many new buildings or construction sites and the city seemed in some ways frozen in 1991. Although Iraq is an oil state, it hasn’t been able to kickstart Abu Dhabi style building. (A developer has started work on a nice big new mall).

The bombers are, then, spoilers rather than revolutionaries, and they appear to have no coherent plan beyond disruption. It is a little surprising that they manage to keep at it despite having had no political impact at all for many years.

It is also surprising that al-Maliki has not been able to mount an effective counter-terrorism policy. How hard could it be to infiltrate the cells and bust them? Of course, even better would be to so mollify the general Sunni Arab population that they become willing to turn in the people making car bombs (you can’t make car bombs on an industrial scale without the neighbors noticing).

A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech about how permanent warfare could now be deployed in a humanitarian fashion and without substantial loss of life to build up and maintain an global American empire. Wow.

Russian Foreign Minister Discusses Syria, Palestinian Question in Interview to Lebanese TV
Transcript of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview to Lebanese Television: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Interview to Lebanese TV Channel Al-Mayadin, Moscow, 13 May 2013″
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
Monday, May 20, 2013
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

(Interviewer) I would like to start our conversation with your recent international contacts and, in the first instance, with your meeting with the American secretary of state on 7 May this year in Moscow. The day after he left Moscow, John Kerry made the statement in Rome that there was no place for President Bashar al-Assad in the transitional government. There were also statements that the White House had not yet taken a final decision on the subject of arming the opposition and was waiting for the results of an investigation into the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic to take the final decision. We are familiar with the accords reached in Moscow between Russia and America but we would still like to understand why, as soon as the American secretary of state had left Moscow, completely different statements were made, which fundamentally do not fall within the framework of the accords agreed the day before?

(Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov) I will start with the fact that very good talks took place during the course of John Kerry’s stay in Moscow. He had a lengthy conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, during the course of which, in addition to detailed discussion of a whole series of bilateral matters, the subject of Syria and a series of other international problems were touched upon. With regard to Syria, Mr Kerry presented an analysis very close to what we talk about, seeing threats resulting from maintaining the status quo and encouraging the irreconcilable opposition to seize power, and solving problems by military means. We talk (and Mr Kerry also supported this) about the need to stop the bloodshed, and to start political talks in line with the logic laid down in the Geneva communique of 30 June 2012, which virtually all the key external players who have any influence on the Syrian situation signed. Mr Kerry spoke in favor of convoking the next international meeting with the participation of the parties in order to encourage them to move in the political direction of forming a transitional governing body, on the basis of the general agreement of the government of the Syrian Arab Republic and all the opposition groups, so that it can prepare firm accords guaranteeing the security and rights of all the ethnic, religious, and other groups in Syria, without exception.

We have been speaking out in favor of holding such a forum for quite a long time. Back in August of last year we suggested convoking a Geneva-2. At that time, our Western partners, Arab participants in the Geneva process, and Turkey said that they were not yet ready for this. Our American, French, and British colleagues, and the Europeans as a whole, called for work in favor of uniting the opposition on a constructive platform of preparing for talks. The National Coalition was created, but, unfortunately, it was formed on a platform that was absolutely the opposite – overthrowing the regime and dismantling all the institutions. The decision of the League of Arab States to the effect that the National Coalition was the only representative of the Syrian people and should take the place of Syria in the Arab League did not help either. A question arises in connection with this:A What about the other opposition groups because the National Coalition is far from being the only one of them? An external opposition exists, which is not represented in the coalition, there is also an internal opposition, which has never left Syria and is in favor of reform from inside the country.

Against such a backdrop, we welcome the agreement of the Americans, represented by John Kerry, to our blueprint for holding a conference without preconditions (no preconditions were formulated in what we agreed with our American colleague). Russian President Vladimir Putin supported the idea outlined by the American secretary of state, and instructed me to formulate ideas on paper together with my American colleague, which we did and we then announced them at a joint news conference. John Kerry and I had an agreement that we would secure the consent of our governments to the proposals that were formulated. President Putin is also working with a number of the countries, which it is important to bring into such a conference, and the American side will continue its efforts to ensure that the opposition unites on a platform of support for such an approach.

These efforts are continuing. I have heard about the statements, which Mr Kerry made in Rome, and about the statements of our other colleagues. I am proceeding from the fact that it is hard to persuade the opposition. It, in contrast to the government of Syria, which has made quite a positive statement in response to the Russo-American initiative, has not done this but has spoken quite vaguely, saying that in principle it would welcome any initiatives, which could put a stop to the violence but first Assad must “disappear” — that is, approaches have once again been set out, which have for many months now been the reason for the continuing deadlock in the Syrian crisis. So we are continuing our efforts and our contact with many partners. A meeting recently took place in Sochi between President Vladimir Putin and British Prime Minister David Cameron, at which support for the Russo-American initiative was also expressed. I know that the next meeting of the opposition forces, which are drawn towards the National Coalition, is planned in Istanbul in the next few days, on around 19-20 May. And immediately after this, in Madrid, I think, the National Coordination Committee will hold a meeting of the internal constructive patriotic opposition. Let us see what approaches will be set out following these events.

We think that preconditions need to be abandoned, not because we like or do not like someone, but because it is necessary to be realistic. And realism and concern for the interests of the Syrian people demand a speedy end to the violence without any preconditions. Any preconditions will only prolong this vicious circle of bloodshed.

(Interviewer) Sergey Viktorovich, you mentioned the talks between Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin and David Cameron in Sochi. After this meeting, statements followed, in particular by Ushakov, about the fact that there were differences concerning the Geneva-2 agenda, its structure, and powers. This may lead to the conference not taking place at the end of the month. Could you not clarify what differences this concerns and what is meant by the “legitimacy” of the representatives of the opposition, so that they are later able to fulfil the commitments made as a result of the talks?

(Lavrov) There are several problems here because the Russo-American initiative was not able to encompass all the details. This was not our aim. Our task was to encourage a process of abandoning the current unacceptable situation and moving towards the preparation of talks. Much still lies ahead for this to be done. For example (and I have already spoken about this when answering your first question), it is crucial to have a single opinion and position of those who are coming out against the regime, and a negotiating team, which would represent all opposition figures.

It is also important, of course, to have a negotiating team from the Syrian government. A day before John Kerry’s visit, I phoned my colleague, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, and once again asked him whether the committee created to promote dialog and reforms, headed by the Syrian prime minister, had the authority to conduct negotiations with the opposition. I was told that it did. We will now wait and see how quickly and effectively the other side (those who the opposition listen to more) is able to achieve the same reaction from the opposition:A Here is our negotiating team and it represents all the opposition forces, it has all the appropriate powers. That is the first task, which is not yet accomplished.

The second problem is, as you rightly said, reaching agreement with the other conference participants. We are proceeding from the fact that all the participants in the meeting in Geneva on 30 June last year should be invited to it, plus the two key players who were not in Geneva last year — Iran and Saudi Arabia. We will also be delighted to see Jordan, Lebanon, and all the neighbors of Syria. A country such as Iran cannot be excluded from this process because of geopolitical preferences. It is nevertheless a very important external player. But there is not yet any accord on this subject.

Some of our Western colleagues (this also emerged during the talks with David Cameron in Sochi) wish to narrow the circle of external participants and start the process with a very small group of countries, within the framework of which the negotiations teams and the agenda would essentially be decided beforehand, and perhaps even the outcome of the talks as well. And then, if the logic of our Western colleagues is followed, the proposals would be handed to the government of the Syrian Arab Republic and the opposition, and everyone would start to put pressure on both in order to push through the implementation of this plan, conceived without the involvement of the Syrians.

We still prefer another approach. Firstly, we do not want such things to be done privately but with the participation of the regional countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed our position at the meeting in Sochi. External players should not take decisions for the Syrians but encourage the government and all the opposition groups to start trying to reach agreement among themselves. This is where the difference lies. We do not consider it to be right that external players should engage in “socio-political engineering” and outline plans of some sort for the Syrians. The Syrians must reach agreement themselves. This will be a difficult business and a lengthy process but it is only in this event that it is possible to count on a firm accord.

(Interviewer) Sergey Viktorovich, yesterday (12 May) representatives of the National Coordinating Committee, who often visit Moscow and meet you, confirmed that they had received an invitation from the Russian Federation ambassador in Paris. Could you define, approximately, the circle of participants in this meeting? Who would you exclude?

(Lavrov) I would not exclude anyone, apart from those who are not opposition figures but terrorists. For example, the Jabhat al-Nusra movement, a well-known structure, which the Americans included on the terrorist list, and its leaders openly state that they receive orders from al-Qaida. There are several terrorist groups in it. Of course, there is no place for them at such meetings. We are talking about a political, even an armed opposition, but on the understanding that there should not be any place for terrorists at the negotiating table.

(Interviewer) You mentioned Iran as an important and key regional player. As I understand it, our Western partners do not at the moment very much wish to see Teheran as a participant in the conference. What role could this country, in your view, play in setting the conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic, and how do you view the role of the quite strong and important organization Hezbollah?

(Lavrov) Iran may play the same role as the other external players who directly cooperate and support one or another of the Syrian parties politically or in another way. There are obvious things:A Iran has repeatedly stressed its solidarity with the Syrian government, and representatives of the Iranian leadership regularly visit Damascus. There should not be any doubts here. I will stress once again that geopolitical biases should not be an obstacle to Iran’s participation in the process of preparing and holding conferences from the very start.

As for Hezbollah, everyone knows very well that this is not an “imported product” but the result of the development of Lebanese political life and the emergence of Lebanese Shiism. As I understand it, they do not have any aims that exceed the boundaries of Lebanese territory. Hezbollah now openly says that they have sent their combat detachments to Syria with one — they stress — aim: to protect Shiite shrines. Everyone knows very well that religious shrines in Syria are being subjected to vandalism. Literally yesterday, I was reading about the destruction of an Orthodox Church, including the image of a saint, who is equally revered by Orthodox Christians and Muslims. So the people who are doing this should be stopped and excluded from any political processes dedicated to Syria’s future.

(Interviewer) A powerful explosion resounded near the town of Reyhanli in the Turkish province of Hatay recently. The Turkish authorities immediately rushed to blame the Syrian secret services and appealed to NATO. It is clear what this conversation will lead to. They evidently want to accuse the Syrian authorities like this and pave the way for an intervention and a sharp reaction on the part of the West or NATO. What do you think about this?

(Lavrov) We have expressed our deepest condolences to the Turkish government and people, and the nearest and dearest of the several dozen dead and wounded. Any act of terrorism merits sharp condemnation, that is why Russia drew up a single standard in the UN Security Council a long time ago now, which concludes that the Security Council reacts unanimously and routinely to any terrorist phenomena. It is regrettable that acts of terrorism occurring inside Syria have not been condemned by a number of our Western colleagues for about a year. I think that any terrorist activity deserves condemnation and there should not be any double standards here. The united front in the fight against terrorism needs to be strengthened. President Putin spoke about this in great detail with President Obama during a telephone conversation after the notorious terrorist act during the Boston marathon. A

As far as the situation that developed specifically after the act of terrorism near the town of Reyhanli on the Syrian-Turkish border is concerned, I think we need to wait for the investigation, especially since the Turkish authorities have already announced the detention of several suspects. So, I would not want to make any unambiguous accusations against anyone, especially at the stage when the investigation is just beginning.

(Interviewer) Sergey Viktorovich, you again confirmed in Warsaw on 10 May this year that Russia intended to complete the delivery of air defense systems to Syria in line with previously concluded accords, signed several years ago. In connection with this, Israel, which recently made an airstrike on Syria, started to get worried and talk about the fact that this related to S-300 systems. Is this the case?

(Lavrov) I will say once again that we have concluded no new contracts but are honouring (we have already partially fulfilled them and are completing their fulfilment) all the old contracts that relate to air defense. Those who are not planning aggressive actions against a sovereign state should not worry because the air defense system is an exclusively defensive (even in name) system, which is required to repel attacks from the air. We are not breaking any laws here and we do not want to lose our reputation as a reliable supplier.

(Interviewer) At the beginning of May, the Israeli air force struck facilities on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic. The Russian Foreign Ministry made a statement, in which it indicated that this incident was being analysed and investigated so that the appropriate conclusions could be drawn. Some people perceived your statement in Warsaw as a response to the events linked to the air raid. Can the statements by the Russian side be regarded as help to Syria in strengthening its air defense system to avoid such air raids?

(Lavrov) Initially, air defense systems are supplied to protect the purchasing country from air raids. But these contracts were concluded a long time before the air strikes were made on Syria last year and now. When we said that we wanted to look into all the circumstances in this affair, we had already clarified many things for ourselves. We wanted to understand which specific targets had been subjected to strikes. According to our assessment, these targets still relate to the functioning of the Syrian state’s military defense system. I do not want to go into details.

(Interviewer) There is the opinion among analysts and observers that Russia supports the Syrian regime and will strengthen its support, especially after the Syrian army started recently to achieve some success on the battlefield. What is your view of such an opinion?

(Lavrov) We have already repeatedly said that we take an open and honest stance, which is well-known to everyone, not for the sake of retaining a regime or any individual at the head of or inside this regime, but so that the Syrian people stop suffering, so that no-one breaks international law, or challenges the basic principles of the United Nations Charter, such as respect of national sovereignty and the territorial integrity and independence of the state, and non-interference in internal matters. We are convinced that no other measures aimed at changes in this or another region will bring a lasting settlement. Look at what is occurring in other countries, which were involved in the “Arab spring” . The situation there is very far from stabilization although we are doing everything politically, morally, and by means of humanitarian aid, to support the processes of reform. But these are very painful processes, to a large extent because of how they were implemented.

(Interviewer) You said that Russia is guided by the supremacy of the law, international law, etc. But Russia probably also has its own geopolitical and economic interests. Could you not define the scope of Russia’s interests in Syria in particular, and in the region as a whole?

(Lavrov) Our interests in Syria do not differ from our interests in the region as a whole. We want this region to be stable so that it is possible to trade with it in a mutually advantageous fashion, so that it is possible to invest in it favourably in conditions of a stable political and socio-economic situation, and to help develop the economy of the countries of the region and at the same time help the operations of Russian companies. We have an interest in assisting, together with the countries of this region, in solving the most pressing problems, which have a global dimension, first and foremost, the Palestine-Israeli conflict, and the Iranian nuclear conflict. I will also mention the task of creating a zone free from weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. We attempted to reach agreement on this quite a long time ago and it was decided three years ago to convene the relevant international conference in 2012. Unfortunately, this was not done, and it was not our fault. We remain convinced that all the countries of the region should take part in such a conference. Our efforts as one of its three (together with the Americans and British) co-founders are aimed at this. The UN secretary general is also involved in this process.

Thus we are interested both in the economy and in settling the conflicts, and in political dialog, which we value and which is developing well for us. At the beginning of the year, the first ministerial meeting between Russia and the Arab League of States took place, the foreign ministers of Iraq, Egypt, and Iran visited us. To this I would add the very deep traditions of our humanitarian and religious links. We are very concerned about the fate of the Christians living in the region, first and foremost Orthodox Christians. They have lived in Syria for centuries “side by side” with the main population group — Sunni Muslims — and other religious minorities — Shiites, Alawites, Druze, and Kurds. So stability is important from this point of view as well. We do not want the countries of the region to turn into mono-ethnic and mono-religious states. This sounds simply ludicrous in the 21 st century.

It is this that we are guided by when we defend the principles of international law in the context of the processes that are occurring in the region.

(Interviewer) Sergey Viktorovich, you spoke in an interview approximately a year ago about the danger of inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts. At that time you were criticized in certain countries of the Persian Gulf. Do you think that this danger still exists today? Do you feel that the explosive situation in the region will be successfully overcome?

(Lavrov) I hope that it will be successfully overcome and prevented. But the severity of the inter-religious conflicts remains. I have not concealed this and I do not agree with the criticism made in response to my statements. If the criticism was meant to “suppress” the concern of those who made it, then that is understandable. But they will not succeed in artificially sweeping this problem “under the carpet” . It exists and everyone sees this. I have already spoken about examples where religious shrines (in this case Christian ones) are suffering, but the conflicts within Islam are very serious. This concerns us because we have a vested interest in the Islamic world developing harmoniously, as set out in the Amman declaration (adopted by theologians of all the Islamic movements in Jordan in 2005). Unfortunately, the principles enshrined in it are now being subjected to a very difficult test.

(Interviewer) The impression being created is that no-one is able to fully realize that Russia, a strong and great power, is really firm in its position, and is defending its own interests and the interests of international law as a whole. People are constantly trying to find some “dirty trick” in this, thinking that certain “behind-the-scenes” agreements exist, under which Russia will give way, for example, in Syria, Iran, or somewhere else, and in response the Western countries and America will make concessions on air defense or other matters that are relevant for the post-Soviet space. What do you think about such statements?

(Lavrov) They are not serious. I think that those who try to make such suggestions are engaging in wishful thinking. Everyone knows very well that Russia’s position on a whole series of fundamental issues is not subject to opportunistic vacillations. This does not mean that it is formulated as an ultimatum. We are defending only what lies at the heart of the modern world system — the principles of the UN Charter and other international legal documents — and we insist on their implementation. We do not want to tolerate and we will not tolerate attempts to distort the content of accords that have been reached, especially those that are enshrined in law. But within the framework of what I have just said, we are prepared to seek constructively and flexibly compromises that are acceptable, first and foremost, to the parties to the relevant conflict themselves.

(Interviewer) It is impossible not to touch upon the Middle East settlement, in which the Palestinian issue occupies a central place. It will be difficult to resolve the remaining issues without this problem being solved. Is there, in your view, a prospect of seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel” on this track in the decades to come?

(Lavrov) I absolutely agree with you regarding the importance of the Palestinian question. I said many years ago and I am still convinced that the failure to settle this problem is the single most important factor enabling extremists to be recruited into the ranks of the various radical structures. Unfortunately, this is continuing because the deadlock, which has continued for many years, is being used to educate young people in intransigence towards those who seek a political solution. This is presented as politicians having entered into dialog, it came to a dead-end, but they are continuing to try to persuade the neighboring country to resume negotiations. They say, let us act differently, like men, let us use force etc. This is a dangerous trend. The process has not yet stopped. The fact that we are seeing the spread of extremism and terrorist activities far beyond the region (Sahara and the Sahel zone has been stricken by threats of this type), is largely a consequence of the unresolved Palestinian problem.

We have for a long time and persistently been drawing the attention of our partners to the fact that the Middle East “quartet” is unacceptably passive. It is to all intents and purposes not working, its activity is paralyzed. Several times, members of the “quartet” could have met at the level of foreign ministers of Russia, America, the European Union high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, and the UN general secretary and were even in one spot, for example, during the UN General Assembly in September 2012, but they were not actually able to do so since their American colleagues were not ready. First they cited the forthcoming elections, and after these took place, the Americans started to cite the elections in Israel. We wanted to organize a meeting of the “quartet” in London just now, “in the margins” of the sitting of G8 foreign ministers, but this did not happen either. This worries us because criticism of the “quartet” is absolutely fair, but we do not want to be undeservedly criticized because Russia is actually striving to resume the negotiating process. The conditions are needed for this.

We are also convinced that it is not sufficient at this stage simply to assemble the “quartet” and debate the terms that will later be presented to the Israelis and Palestinians. We are convinced of the need to be actively involved in the operations of the Arab League of States. Especially since the Arab League itself has, in my opinion, got too carried away with Syrian matters and the Palestinian problem has been placed on the backburner for some time. The situation seems to have started to change recently. Representatives of the Arab League visited Washington where they presented to the Americans their approaches, as we were told, to the “flexible” implementation of the Arab peace initiative.A We have not yet been familiarized with these ideas but we are counting on the Arab peace initiative not being subjected to revision since this is a very important document opening up the way towards a sustainable peace between Arabs and Israelis, and stable development in the Middle East. Let us not forget that in addition to the Arab countries, this initiative was supported by all the Muslim states within the framework of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation). I would treat this document carefully. It is the foundation, together with the UN Security Council resolutions on the Palestinian issue. Incidentally, the Arab peace initiative, together with the UN platform, is the base for the unification of Fatah and Hamas. I hope that the efforts made by Egypt in this area, which we actively support, will be crowned with success, and the heated events of the “Arab Spring” will not severely damage the path towards Palestinian unity, in line with the accords in principle that have been reached.

(Description of Source: Moscow Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation in Russian — Official website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; URL: http://www.mid.ru)

While it is uncontroversial that climate change will produce more frequent and more intense storms (hurricanes, cyclones), it is not clear what impact it will have on smaller weather events like tornadoes or hail storms.

Kudos to WXYZ Detroit for doing real science journalism on climate change and extreme weather! Pt. 1:

part 2:

part 3

The reporters helpfully warn that from here on out, our extreme weather season may lengthen . . .

For an informed discussion of climate change and public policy, see this Woodrow Wilson Center discussion: