The Al Houla atrocity: The outcome of nuclear diplomacy with Iran

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

Assad’s latest massacre at al-Houla

The wanton slaughter by Syrian forces of 92 confirmed victims, 32 of them children under ten, at the Homs village of Al-Houla Friday, May 25, was the most horrifying atrocity in the Middle East this week, but not the only one: In Sanaa, six days ago, al Qaeda’s suicide bombers, having penetrated Yemeni military ranks, detonated two tons of explosives at a parade rehearsal killing more than 100 soldiers and civilians and injuring 400.

Yet, according to the New York Times, after 15 months of bloodshed, President Barack Obama is working on the Yemenbi model for a plan to push Bashar Assad out of office, while “leaving remnants of his government in place. The Yemeni model replaced President Ali Abdullah in Sanaa with his vice president Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Whereas US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned Assad and his “cronies” for the al-Houla massacre, the “Yemen plan” would leave in place those very “cronies,” including Assad’s close relatives, who are responsible for massacres not only in al-Houla, but also in Homs, Hama, Idlib and Deraa, to name a few.

According to the NYT, when Obama tested the idea with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at the Group-of-8 summit in Camp David last Saturday, May 19, the Russian prime minister raised the example of “Mubarak in a cage,” referring to Mubarak’s court appearance at his trial. Obama then “countered with Yemen, and the indication was, yes, this was something we could talk about.”

This scrap of dialogue lifted the veil from a key aspect of Obama’s broader Middle East program and the role he has assigned Moscow for carrying it through. This role was first revealed exclusively by DEBKA-Net-Weekly 542 of May 25 which reported that the US president is acting to bring the Russians into a partnership for securing deals on the Iranian nuclear program and the Syrian crisis.

So far, his venture has had two results:

    1. The Iranian nuclear impasse and the outcome of the Syrian civil war have been more tightly integrated than ever before.

    2. Any deal reached by the US, Russia and Iran on the two issues would have to entail a carving-up of Middle East influence among those three powers.

As for Israel’s role in the ongoing bargaining, we also disclosed in DEBKAfile of May 19 that Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak had agreed to stand back for Barack Obama to put his interim deal with Iran to the test. Despite their reservations, they decided to go along with it after receiving assurances from the White House that Iranian violations would result in the immediate termination of negotiations and bring military action forward as the sole remaining option for stopping a nuclear Iran.

The US president promised to put his accord with Israel before the G-8 summit. And he did.

But for now there is no deal although Israel, in effect, gave Obama six months’ grace to explore his diplomatic initiative with Vladimir Putin and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before turning back to the military option.

But as the days pass, major hurdles are piling up in the path of what some observers hail as Obama’s “Grand Bargain,” and others his “Grand Failure:” The Six-power talks with Iran have failed to persuade the ayatollahs to give up uranium enrichment up to weapons-grade; the world wants actions not words to halt the brutal massacres in Syria; rising bloodshed in Yemen continues to cripple the country. Obama’s hopes of a crisis-free six months for electioneering in peace look more and more like pipe-dreams.

The bargaining with Tehran is likely to stay stalled because Iran’s leaders take Obama’s deal with Israel as a six-month respite from a military threat. So why should they hurry in May or even June to reach a compromise with America on its demand to stop 20 percent uranium enrichment?

Bashar Assad and his army chiefs likewise feel US hands are tied by Obama’s hopes of a breakthrough with Iran and they can safely carry on with their “unspeakable crimes” for the next six months under the Iranian-Russian umbrella. Words however strong will not discourage him from sending tanks to crush every last opponent and their children.
And Israel, seeing the US president lurching from one bargaining position to another to keep his initiative afloat, shifts uncertainly in and out of its unwritten commitment to withhold military action against Iran until November.

None of the parties involved in granting Obama his six-month grace period, whether Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, Binyamin Netanyahu or Bashar Assad, can be sure that he will in fact be returned to the Whie House in November. And even if he is, how much will be left of his Grand Bargain.

May 27, 2012 | 14 Comments »

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14 Comments / 14 Comments

  1. Also the outcome of special theatre which involves desparate Jihadist Al Qaeda types, the British SAS active in these areas, working like crazy to save Obama the CIA, and a Media which is unchallenged even by groups like Breitbart

    Oh and also Jewish leaders in America and Britain who have their agents in Israel

    All of the above combined will cause the death of Israel.

    Oh and included on this issue of Syria the spinelessness of those right on religious jewish folk in Israel. they are so “unworldly2 they always end up follolwing the US Government policy in the world.

  2. The Al Houla atrocity: The outcome of _____

    Fill in the blank with anything you wish. How about this:

    The Al Houla atrocity: The outcome of shooting people in the head

  3. I give up. Cannot deal with such stupidity/ignorance. Just remember what I said when the Arabs in Palestine orchestrate with the Empire/Sharia Alliance a similar “massacre” and the world calls for the resignation of Netanyahu…people above will have no leg to stand on

  4. Al Houla is hoopla for nothing!

    Considering that Stalin (USSR) and Mao (China) have the Guinness world records of the most people liquidated (>110,000,000 human souls = 110 MILLIONS), Assad has a long way to go with their approval. The US did NOTHING in Rwanda, NOTHING in Congo (Kin), NOTHING in Darfur, NOTHING in the conflict N vs S Sudan and will do NOTHING in Syria because Pr. O is supporting the Iranian mullahs who are in cahoot with the Talibans, Al Qaeda and Pakistan.

  5. Vinnie

    If what you say is true then it is very difficult to continue to defend the existness of the USA as I used to. I am beginning to look at the USA the way I look at a convicted rapist.

    The incident at the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena is an example of how the USA looks at the rest of the world. Things to be used for their pleasure and to hell with the world. The USA has committed many evil acts since 1945. The only bright spots were 1) the cure to Polio ( Sabin/ Salk; Jews) and its support of Israel and 3) medical discoveries and 4) Internet.

    Obama is the enemy of Israel and he hates the USA as do many Democrats and Republicans.

  6. The media is covering this here in the U.S. My local newspaper – very anti-Israel, most of the time – is giving this front page coverage.

    However, the naked emperor here is WHY nothing serious is being done. Just hand-wringing. And this is much worse than Libya.

    Is it because of Syrian WMDs? Libya had those, too. If Syria started to ready those for use, this could be promptly detected and pre-empted.

    Is it because Syria has “hard” defenses that would result in a lot of expensive Western aircraft being shot down? No way. They are a bankrupt country. Israel hit their North Korean-provided nuke site in ’07 with no losses, and not even a military reaction from Syria.

    Will Russia intervene on their behalf? They didn’t even intervene when they were near the height of their relative military power, back in ’82, when Israel was beating the tar out of Syria. That is not happening.

    How about Iran? Will they intervene? With what? A pitiful force of 1970s technology fighter jets? Are they going to march through Iraq? I don’t think so.

    So…why is nothing being done?

    The answer is so f****** obvious, yet no one says anything.

    It is because it would relieve pressure off of Israel. That’s why. Intervene against Assad, support some genuine democratic reform-minded government that might make a separate peace with Israel, and that at least partially relieves the pressure of TOTAL local isolation Israel is under.

    The ONLY acceptable alternative to Assad, per Obama, the EU, and the UN…is someone who would be JUST as hostile to Israel as Assad was.

    That’s why Obama would do nothing to back the Syrian Democratic Coalition. Instead, he’s backing the Turkish-sponsored MB opposition, even though they’d be just as illegitimate in the eyes of most Syrians as Assad.

    Obama’s policy is this: Israel must be made as dependent on the U.S. as possible, while at the same time, as locally isolated and threatened as possible. This maximizes the leverage the U.S. has to force a Saudi-style “peace plan” down Israel’s throat. This is combined with the pressure of the threat of a nuclear Iran.

    It is all about Israel. Syrian civilians can get massacred even though we are abundantly capable of stopping this. We can take the risk of Iran going nuclear; the U.S. can “contain” them if need be. TOP PRIORITY: BRING ISRAEL TO HEEL!!!! (Operationally, this means either making her fatally vulnerable to ultimate dissolution per a Saudi surrender plan, or if Israel balks, turning her into a Rhodesia-style pariah state to be similarly strangled).

    May Obama rot in hell.

    At any rate, leaving his ultimate disposition aside, this is why Israel MUST act on her own against Iran, if she still has the means to do so effectively. At many levels, there is no choice in this. Obama cannot be trusted at all. He is the enemy of Israel. There is no question of this.

  7. Muslims killing muslims is not news to the western media or left wing US and Israel hating blog sites ( financed by sod ). There is no interest there.

    There is no interest by the “christians” who have divested funds from Israel. There is no comment from the arab league. No outburst of emergency council meetings from the UN. No comments from the weasels who run Brussels. No NYTimes stories,,,, it is not happening. This ” massacre” is overblown. Continue doing our crossword puzzles.

    But when it involves Jews, this is a different story. Detailed tabulations of deaths, wounded are reported hourly. Etc…

  8. The cult of death has not changed one bit ever since its abortion over humanity.
    Mass murder, bestial acts against humans and all living creatures is in the very nature of that horror or horrors.
    That, the most dangerous threat to the human race has been allowed, in fact encouraged to grow among human beings. Those that have been material or tacit collaborators to the spread of that gruesome cult must face jeopardy including harsh penalties.
    The monstrous acts just reported derived from the promotion of “peace” with islam, be that Iran or Syria, etc, will expand for as long as the human society allows that to remain.

  9. It is not at all that the Jews are gullible. It is that the Jewish leaders, especially in America, have been conditioned by their own (American) ruling class with its great powers of persuasion (for example Ted Belman of this Israpundit conditioned through his years as a LAWYER, to follow whatever garbage the elites throw at the population through the Media.

    I was not there. I cannot say what happened.

    However I have listened to the BBC and the reporting on this “massacre” follows the pattern of the reporting of the Srebrenica “massacre”.

    Except that they have become more bold since 1995 because then they did not report a massacre until 2 months after the event.

    The Irish times has reported on Srebrenica many hundreds of times since 1995 but in the first 2 months there was no mention at all of a massacre.

    Now they can put this type of news story in circulation very fast and nobody bats an eyelid.

    I can handle all of that but what I cannot handle is Jewish leaders like Belman who toe the line like any other gullible Media dimwit.

    The reason they can put it out so fast is largely due to people like Belman and it is worse in his case because he has had a chance to understand how the Media in Yugoslavia worked.

    An alternative theory, with the merest tiny bit of reflection, and I am no expert at all, but the whole point is I do not need great expertise, I just need to reflect back on Yugoslavia, on Qana, on Jenin, on El Dura etc..

    1. Who benefits? Assad does not benefit at all because he is interested in keeping the shaky Russians on board with him.
    2. Clearly benefit are those who call for HUMANITARIAN Intervention such as the CIA, the sections around Obama like Rice who are for Humanitarian Interventions everywhere, Joe Lieberman…and Ted Belman? But why the latter?

    An alternative theory thinking only of the practicals of this specific massacre story:

    We know that Al Qaeda is there and we know their ruthlessness.

    We know the CIA and SAS are there and they would do anything for political global strategy.

    We know that Al Jazeera and Kuwait are there and we saw just how ruthless they were in Libya in murdering not a hundred but tens of thousands of black Africans.

    We have experience of the Qana affair where the same Islamists raided the nearby morgues in order to locate the very bodies that they later had actors dig or pull out of the rubble, in the case on one child pulled out time after time. THESE TYPES WOULD DO ANYTHING. THAT IS THE WHOLE ESSENCE OF THE EXPOSURES BY SPENCER ON JIHADWATCH AND BY PAMELA ON ATLAS SHRUGS.

    And again on the BbC this morning these Antisemites focus on CHILDREN.

    A lady from Save the Children (note a lady to give the maternal touch) was calling for humanitarian intervention.

    And Belman, a Jewish leader through Israpundit in America and Israel, and a man who networks with Eidelberg et al, falls for all of this.

    This makes me think that the issue is Assad and Jewish leadership opportunism devoid of principle, you know sell your granny fro a penny.

    Assad is in league with Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran. So Belman is quite incapable of calling for a defence of Assad from the forces of Empire/Sharia.

    Belman cannot act because he leaves out a fact I raised a year ago which is: defence of Assad does not mean lowering the guard against Assad by Israel.

    Nothing to stop defending Assad. Nothing to stop Israel from striking against Assad if it needs to. But that entails seeing Israel as an independent force in the world.

    THAT BELMAN AND HIS ILK IN THE Jewish ELITE CANNOT EVER DO

    They have always and will always see Israel as an adjunct to the US which has brainwashed them.

    Nor does defence of Gaghbo, Ben Ali, Gadhafi or Mubarak ever stop Israel from hitting Iran with a Nuclear Weapon to save the Jews.

    Only the http://www.4international.me can take these positions and only that organization can become the defender of the Jews in the long term consistent sense.

  10. Is this really the work of Assad, or is it yet another case of NATO’s Islamists slaughtering children and civilians while trying to invoke sympathy and Nato intervention??

    There’s no way to know which is true, but I’m inclined to believe the latter.

  11. @ James B – Canada:

    Well, perusing various left wing websites hateful to the USA, NATO and Israel; http://www.antiwar.com, rt.com, there is hardly any mention of this.

    Frankly, I’m surprised. I would have thought that sites such as this would have at least made a brave attempt to blame the Al-Houla massacre on Israel, if not the Jews.

  12. Well, perusing various left wing websites hateful to the USA, NATO and Israel; http://www.antiwar.com, rt.com, there is hardly any mention of this.

    Antiwar.com –

    This site is devoted to the cause of non-interventionism and is read by libertarians, pacifists, leftists, “greens,” and independents alike, as well as many on the Right who agree with our opposition to imperialism ????

    OBVIOUSLY FINANCED BY THE HOUSE OF SOD