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 | Daily News Brief March 19, 2014 |
Top of the Agenda
Syria Conflict Stirs New Concern
UN
investigators told the Human Rights Council in Geneva that they had
expanded their list of Syrian individuals, military units, security
agencies, and insurgent groups suspected of war crimes, and have
collected enough evidence to substantiate indictments (Reuters).
Meanwhile, the Obama administration ordered the Syrian government to
suspend operations at its American embassy and consulates, requiring personnel who are not legal residents to leave the country (AP).
As the conflict marked the third anniversary of the initial uprising
that sparked the civil war this week, regional fallout has spread. The
Lebanese military moved to break a blockade of a Sunni town in the Bekaa
Valley that followed rocket attacks in the area (Daily Star), while Israel retaliated against Syrian security targets after a bomb wounded four Israeli soldiers in the Golan Heights on Tuesday (Haaretz).
Analysis
"The
Assad regime's recent successes are by no means sweeping -- its
offensive operations sometimes progress very slowly or fail altogether,
and in some places it has lost ground. But it is having incremental
success on key fronts in Aleppo and the Damascus area. If it prevails
there, the war's real and perceived direction would shift strongly in
its favor -- Bashar al-Assad and his allies, buoyed by success, would
press their 'military solution' harder and become even less inclined to negotiate," writes the Washington Institute's Jeffrey White.
"In
the unceasing warfare between rival camps all around Israel's borders,
Israel is a secondary player, and conventional wisdom has been that the
main players are too busy battling each other to attack Israel. But the ongoing instability is gradually wearing down the security bubble in which Israelis have been living in recent years," writes Amos Harel in Haaretz.
"The best case for Syria and for the credibility of the United States
would be one in which the president upholds the operational relevance
and directive nature of his August 2011 step-aside language and permits
the interagency national security system to go back to the drawing board
in creating options for his consideration. The worst case would be one
that continues to permit the strategic communicators to broadcast the
inadmissibility of what is happening in Syria, but coupling that message
with operational inaction justified by excuses ranging from someone
else's civil war, to the purported failure of mass murder to achieve the
definition of genocide, to the all-or-nothing argument that anything
with a military dimension amounts or leads to the invasion and
occupation of Syria," writes former ambassador Frederic C. Hof.
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