Tomorrow, John Kerry will meet Sergei Lavrov and several of his other counterparts from Europe and the Mid-East in Munich in a last ditch effort to revive Syrian peace talks, which fell apart amid an intense Russian air assault on rebel positions in Aleppo.
Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier make a predictably horrible plea for more military intervention in Syria:
The Saudi Arabia plan to send ground troops into Syria could be a cover for sparking military action between Russia and the United States – a situation that will likely spiral into World War 3. Saudi Arabia have threatened to send in 150,000 troops to invade Syria on the pretext of ‘fighting terrorism’ and to defeat ISIS. Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem has warned that Saudi’s presence in Syria would be interpreted as an “act of aggression” and that Syrian forces would respond by sending troops back in “wooden coffins”.
Earlier this year, Seymour Hersh, America’s leading investigative journalist, published an intriguing article on U.S. policy towards the growing conflict in Syria and Iraq. “Military to Military,” which appeared in the London Review of Books, maintains that the Pentagon’s intelligence analysts have, since 2013, been advising against the White House policy of removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, arguing that it would create a power vacuum in the country that would inevitably be exploited by groups like ISIS.
“What’s going on in Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on a plane back to Turkey from Latin America over the weekend.
As we’ve documented extensively over the past several days, Ankara, Riyadh, and Doha have their backs against the wall when it comes to the effort to oust Bashar al-Assad and perpetuate Sunni hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula.