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BREAKING: Russian Ultimatum To Assad: Give Up Chemical Arsenal -- Or Face US Attack Alone
One almost feels sorry for Secretary of State Kerry, so neatly is he being hoisted with his own petard. But then, he was pronounced The Second Smartest Man In The Room upon his nomination, as you'll recall, a neater damning with faint praise of which does not exist.
[Debka] In an unexpected turn of events along the road to a US military strike on Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Monday afternoon, Sept. 9 that he had urged Syria to hand over its nuclear arsenal to international control if that would stop an American attack. Moscow had lost no time in picking up the gauntlet thrown down by US Secretary of State John F. I was in Vietnam, you know Kerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a lucky hat, conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
 in London a short time before.

Asked if there were steps the Syrian president could take to avert an American-led attack, Kerry replied: "Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week -- turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting."

The B.O. regime had in this way given Bashir al-Assad a week to turn in his chemical weapons to an international team that would no doubt be put together by the US, Russia and the United Nations
...an idea whose time has gone...
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, who arrived in Moscow earlier Monday, was informed that the Kremlin expected a positive and expeditious answer from President Assad. Within the hour, he came back with a welcome for the Russian "proposal" to place his country's chemical weapons under international control. But he said nothing about letting the arsenal be moved out of the country and destroyed , as both Lavrov and Kerry specified.

Sunday, debkafile reported that a secret US proposal had been presented to Assad and that negotiations were in progress on a deal for a way out of the crisis generated by the chemical attack east of Damascus on Aug. 21. The transfer of Syria's entire chemical stockpile to international control was a part of that proposition.

Our military sources add that Assad was in no position to flatly rebuff the Russian ultimatum; only to try and maneuver and haggle to buy time. If Moscow stops the air corridor lifting military supplies to Damascus, the Syrian army will quickly run out of ordnance for fighting the rebels.
Normally we recommend anything coming from Debka be heavily salted, as a matter of principle. Normally, however, we do not see The Times of Israel and USA Today coming out with substantially the same story simultaneously. Also Der Spiegel, for those who prefer the German perspective on the matter.
This is a brilliant counter by Vlad. A week? It'll take a week just to get the U.N. inspectors to agree on airplane flights. It'll be three months to get them to 'inspect' everything and six months minimum before any of the weapons, assuming they are found, to be shipped out or destroyed. Assad can play the same game Saddam played with hiding the weapons; if not the weapons themselves then at least the machinery and facilities to make the weapons. Oh that? That's a pesticide factory for our farmers. Prove us wrong.

Brilliant. Kerry is a fool.

Posted by: trailing wife 2013-09-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=375531