Mid-level professional diplomats from the U.S. checked in Friday morning, Istanbul time, according to mainstream Israeli media. No one of importance from the Untied States will attend.

The Iranian delegation, headed by the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili, did the same, according to Iranian official media. Jalili has cachet in Iran, which may make him the senior diplomat attending the meeting.

Functionaries from Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany also arrived Friday.

Official U.S. media says all seven nations have been holding ‘preliminary meetings’ throughout the day. Iran has said specifically that they have met with Russia and China, apparently to make sure all three countries are on the same page about what Iran will accept and not accept.

Usually, the pre-meeting sessions are the real meetings. The official meeting is just pro forma. A joint statement if all are in agreement - or individual statements if not - are usually issued after the official meeting. But by now everyone attending probably knows exactly what the bottom line will be.

As you know, Saturday morning Istanbul time is Friday evening U.S. time. So by Saturday morning U.S. time, it should be all over.

Maybe even sooner.

(more…)

“That monitoring mission will only be a force for peace and security if it enjoys the full freedom of action within Syria. And that means freedom of movement, secure communications, a large enough ground presence to bear witness to the enforcement of the six-point plan in every part of Syria.”
– Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, today in Washington, talking with reporters

The ceasefire in Syria is holding as of this moment. A few skirmishes, a few deaths, nothing unexpected. No tank fire, no large incidents. UN-AL Special Envoy Annan reported to the United Nations Security Council that he was “encouraged”… although concerned about the fragility of the truce. As the world goes, a pretty good start to a ceasefire after heavy loss of life.

But it is not fated to last. Agendas beckon, and they will not be denied.

(more…)

According to Israeli and U.S. mainstream media, Syria went quiet at the ceasefire deadline of 6:00 am Syrian time. There is no report of any conflict in Syria at present.

The Syrian government ceased all operations, as promised to UN-AL Special Envoy Annan.

Annan is scheduled to appear before the UN Security Council at 2pm New York time and brief the SC on the situation in Syria.

Syrian government forces have not pulled back, according to all sources.

The Syrian foreign ministry sent a letter to Annan saying that the Syrian government is “reserving the right to respond proportionately to any attacks carried out by armed terrorist groups against civilians, government forces or public and private property”.

U.S. official media says that the Russian stance is since the Syrian government has stopped firing, ‘it is now the armed opposition’s turn to do the same’.

Unfortunately, the Annan ceasefire plan requires the Syrian government to completely retire from the field of conflict. It is difficult to see how any government can do that and stay in power.

It remains to be seen which side Annan will come down on… (more…)

This is what Iran is doing today during the run-up to the P5+1 plus Iran meeting that looks to occur on Saturday. Apparently they think these actions are an appropriate counter to the large Western military wargame in the Persian Gulf, which they deem ‘confrontational’.

(more…)

But first a few words about the scheduled P5+1 plus Iran meeting and the ongoing Western airwar exercise in the Persian Gulf.

Iranian official English language media just now put up Iran’s interim answer to the wargame. They quote the Iranian parliament’s chairman of their Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, as saying:

“If the parties negotiating with Iran refuse to change their policy of confrontation to one of collaboration, they will be the losing side in the long term as they have been in the short and medium terms.” The media capsulates his sentiments with the headline ‘P5+1 Will Lose With Confrontational Attitude’.

That confrontational stance could not be more perfectly expressed than with the current military exercises in the Gulf.

And once again Iran said clearly, ‘Tehran has repeatedly made it clear that it will not negotiate over any of its fundamental rights’.

So it looks like no Iranian attack on the Gulf states. But chances of anything positive happening at P5 are slim to none.

SYRIA

On October 20, 1998, Syria and Turkey signed the Adana Agreement under pressure from Iran and Egypt. (more…)

There has been a tremendous volume of news and analysis in the past 48 hours regarding the crises in the Middle East. We are coming up to crunch time on the Iranian nuclear program and the Syrian situation.

But much is froth and foam, speculation and misinformation and absolute lies.

The truth is, it will be impossible to tell what is happening until it happens.

The P5+1 plus Iran meeting seems firmer now. (more…)

Saturday night, local time, there was an Israeli air strike into Gaza. It was a small incident, not followed up by any other action, and would be insignificant if it were not for the Grad missile strike on Eilat a couple of days ago. Why it is significant will need some rambling down a round-about path, but I promise to tie it all together by the end of the post.

Israel has limited options for retaliation into the Sinai, from whence the Grad was launched. The wrong move could sink the fragile peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

Egypt is aware of the fragility. Earlier Saturday, before the Gaza strike, the Egyptian government told Israel that they were going to do something about the situation in Sinai. Israeli mainstream media reported there would be an Egyptian ‘operation to gain control of Sinai’, or alternately, a ‘crackdown on north Sinai terror groups’.

That is easier said than done.

(more…)

A single Grad missile crashed into Eilat in the wee hours of Thursday morning, local time. Or maybe it was two. Or three. The good people of Eilat reported ‘explosions in the city’, according to mainstream Israeli media. Note ‘explosions’, plural. Israeli media with Mossad connections think it was three. No casualties beyond shock reported. No destruction reported, although that seems a little unlikely.

All accounts have the Grads being fired from the Sinai… which is in Egypt according to the Israel-Egypt treaty that ended the last major war between the Arabs and Israel, and has been the linchpin of peace ever since. Although since the Arab Spring, a great portion of the people of Egypt have been calling for the abrogation of that treaty.

The last time Eilat came under Grad attack was August, 2010. But that sentence is very misleading. The situation is much deeper. Here are the pertinent posts from two summers ago, Lawrence of Arabia, and Aqaba.

It’s probably not possible to get a good understanding of today’s missile attack without the information contained in those two posts, and there is so much information in them, it would be too bulky to repeat it here. The first one has the added perk of being unusually odd and perhaps especially interesting.

Those August missiles were not necessarily fired at Eilat. They carried a very specific set of messages. That set of messages, concerning Jordan and Egypt, may have been re-sent with today’s missiles…. along with an additional, updated message. I had been waiting to see if there were more missiles before posting. There seems to have been none. Which gives the message factor more gravitas.

(more…)

Location, Location, Location. As any good real estate agent will tell you, the value of a property depends on its location.

In the past couple of hours, Middle Eastern media started winding up the siren over the venue for the P5+1 plus Iran meeting scheduled for April 13-14. The date has been solid for a week or more; totally locked in by Saturday, when Secretary of State Clinton announced it at a joint press conference with Saudi Foreign Minister al-Faisal after the Friday Gulf Cooperation Meeting. Iran agreed that the date was firm.

The location of the meeting has never been solid. On Saturday, Madam Clinton said it would be in Istanbul, Turkey… but the reality was that Iran had not yet agreed to Istanbul or any other location.

Now the Iranians are saying they want the meeting in Bagdad, Iraq.

(more…)

Syrian Mercenaries

The Friends of Syria meeting on Sunday.

What it did not do: it did not authorize humanitarian corridors or a buffer zone.

What it did do: turn the Syrian National Council (SNC) into a mercenary force, paid for primarily by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (ironically named because the gulf is the Persian Gulf, referencing Iran, whom they are dead set against). Some Middle East sources say the FOS did not recognize the SNC as the only voice of the Syrian opposition. But U.S. mainstream sources say the SNC will henceforth be the ‘main opposition interlocutor with the international community’.

Whatever you call it, the SNC has been singled out as the overlord of the Syrian opposition… which incidentally marginalizes 4 million Syrian Kurds, among others. (See previous post Kurdish Wild Card, with seminal information about the Kurdish question in the Middle East.)

Mainstream U.S. media has been reporting today that the U.S. share of supporting the SNC has been upped from 6 million to 12 million dollars. But that pales compared to the amount pledged by the Gulf States, which according to Iranian official media brings the total pledged to the SNC to 100 million dollars. Even if that amount is somewhat inflated by the Iranian foes of Saudi Arabia, it is far from unbelievable. About 3 hours ago, the amount to be supplied by the U.S. started to be reported as 25 million dollars.

(more…)