History > 2014 > USA > International (I)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/un-children-syrias-civil-war-suffer-unspeakable-abuse/

Daniel Zender

Use Force to Save Starving Syrians

NYT

10.2.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/opinion/use-force-to-save-starving-syrians.html
 

History > 2014 > USA > International (I)

U.S. Case Offers Glimpse

Into China’s Hacker Army

MAY 22, 2014
The New York Times
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — One man accused of being a hacker for the Chinese military, Wang Dong, better known as UglyGorilla, wrote in a social media profile that he did not “have much ambition” but wanted “to wander the world with a sword, an idiot.”

Another, Sun Kailiang, also known as Jack Sun, grew up in wealthy Pei County in eastern China, the home of a peasant who founded the ancient Han dynasty and was idolized by Mao.

They and three others were indicted by the United States Justice Department this week, charged with being part of a Chinese military unit that has hacked the computers of prominent American companies to steal commercial secrets, presumably for the benefit of Chinese companies.

Much about them remains murky. But Chinese websites, as well as interviews with cybersecurity experts and former hackers inside and outside China, reveal some common traits among those and other hackers, and show that China’s hacking culture is a complex mosaic of shifting motivations, employers and allegiances.

Many hackers working directly for the Chinese government are men in their 20s and 30s who have been trained at universities run by the People’s Liberation Army and are employed by the state in myriad ways. Those working directly for the military usually follow a 9-to-5 weekday schedule and are not well paid, experts and former hackers said. Some military and government employees moonlight as mercenaries and do more hacking on their own time, selling their skills to state-owned and private companies. Some belong to the same online social networking groups.

“There are many types of relationships,” said Adam Segal, a China and cybersecurity scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Some P.L.A. hackers offer their services under contract to state-owned enterprises. For some critical technologies, it is possible that P.L.A. hackers are tasked with attacks on specific foreign companies.”

The Obama administration makes a distinction between hacking to protect national security, which it calls fair play, and hacking to obtain trade secrets that would give an edge to corporations, which it says is illegal. China and other nations accuse the United States of being the biggest perpetrator of both kinds of espionage.

In what may be Chinese retaliation for the indictments, a state agency announced plans on Thursday for tighter checks on Internet companies that do business in China. The State Internet Information Office said the government would establish new procedures to assess potential security problems with Internet technology and with services used by sectors “related to national security and the public interest,” reported Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

In the indictments, unsealed on Monday, the United States accused Mr. Wang, Mr. Sun and three others of working in the Chinese Army’s Unit 61398, which a report last year by Mandiant, a cybersecurity company in Alexandria, Va., said operated out of a 12-story white tower on the outskirts of Shanghai. That unit is now the most infamous of China’s suspected hacking groups, and the Western cybersecurity industry variously calls it the Comment Crew, the Shanghai Group and APT1.

Some members are active on Chinese social media. Mr. Wang, Mr. Sun and another of the men indicted, Wen Xinyu, are part of a group on QQ, a social networking and messaging tool, that calls itself “Poor Folks Fed by Public Funds,” according to an Internet search.
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The group, which has 24 members, also includes Mei Qiang, a hacking suspect named in the Mandiant report whose alias is SuperHard. Another member, Xu Yaoling, has the same name as someone from the P.L.A. University of Science and Technology, a military institution in Nanjing, who has written papers on hacking and cybersecurity.

Mr. Wang posted messages on an official Chinese military forum in 2004 under the alias Green Field. He called himself a “military enthusiast” and asked in one thread, “Does our military have the capabilities to fight against American troops?” His forum profile listed an English name, Jack Wang, and an email address; messages sent this week to that address went unanswered. He has been known to leave a signature, “ug,” on malware he has created.

“I think they’re soldiers with some training in computer technology, not technology people drafted into the military,” said a former hacker who has done what he calls defensive work for the Chinese Army and security agencies.

The Comment Crew is not the only big player in China, where hacking is as common in the corporate and criminal worlds as in the government. It is even promoted at trade shows, in classrooms and on Internet forums.

Western cybersecurity experts usually focus on hackers with state ties. FireEye, a cybersecurity company in Milpitas, Calif., that bought Mandiant in January, is tracking at least 25 “active Chinese-based threat groups,” of which 22 support the state in some way, said Darien Kindlund, the company’s manager of threat intelligence. At least five appear to be tied directly to one or more military groups, Mr. Kindlund said, adding that this was a conservative estimate.

Joe Stewart, a cybersecurity expert at Dell SecureWorks, said that as of last year, the Comment Crew and a unit he called the Beijing Group were using “the lion’s share” of 25,000 suspicious online domains he had been tracking. The Beijing Group, he said, used a dedicated block of I.P. addresses that could be traced to the Chinese capital and to the network of China Unicom, one of the three biggest state-owned Internet telecommunications companies.

“There’s espionage activity coming out of that,” Mr. Stewart said, though he added that he had seen no evidence of the Beijing Group’s working with China Unicom or any other state entity.

A man who answered a China Unicom spokesman’s cellphone declined to comment.

The targets pursued by the Comment Crew and the Beijing Group overlap — both go after foreign corporations and government agencies, for example — but the Beijing unit also takes aim at “activist types,” Mr. Stewart said, including ethnic Tibetan and Uighur exile groups. The two units are responsible for creating most of the world’s 300 known families of malware, he added.

Western cybersecurity experts saw a surge of online espionage attacks on corporations starting in late 2006. Before that, attacks had been aimed mostly at government agencies or contractors. The experts said much of the initial wave of corporate espionage was traced to China, and specifically to the Comment Crew. About a year later, the Beijing Group appeared on the scene.

A smaller unit, the Kunming Group, whose attacks have been traced to I.P. addresses in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, seemed focused on targets in Vietnam, Mr. Stewart said. It deployed malware and so-called spear phishing attacks that tried to entice victims to click on messages and links in Vietnamese.

It is unclear exactly what the Kunming Group sought to achieve, but tensions between China and Vietnam have been rising in recent years over territorial disputes in the South China Sea. China moved an oil rig near Vietnam this month, an action Vietnam has protested. Vietnam is also working with foreign oil companies to drill and explore in that sea.

Though the Obama administration has focused on exposing corporate espionage, hackers suspected of working for the Chinese government have breached a wide range of foreign government agencies, cybersecurity experts say.

For example, FireEye said it had observed spying attacks on Taiwanese government agencies and on a professor in India who held pro-Tibet views. The company called the attackers the Shiqiang Gang. A mainland Chinese group also carried out attacks on Japanese government agencies and companies last September by putting commands on Japanese news media websites that would infect users.

Mr. Kindlund, the FireEye executive, said people in his industry looked at a variety of factors to determine whether a hacker was a state employee or private contractor. One is the hacker’s security methods: Military hackers are less sloppy. Another is the victims: A hacker who jumps among wildly divergent victims, he said, is likely to be a contractor. In recent months, FireEye observed a hacker who took aim at foreign defense and aerospace companies, then hacked an online entertainment company. It appeared the hacker was a private contractor, Mr. Kindlund said.

There is no proven method of getting a Chinese hacking unit to back down. In early 2013, American officials hoped that the release of the Mandiant report and loud criticism of Chinese cyberespionage by the Obama administration would silence the Comment Crew. The unit went dormant but resurfaced within five months, Mr. Kindlund said. Now, its attacks have returned to pre-2013 levels.

“They’re using similar tactics but launching attacks from different infrastructure,” Mr. Kindlund said. “The tools are only slightly modified. Over all, most of the changes are very minor.”

Jonathan Ansfield and Chris Buckley contributed reporting,

and Kiki Zhao and Mia Li contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

U.S. Case Offers Glimpse Into China’s Hacker Army.

    U.S. Case Offers Glimpse Into China’s Hacker Army, NYT, 22.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/world/asia/

With Military Moves Seen in Ukraine,

Obama Warns Russia

 

FEB. 28, 2014
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN,
MARK LANDLER and ALISON SMALE

KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s fragile new government accused Russia of trying to provoke a military conflict by invading the Crimea region on Friday, while in Washington President Obama issued a stern warning to the Kremlin about respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty, in an effort to preclude a full-scale military escalation.

American officials did not directly confirm a series of public statements by senior Ukrainian officials, including the acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, that Russian troops were being deployed to Crimea, where Russia has a major naval base, in violation of the two countries’ agreements there.

Mr. Obama, however, cited “reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine,” and he said, “Any violation of Ukrainian sovereignty would be deeply destabilizing.”

“There will be costs,” Mr. Obama said in a hastily arranged statement from the White House.

President Obama said any intervention militarily in Ukraine would be “deeply destabilizing.”

“The Russian Federation began an unvarnished aggression against our country,” Mr. Turchynov said in televised remarks on Friday evening. “Under the guise of military exercises, they entered troops into the autonomous Republic of Crimea.”

He said that Russian forces had captured the regional Parliament and the headquarters of the regional government, and that they had seized other targets, including vital communications hubs, as well as blocked unspecified Ukrainian military assets.

American officials said they believed that unusual helicopter movements over Crimea were evidence that a military intervention was underway, but cautioned that they did not know the scale of the operation or the Russians’ motives.

Russia on Friday denied that it had encroached on Ukrainian territory or would do so. After an emergency meeting on Ukraine at the United Nations Security Council, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, said that any troop movements were in line with arrangements that allow it to station soldiers in the area.

“We have an agreement with Ukraine on the presence of the Russian Black Sea fleet and we operate under this agreement,” Mr. Churkin said.

Still, the developments in Crimea sent Ukraine’s interim government, which was appointed recently, deep into crisis mode as it confronted the prospect of an armed effort to split off Crimea, an autonomous region with close historic ties to Russia, from the Ukrainian mainland.

Analysts said the reported moves in the area had parallels to steps Russia took before a war with Georgia in 2008 over the largely ethnic Russian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. There was little to indicate if President Vladimir V. Putin intended to escalate the challenge to Ukraine beyond nonviolent provocation of the mostly pro-Russian population in the region.

Mr. Turchynov, the acting president, also made comparisons to Georgia. “They are provoking us into military conflict,” he said. “They began annexation of territory.”

In his address, Mr. Turchynov added, “I personally appeal to President Putin, demanding that he immediately stop the provocation and withdraw troops.”

The crisis in Crimea is the latest a series of rapidly unfurling events that began when scores of people were killed in Kiev last week during a severe escalation of civic unrest that had been underway since late November.

Protests started after Russia pressured Viktor F. Yanukovych, then the president, to back away from political and free-trade agreements with the European Union that he had long promised to sign, setting off an East-West confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War.

After the recent killings, Mr. Yanukovych reached a tentative truce with opposition leaders in talks brokered by the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland, but within 24 hours he fled Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, and an overwhelming majority of lawmakers voted to strip him of power, saying he had abandoned his position.

On Friday, a week later, Mr. Yanukovych resurfaced for a news conference in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, in which he said he was still the legitimate president and urged Russia not to intervene militarily in Crimea.

Mr. Obama’s warning suggested a deepening uncertainty among American officials about Mr. Putin’s intentions in the region despite a series of high-level contacts in recent days, including a telephone call between the two presidents one week ago. Mr. Yanukovych was an ally of Russia, and his toppling has left the Kremlin grappling for a response.

While American officials said that intelligence indicated that a Russian operation was underway, Mr. Obama stopped short of calling it an invasion. Part of the confusion, one official said, was that Russia routinely moves troops between military bases in Crimea.

Another American official said that intelligence reports from the region were “all over the place,” but that the administration believed that Russia had moved some of its forces into Ukraine, while some of the movement, officials said, seemed to be an increase in protective measures around Russian military installations.

Though he threatened an unspecified cost to Russia, Mr. Obama has limited options to respond to an intervention. Officials said he could cancel his participation in a Group of 8 meeting in Sochi, Russia, in June. The administration could also break off talks on a potential trade agreement. Russia sent a delegation to Washington this week to explore closer trade and commercial ties.

Crimea, a multiethnic region that was granted a large degree of autonomy after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, has long been a source of tension with Russia and is home to some of Russia’s most important military installations, including the headquarters of its Black Sea naval fleet.

As other nations reacted with consternation to the developments in Crimea, the Kremlin was largely silent.

Russian state television reported that Russian troops had arrived to secure the airport at Belbek, which is close to the Russian naval base, but officials did not confirm that information. The identity of gunmen who appeared at the Simferopol airport and at roadblocks on major roadways also remained unclear.

While movement of Russian military vehicles, equipment and personnel is common in the Crimea, Friday’s activity was extremely unusual, local residents said. It involved a number of strange components, including the deployment of heavily armed soldiers, wearing uniforms with no identifying marks, at the region’s two main airports.

Before dawn, at Simferopol’s international airport, the soldiers initially posted themselves outside an administrative building, and through much of the day they did not interfere with departing or arriving flights.

By evening, however, the usual flight in from Kiev was canceled, and it was unclear whether any flights would go through Crimean airspace over the weekend. Similarly mysterious gunmen also appeared at the second airport, which is used for civil and military flights.

Journalists spotted a convoy of nine Russian armored personnel carriers on a road between the port city of Sevastopol, the site of Russia’s main naval base, and Simferopol, a city of about 250,000 people. There were also unconfirmed reports that several planes carrying thousands of Russian soldiers had arrived in Crimea on Friday night.

Even more unusual, a Ukrainian telecommunications company, Ukrtelecom, said unknown people had seized control of several communications hubs, disrupting telephone and Internet service between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine. In a statement, the company pleaded with law enforcement agencies to take control of the situation.

While Western governments at first seemed hesitant to draw conclusions, officials in the new provisional government in Kiev said early Friday morning that they suspected Russian interference.

Mr. Turchynov, who is also the speaker of Parliament, immediately convened a meeting of the newly formed National Security and Defense Council to discuss the events in the south.

David M. Herszenhorn reported from Kiev, Mark Landler from Washington, and Alison Smale from Simferopol, Ukraine. Reporting was contributed by Patrick Reevell and Noah Sneider from Simferopol, Oksana Lyachnyska from Kiev, Somini Sengupta from the United Nations, and Michael D. Shear, Michael R. Gordon, Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on March 1, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Top Ukrainians Accusing Russia of an Invasion.

    With Military Moves Seen in Ukraine, Obama Warns Russia,
    NYT, 28.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/world/europe/ukraine.html

Ukraine’s Uncertain Future

 

FEB. 24, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The venal president of Ukraine is on the run and the bloodshed has stopped, but it is far too early to celebrate or to claim that the West has “won” or that Russia has “lost.” One incontrovertible lesson from the events in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, is that the deeply divided country will have to contend with dangerous problems that could reverberate beyond its borders.

The success of the protesters in Independence Square in driving out President Viktor Yanukovych and his supporters has also fired nationalist passions that can still erupt into further deadly violence. Parliament is feverishly passing laws, but it is not clear who is in charge. Ukraine is broke, and a vindictive Russia could easily make things more miserable by closing the border or raising gas prices.

This is not the time for saber-rattling. The right move for the United States and the European Union is to make clear to the Ukrainians — in the Russian-oriented east and the fiercely anti-Russian west — that substantial financial assistance is forthcoming if they form a credible government of national unity and agree to a package of reforms. Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, is already in Kiev, and the acting Ukrainian president, Oleksandr Turchynov, has called on Parliament to form a government this week. President Obama, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union can follow up at this critical juncture with a firm pledge of aid.

And the Western powers will need to make efforts to include Russia in the transition, both to prevent the Kremlin from undermining any rescue plan and to reassure Russian-speaking Ukrainians that the West is not promoting a government dominated by nationalists. This is not “appeasement.” There is ample evidence that Ukrainians of all religious and linguistic backgrounds yearn to draw closer to the West, and the challenge for the United States and Europe is to make sure that political reform is not unraveled by civil strife or a vindictive Kremlin.

This is a decisive moment for President Vladimir Putin of Russia. He, like many of his countrymen, cannot fully accept that Ukraine is a separate nation, and no doubt Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev was speaking for the Kremlin when he questioned the legitimacy of a government installed by what he called “armed mutiny.”

Mr. Putin has also made a habit, perhaps acquired in the K.G.B., of spotting Western conspiracies behind all challenges to his will. But after gambling on Mr. Yanukovych, Mr. Putin must understand that Russia cannot prevent the next Ukrainian leader from signing an association agreement with the European Union, and that actively working to break up Ukraine would risk civil war.

That is what Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany apparently sought to impress on Mr. Putin when she talked with him on Sunday, and her spokesman said Mr. Putin agreed that Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” must be safeguarded. That was also the message from President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, when she said on Sunday, “It is not in the interests of Ukraine or of Russia, or of Europe, or the United States to see the country split.” In fact, that would be a catastrophic shift; the region needs a united and stable Ukraine.

Unlike the Eastern European countries that have been incorporated into the European Union and NATO, Ukraine shares much of its history, and industry, with Russia, and has been part of a fierce tug-of-war since it broke from the Soviet Union 22 years ago. But, as the three-month siege of Independence Square made clear, Ukrainians believe their future is with the values and practices of the West. The key is to persuade all Ukrainians and Russia that this is not a either-or, that a democratic Ukraine with ties to Europe can also maintain the culture, language and history it shares with Russia.


A version of this editorial appears in print

on February 25, 2014, on page A24

of the New York edition with the headline:

Ukraine’s Uncertain Future.

    Ukraine’s Uncertain Future, NYT, 24.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/opinion/ukraines-uncertain-future.html

Wary Stance From Obama on Ukraine

FEB. 24, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Televisions around the White House were aglow with pictures of Ukrainians in the streets, demanding to be heard and toppling a government aligned with Russia. It was an invigorating moment, and it spurred a president already rethinking his approach to the world.

That was a different decade and a different president. While George W. Bush was inspired by the Orange Revolution of 2004 and weeks later vowed in his second inaugural address to promote democracy, Barack Obama has approached the revolution of 2014 with a more clinical detachment aimed at avoiding instability.

Rather than an opportunity to spread freedom in a part of the world long plagued by corruption and oppression, Mr. Obama sees Ukraine’s crisis as a problem to be managed, ideally with a minimum of violence or geopolitical upheaval. While certainly sympathetic to the pro-Western protesters who pushed out President Viktor F. Yanukovych and hopeful that they can establish a representatively elected government, Mr. Obama has not made global aspirations of democracy the animating force of his presidency.

“I just think this president is not going to lean forward on his skis with regard to democracy promotion,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale University historian who advised the Bush White House as speechwriters worked on the former president’s January 2005 inaugural address promising to combat tyranny abroad. “If anything, he’s going to lean back and let natural forces take us there, if they do.”

Mr. Obama’s handling of Ukraine reflects a broader “policy of restraint,” as Mr. Gaddis termed it, keeping the United States out of crises like Syria, minimizing its involvement in places like Libya, and getting out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It reflects, he said, not only fundamental differences between the presidents but an underlying weariness on the part of the American public after more than a dozen years of war.

Turned off by what he saw as Mr. Bush’s crusading streak and seared by the dashed hopes of the Arab Spring, Mr. Obama, aides said, was wary of being proactive in trying to change other societies, convinced that being too public would make the United States the issue and risk provoking a backlash. The difference, aides said, was not the goal but the methods of achieving it.

“These democratic movements will be more sustainable if they are seen as not an extension of America or any other country, but coming from within these societies,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “For the longer term, it is better to let the people within the country be the strongest voice while also ensuring that at the appropriate times you are weighing in publicly and privately.”

To some critics, though, that justifies a policy of passivity that undercuts core American values.

“The administration’s Ukraine policy is emblematic of a broader problem with today’s foreign policy — absence of a strategic vision, disinterest in democracy promotion and an unwillingness to lead,” said Paula J. Dobriansky, an under secretary of state for Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama’s commitment to democracy promotion has long been debated. Advocates say he has increased spending on projects that encourage democratic reform in places like Africa and Asia while directing money to support changes in the Arab world. At the same time, they said, he has cut back on democracy promotion in Iraq, Pakistan and Central Asia.

One of the strongest advocates for democracy promotion in Mr. Obama’s circle has been Michael A. McFaul, first the president’s Russia adviser and then ambassador to Moscow. But Mr. McFaul is stepping down. Mr. Obama’s nominee for the assistant secretary of state who oversees democracy programs, Tom Malinowski, has been languishing since July waiting for Senate confirmation.

For Mr. Bush, the focus on spreading democracy preceded his decision to invade Iraq, but it was inextricably linked to the war after the failure to find the unconventional weapons that had been the primary public justification. The goal of establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East began driving the occupation, but it became tarnished among many overseas because of its association with the war.

After winning re-election in 2004, Mr. Bush decided to broaden his ambition by setting a “freedom agenda” for his second term. Even as he and his aides were working on his inaugural address, images of Ukrainian protesters wearing orange scarves and resisting a corrupt election exhilarated the West Wing. In January 2005, Mr. Bush declared it his policy to support democracy “in every nation” with “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

For a time, Ukraine was a model. The newly elected president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, was welcomed at the White House and addressed a joint session of Congress. “It was the poster child for ‘democracy can work, we’re on a roll,’ ” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine now at the Brookings Institution.

Yet like other places, the heady days in Kiev eventually gave way to political paralysis and retrenchment. Mr. Yushchenko failed to consolidate support and ultimately was replaced by his nemesis, Mr. Yanukovych, in a democratic election. The unresolved debate over whether Ukraine should be more tied to Europe or Russia led back to a similar showdown over the past weeks and months, this time more violent, with more than 80 killed.

Mr. Obama privately told aides he admired Mr. Bush’s second inaugural as a piece of writing and expression of values, but thought it overpromised, raising expectations that could never be met. As the latest Ukraine protests got underway, Mr. Obama personally evinced little of the enthusiasm of Mr. Bush, but his administration has been heavily involved in seeking a settlement. Taking the lead has been Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who called Mr. Yanukovych nine times since November, and Secretary of State John Kerry, who has reached out to Russia repeatedly.

On the ground has been Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state who previously worked for Mr. Bush’s administration and is passionate about anchoring Ukraine in the West. A leaked recording of a conversation she had during the height of the events showed her discussing ways to bring the opposition into the government.

Mr. Obama waited until last week, three months into the crisis, to make his first statement in front of cameras. Aides said he wanted to wait until the critical moment, and it came when Americans saw indications that Mr. Yanukovych might turn loose the military on the protesters. Mr. Obama followed with an hourlong phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Critics saw that as too little, too late. “Regrettably, the West viewed the situation as a crisis that needed to be tamped down rather than an opportunity for positive change,” said David Kramer, a former Bush administration official now serving as president of Freedom House, a nonprofit group that advocates democracy around the world.

Others said caution might be justified. “It doesn’t seem to me that the Obama administration is so invested in that democracy theme,” said Mr. Pifer, but that “may not be a bad thing.” He added: “Given how fluid things are in Kiev, I’m not sure it would be wise to jump in there with advice, and I’m not sure the advice would be welcome. This may be a time where a little restraint on our part is a good thing.”

A version of this news analysis appears in print

on February 25, 2014, on page A1

of the New York edition with the headline:

Wary Stance From Obama.

    Wary Stance From Obama on Ukraine, NYT, 24.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/world/
    europe/wary-stance-from-obama.html

25 Deaths Are Reported

in Fierce Clashes in Kiev

 

FEB. 19, 2014
The New York Times
By ANDREW HIGGINS
and ANDREW E. KRAMER
 

KIEV, Ukraine — Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday that 25 people had been killed after hundreds of riot police officers advanced on antigovernment protesters who mounted a desperate act of defiance in what remained of their all-but-conquered encampment on Independence Square.

The Health Ministry, quoted by news agencies, said that 240 people had been injured and that nine of the dead were police officers.

In an indication of deepening concern in Washington, the State Department issued an urgent warning late Tuesday telling American citizens in Ukraine to avoid all protests, keep a low profile and remain indoors at night while the clashes continue.

The agency said that travel into and out of the center of Kiev, the capital, was restricted and described the situation as “currently very fluid.” It also warned that roving gangs have attacked journalists and protesters and committed other random acts of violence in Kiev and other cities.

“U.S. citizens whose residences or hotels are located in the vicinity of the protests are cautioned to leave those areas or prepared to remain indoors, possibly for several days, should clashes occur,” the notice said. “Further violent clashes between police and protesters in Kiev and other cities are possible. The location and nature of demonstrations and methods employed by the police can change quickly and without warning.”

With hundreds of riot police officers advancing from all sides after a day of deadly mayhem here in the Ukrainian capital, antigovernment protesters mounted a seemingly doomed act of defiance late on Tuesday evening, establishing a protective ring of fire around what remained of their encampment on Independence Square.

The attack on the square began shortly before 8 p.m., when police officers tried to drive two armored personnel carriers through stone-reinforced barriers outside the Khreshchatyk Hotel on the road to the square. The vehicles became bogged down and, set upon by protesters wielding rocks and fireworks, burst into flames, trapping the security officers inside one of them and prompting desperate rescue efforts to save those caught in the second vehicle, which managed to pull back from the protesters’ barricade.

A phalanx of riot police officers, backed by a water cannon, had more success in a separate thrust, pushing through protesters’ barricades near the Ukraina Hotel and firing tear gas as they advanced toward the center of the square. People covered in blood staggered to the protesters’ medical center.

Feeding the blazing defenses around Independence Square Tuesday night with blankets, tires, wood, sheets of plastic foam and anything else that might burn, the protesters hoped to prolong, for a while longer at least, a tumultuous protest movement against President Viktor F. Yanukovych, a leader who was democratically elected in 2010 but is widely reviled here as corrupt and authoritarian.

“It is called the tactic of scorched earth,” said a protester who identified himself as Andriy.

Doctors and nurses treating protesters in a temporary medical center in the Trade Unions building on Independence Square reported gunshot wounds and evidence that the police had doctored percussion grenades in order to inflict more serious injury. By early Wednesday, the union building had caught fire and the blaze raged out of control, with flames spreading to adjacent buildings.

With the center of the city engulfed in thick, acrid smoke and filled with the deafening din of the grenades, fireworks and occasional gunfire, what began as a peaceful protest in late November against Mr. Yanukovych’s decision to spurn a trade deal with Europe and tilt toward Russia became on Tuesday a pyre of violent chaos.

The violence, which will resonate for weeks, months or even years around this fragile and bitterly divided former Soviet republic of 46 million, exposed the impotence, in this dispute, of the United States and the European Union, which had engaged in a week of fruitless efforts to mediate a peaceful settlement. It also shredded doubts about the influential reach of Russia, which had portrayed the protesters as American-backed “terrorists” and, in thinly coded messages from the Kremlin, urged Mr. Yanukovych to crack down.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. telephoned Mr. Yanukovych to “express grave concern regarding the crisis on the streets” of Kiev, and urged him “to pull back government forces and to exercise maximum restraint,” the vice president’s office said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mr. Yanukovych had repeatedly pledged not to use force to disperse protesters, but after meeting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, he had clearly changed his mind. The fighting also broke out only a day after Russia threw a new financial lifeline to Mr. Yanukovych’s government by buying $2 billion in Ukrainian government bonds.
 

The Russian aid appeared to signal confidence that important votes in Parliament expected this week, to amend the Constitution and form a new cabinet, will go in Russia’s favor.

The fateful shift in Mr. Yanukovych’s thinking and tactics will silence what had been chants night and day from Independence Square for him to resign, but will by no means guarantee his future grip on power in a country that, despite its deep divisions rooted in language, culture and huge disparities of wealth, prides itself on avoiding violence.

Even one of the president’s most stalwart supporters, the billionaire businessman Rihat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, seemed distressed by the president’s decision, warning in a statement on Tuesday that “there are no situations whatsoever that vindicate the use of force against a peaceful population.”

With opposition politicians and other protest leaders vowing defiance late into the night from a stage at the center of their crumbling encampment, it was unclear how long even the greatly feared and detested antiriot police, known as Berkut, could hang on to Independence Square in the event that residents poured into the area once morning broke.

The authorities shut down the subway system on Tuesday to prevent people from reaching the area and said they would restrict traffic into the city starting at midnight.

Activists in the west of the country, a bastion of support for the antigovernment cause, had earlier vowed to send buses with reinforcements to Kiev.

Volodomyr Pogorily, a doctor at the protesters’ medical center, said he had removed five bullets from wounded protesters. Many of the injuries were from percussion grenades, which create a deafening noise but are not meant to be lethal or cause serious injury. But a nurse said the wounds she had treated on Tuesday suggested that the grenades had been wrapped in tape with nails and stones to make them more dangerous. Other victims had been hit by birdshot from shotguns.

Yevgeny Avramchuk, a protester who was treated at the center, said doctors had removed a pebble from a hole in his calf. Another person was evacuated in an ambulance with a puncture wound to the chest. Throughout the evening, doctors rushed along a corridor lined with a filthy carpet and littered with bloody bandages, removing projectiles from people slumped in the hallway.
Satellite Images of the Protests in Kiev

This image, taken by Skybox Imaging, shows the site of the protests in Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine, as it appeared around 11a.m. on Tuesday.

In the late evening, the police finally overcame resistance from barricades near the Khreshchatyk Hotel and joined colleagues in a pincer operation to try to secure the flame-encircled center of Independence Square, known as Maidan. As they advanced, protesters started singing the Ukrainian national anthem.

Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, a prominent opposition leader who had just returned from a meeting on Monday with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, delivered what could be his final speech from the stage in Independence Square, at least for some time.

“We see that this regime started shooting at people again. They want to drown Ukraine in blood,” he shouted. “We won’t react on a single one of their provocations. But we won’t make any single step back from here, from this Maidan.”

Protesters caught three police officers who had apparently tried to run through what the protesters were calling the “perimeter of fire.” One was bloodied and semiconscious. As he was being dragged through the crowd, people kicked and cursed at him. Others yelled to stop beating the officer. “We are not beasts, brothers and sisters, stop,” one man said. Protest leaders stepped in to make sure the officers received medical treatment.

By early Wednesday, the speeches from the stage had given way to mournful prayers and chants by priests from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Some protesters acknowledged that they had contributed to the violent spiral of events by attacking police officers during street battles early in the day near the Ukrainian Parliament, which the opposition had hoped would approve constitutional amendments curbing President Yanukovych’s powers.

“We have no other way,” said Lena Melniko, a 33-year-old accountant who joined a team of protesters digging up paving stones and passing them on to fighters to throw at the police, “We have been protesting for three months but are stuck in dead end.”

Throughout the day, opposition leaders urged protesters to stand firm in a series of defiant speeches. “We will come out of Maidan either free or slaves. But we don’t want to be slaves,” said Serhiy Sobolev, a member of Parliament.

Older women clustered on the sidewalk and heckled the police, yelling, “Killers!” and “Shoot us! Just shoot us, kill us, kill us, you bastards!”

Petro Poroshenko, a wealthy opposition member of Parliament whose television station has been broadcasting the protests, called for discipline and defiance. “We are here not simply protecting Maidan, we are here protecting Ukraine,” Mr. Poroshenko said, urging residents to converge on the square. “We are not simply staying here for the future of Kiev. We are standing for the unity of Ukraine.”

    25 Deaths Are Reported in Fierce Clashes in Kiev,
    NYT, 19.2.22014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/world/europe/ukraine.html

Bombings in Syria

Force Wave of Civilians to Flee

FEB. 17, 2014
The New York Times
By BEN HUBBARD

KILIS, Turkey — Hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians have fled rebel-held parts of the city of Aleppo in recent weeks under heavy aerial bombardment by the Syrian government, emptying whole neighborhoods and creating what aid workers say is one of the largest refugee flows of the entire civil war.

The displaced, as many as 500,000 to date, the United Nations says, have flooded the countryside, swelling populations in war-battered communities that are already short on space and food and pushing a new wave of refugees into Turkey, where in interviews many have described a harrowing journey that left them in desperate condition, broke, hungry and, in many cases, sick or wounded.

Much of the human tide flowing out of northern Syria has crashed on this once-quiet border town, where Syrians now nearly outnumber the original 90,000 Turkish inhabitants.

Its sidewalks are covered with destitute Syrians hawking cookies, coffee and cigarettes, and rents have skyrocketed as Syrian families have crowded into apartments. Ambulances regularly scream through town, ferrying war victims to the city’s overburdened medical facilities.

Attacks on Aleppo have accelerated in recent weeks, as international talks aimed at ending the war have stalled and as the Obama administration has begun reviewing its Syria policy to find new ways to pressure the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

While the United States explores potential new strategies, analysts say, Mr. Assad is forging ahead with his own: pounding civilians out of rebel-held districts or using military means to make life miserable for those left inside.

The United Nations human rights agency warned last week of what it called “a pattern” of government attacks that violate the laws of war, but the strategy appears to be working for Mr. Assad, draining the power of rebels near Damascus and allowing his forces to advance near Aleppo.

Driving much of the exodus is the government’s heavy use of so-called barrel bombs, large containers filled with explosives and metal shards that explode on impact, maiming and killing people within a large radius, collapsing buildings and often leaving bodies buried in the rubble.

“A barrel came down on our neighbor’s house and mixed up the people with the bricks,” said Mustafa Toameh, 43, sitting on the floor of the bus station in this Turkish border town, where he had spent the previous two nights. Surrounding him were 10 members of his extended family he had smuggled out of Syria and a few grain sacks full of hastily gathered belongings.

“We don’t know anyone here, and if we had someplace to go, we would,” he said.

While Aleppo has taken the worst of it, Syrian helicopters have also dropped barrel bombs on Yabroud, an opposition town near Damascus, pushing thousands of refugees into Lebanon.

But the bulk of the new refugees are coming to Turkey, pressuring already strained medical and social services.

In recent weeks, emergency cases at the main hospital in Kilis have surged to between 20 and 30 per day, said Dr. Mehmet Beyazit, a supervising physician there. While some patients are rebel fighters wounded in clashes with Islamic extremists, the vast majority are civilians wounded by barrel bombs. After initial treatments, patients are transferred to clinics elsewhere in town that are dedicated to the war wounded.

On a recent afternoon, the doctors in one clinic grimaced as a 12-year-old boy who had lost a leg to a barrel bomb screamed while having the dressing changed on his stump.

“He was at the vegetable market when a barrel came down and took off his leg,” said the boy’s grandmother Fatima Abtini, making a slicing motion with her hand.

At the time, the family had been debating whether it had become too dangerous to remain in the city, she said.

“We kept saying, ‘We’ll go tomorrow’ and organizing ourselves, but then the barrel came and we rushed for the border,” she said.

Since no one had passports, the family paid smugglers to bring its members to Kilis, where they crowded into a small apartment with a rent they struggle to pay.

While the men looked for work, Ms. Abtini visited local charities to get whatever aid she could and tried to comfort her grandson, Ahmed, who kept asking about artificial limbs.

“Does it stay on all the time or does it come off?” Ahmed asked, frowning and gazing out the window near his hospital bed.

“I want one that doesn’t come off,” he said.

In a closed briefing last week, Valerie Amos, the United Nations aid coordinator, told the Security Council that 500,000 people were believed to have fled Aleppo in recent weeks and that twice that many could end up trapped in the city as the fighting advances.

In her remarks, obtained by The New York Times, she said that aid convoys were due to enter the area this week but that new fighting made those efforts “extremely precarious.”

Emile Hokayem, an analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that displacing civilians allows Mr. Assad to put an enormous burden on rebels, neighboring countries and aid organizations. Destroying opposition neighborhoods also ensures that they will not pose a threat in the future.
Photographs: The Historic Scale of Syria’s Refugee Crisis

“Assad seeks to take back important territory but not population,” Mr. Hokayem said. “He doesn’t need to maintain housing in place because the objective is not to allow residents back. It is a kind of cleansing going on.”

While the Syrian government has been using barrel bombs for months, it has stepped up their use on rebel-held districts in recent weeks, killing more than 450 people there so far this month, said Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Most of those who have fled the city have remained inside Syria, overwhelming poor towns and sleeping in ratty tents with no access to electricity or running water.

“There are lots of families who have taken people in, but they have no way to feed them,” said Muhannad Najjar, an activist from a town north of Aleppo that has taken in thousands of refugees in recent weeks.

Since the start of the year, the United Nations refugee agency has reported more than 20,000 Syrians crossing into Turkey, with as many as 2,000 crossing per day. But the actual number could be much higher, since many Syrians lack passports and cross the border illegally, avoiding registration.

Many reach Kilis with no idea what to do next and congregate at the town’s bus station, just to get a roof over their heads and ask around about work or charity.

One refugee runs a business letting new arrivals use his cellphone, charging one Turkish lira, about 45 cents, for three calls. Some boys sell cookies from cardboard boxes, yelling out to passers-by, “Three items for a lira!”

Inside, large families camp out on benches or claim patches of floor, laying out blankets to sleep on and crowding next to radiators to fight the winter chill.

Sitting on the floor near his sleeping infant daughter, Yasser Baz, 32, described how he and his family had fled their apartment building days before it was hit with a barrel bomb.

“All that was left was a pile of bricks,” he said. His brother, his sister-in-law and their two children were all killed in the attack.

He borrowed $500 from a relative who commands a rebel brigade and used it to smuggle his family across the border. After a few stops elsewhere, they ended up in the bus station, with less than $10 remaining and no idea what to do next.

“Praise God that we are living in this five-star hotel,” he said.

Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Kilis,

Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul,

and Somini Sengupta from the United Nations.

A version of this article appears in print

on February 18, 2014, on page A1

of the New York edition with the headline:

Bombings Force Wave of Civilians in Syria to Flee.

    Bombings in Syria Force Wave of Civilians to Flee, NYT, 17.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/world/middleeast/
    bombings-in-syria-force-wave-of-civilians-to-flee.html

U.S. Steps Up Criticism

of Russian Role in Syrian War

FEB. 17, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON,
DAVID E. SANGER
and ERIC SCHMITT

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday sharpened the Obama administration’s mounting criticism of Russia’s role in the escalating violence in Syria, asserting that the Kremlin was undermining the prospects of a negotiated solution by “contributing so many more weapons” and political support to President Bashar al-Assad.

“They’re, in fact, enabling Assad to double down, which is creating an enormous problem,” Mr. Kerry said in Jakarta, Indonesia, before he flew here to confer with top officials of the United Arab Emirates, a gulf state that has been a strong supporter of the Syrian opposition.

Mr. Kerry’s tough criticism underscored the erosion of the Russian-American partnership in Syria, and raised questions about the viability of the United States’ diplomatic strategy to help resolve the escalating crisis.

President Obama has been deeply reluctant for nearly three years to get the United States directly involved in Syria’s civil war, and pulled back the threat of cruise missile strikes in September after Mr. Assad’s agreement to eliminate his chemical arsenal. While chemicals for making poison gas are leaving the country, behind schedule, Mr. Assad’s conventional attacks on civilians have escalated significantly, and now Mr. Obama is calling for a review of what one senior official called “both old and new options” to bolster opposition forces and ease a desperate humanitarian crisis.

Administration officials, however, insist that those options do not include directly supplying more sophisticated, heavier armaments to the rebels, who are already receiving some weapons and training under a limited C.I.A. program, or carrying out airstrikes in a civil war that Mr. Obama fears could turn into a prolonged conflict. Instead, the United States is considering paying salaries to some of the rebel forces and providing more transportation and intelligence, American and European officials said.

Mr. Assad’s hold on power has grown over the past year, according to the head of American intelligence. Recognizing that a political settlement is unlikely if he keeps the advantage, administration officials said that Mr. Obama and other Western leaders had dropped their objections to proposals by Saudi Arabia and other countries to funnel more advanced weapons to vetted rebel groups, including portable antiaircraft weapons, often called manpads.

A secret meeting in Washington last week among the intelligence chiefs from almost all of the countries attempting to oust the Assad government included extensive discussion about how to best provide that new lethal aid to rebel groups, the officials said. The gathering of the top intelligence officials from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Britain, France and the United Arab Emirates, and several others from the 11-nation group known as the Friends of Syria, reflected a belief that the diplomatic track has been exhausted unless Mr. Assad sustains significant military setbacks.

Mr. Kerry’s pointed remarks on Russia’s role were striking since it was Mr. Kerry who flew to Moscow in May, and the administration hoped that Russia would encourage the Syrian government to move toward a political settlement without Mr. Assad. After meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Kerry announced that the United States and Russia would co-sponsor renewed peace talks in Geneva.

Those talks have now stalled. In August and September, the United States fleshed out and strengthened a Russian proposal that Syria’s chemical arsenal be dismantled — a process now underway, but behind schedule — suggesting the countries could work together even while backing different sides in the war.

That comity, or at least a temporary alignment of interests, has now been set back. Mr. Obama was sharply critical of Russia in public statements over the past week, first at a news conference with President François Hollande of France and then at a meeting in California with King Abdullah II of Jordan. One senior Western official who discussed the issue with Mr. Obama last week said, “I’ve never seen him more frustrated — not only with the Russians, but with the failure of anything his own administration has tried so far.”

“The Russian view is that their guy is winning,” said the official, who has been involved in the talks in Washington, “and they may be right. So we’re back to the question we faced a year ago: How do you change the balance and force the Syrians to negotiate?”

Mr. Kerry said on Monday that the United States and its allies were approaching a series of critical decisions on how to respond to the crisis. But even as he insisted that the administration remained committed to peacefully resolving a civil war that has claimed about 140,000 Syrian lives and displaced hundreds of thousands, it is no longer clear if the United States has the influence to broker a settlement or whether the limited steps the White House is now willing to consider would be sufficient to help it regain its lost leverage.

Debate has raged since the start of the civil war over whether Western and Arab nations should provide Syria’s rebels with manpads. Administration officials have in the past sought to limit the flow of the weapons into the Syria conflict, fearing they could be smuggled away and later used by terrorists against civilian airliners. However, providing selected rebel fighters with surface-to-air missiles is a logical response to the persistent barrel-bomb attacks of Syrian cities like Aleppo and Homs.

There are believed to be hundreds, if not thousands, of groups fighting in Syria. These opposition groups are fighting the Assad regime, but recently turned on each other with increased ferocity.

Jeffrey White, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior American intelligence official, said the Assad government was using Russian-supplied Mi-8 and Mi-17 helicopters to carry out the barrel-bomb attack in Homs. Russia, he said, is most likely providing spare parts such as engines, transmissions and rotors, which may explain Mr. Kerry’s specific reference to how Russian weapons are fueling the war.

A fighter from the Damascus suburbs who fled to Beirut, Lebanon, said one of the reasons he left was that the Army of Islam, the rebel group led by Zahran Alloush, had surface-to-air missiles, which he said were a Syrian Army model taken from antiaircraft bases a year ago. But the Army of Islam, which is supported by Saudi private donors, has declined to share its plentiful arms and its cash with other rebel groups, particularly non-Islamist ones. That has complicated efforts to counter Mr. Assad’s forces around Damascus.

Mr. Obama’s apparent willingness to drop objections to supplying the rebel groups with heavier weapons may simply be an acknowledgment that Saudi Arabia and gulf states that are frustrated with American policy are now prepared to do so anyway, without Washington’s blessing. American officials say they also now have a better sense than they did last year about which groups they can trust to use and secure the weapons.

Mr. Obama has also been influenced by growing fears that Syria is becoming a training ground for a new generation of terrorists and may become even more of a haven until a political settlement is reached. “That’s one big change from a year ago,” a senior American diplomat said. “And it’s beginning to haunt everyone with memories of Afghanistan.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported the likely increase in manpad shipments and rebel salaries on its website Friday night.

Mr. Kerry alluded on Monday to the internal administration deliberations about what to do next on Syria on Monday before he conferred here with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed and Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates.

“It is important for the world to consider in these next days exactly what steps can now be taken in the face of this intransigence that is creating an even greater human catastrophe by the moment,” Mr. Kerry said at his news conference in Jakarta.

In an administration that has been deeply divided on Syria strategy — the first hints of antigovernment protest erupted in the Damascus markets exactly three years ago Monday — Mr. Kerry has been among those arguing for more overt and covert pressure on Mr. Assad, according to administration officials.

But Mr. Obama has been wary of deep involvement and is adamant that no American forces can be put at risk — a reflection, aides say, of his belief that even if Mr. Assad is overthrown, the country could enter into a civil war from which there is no exit for years.

Mr. Kerry’s remarks on Monday reflected the blunt assessment that Mr. Assad is filibustering in Geneva while seeking a battlefield victory. “The regime stonewalled; they did nothing, except continue to drop barrel bombs on their own people and continue to destroy their own country,” he said. “And I regret to say they are doing so with increased support from Iran, from Hezbollah and from Russia.”

Michael R. Gordon reported from Abu Dhabi,

and David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print

on February 18, 2014, on page A1

of the New York edition with the headline:

Russia Scolded as U.S. Weighs Syria Options.

    U.S. Steps Up Criticism of Russian Role in Syrian War,
    NYT, 17.2.2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/world/middleeast/
    russia-is-scolded-as-us-weighs-syria-options.html

Use Force to Save Starving Syrians

FEB. 10, 2014
The New York Times
By DANNY POSTEL
and NADER HASHEMI

DENVER — THE Syrian people are starving. According to the United Nations, about 800,000 civilians are currently under siege. In areas around the cities of Homs, Aleppo and Deir Ezzor and in parts of the capital, Damascus, no food, medical supplies or humanitarian aid can get in, and people can’t get out. Many have already died under these “starvation sieges” and hundreds of thousands teeter on the brink, subsisting on grass and weeds. In Damascus, a cleric has ruled that under these conditions, Muslims are permitted to eat normally forbidden animals like cats, dogs and donkeys.

This is not a famine. Food is abundant just a few miles away from these besieged areas. Military forces — mainly the army of President Bashar al-Assad, but in some cases extremist anti-Assad militias — are preventing food and medicine from reaching trapped civilians. In addition to starving, many people in besieged areas have been stricken by diseases, including polio, but can’t get medical treatment because doctors can’t get through.

This moral obscenity demands action by the international community. Any armed group that prevents humanitarian access — whether the Syrian regime’s forces or rebel militias — should be subject to coercive measures.

France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, has denounced the international community’s failure to prevent starvation as “absolutely scandalous” and is now calling for “much stronger action.”

The news that France may propose a strong Security Council resolution is welcome, but Mr. Fabius hasn’t made clear whether such a measure would invoke Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which allows the Security Council to enforce its directives through military action. If it doesn’t, the resolution will be inadequate.

The recent attacks on the convoys attempting to deliver humanitarian aid into the besieged city of Homs are a case in point: The lifting of the sieges can’t be left to the warring factions on the ground. An external, international force must be introduced to guarantee the safe passage of food and medicine to starving Syrian civilians.

The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, remains a major obstacle. His government has vetoed three Security Council resolutions on Syria since October 2011 and Russia has said it would support measures on humanitarian issues only if Syria agrees to them. But Mr. Putin’s geostrategic calculations and Mr. Assad’s coldblooded recalcitrance cannot be allowed to stand in the way of thousands of Syrian civilians eating.

If Russia blocks meaningful international action, and if the Assad regime or any rebel group refuses to allow humanitarian aid into the besieged areas, the sieges must be broken by any means necessary.

We should invoke the Responsibility to Protect, the principle that if a state fails to protect its populations from mass atrocities — or is in fact the perpetrator of such crimes — the international community must step in to protect the victims, with the collective use of force authorized by the Security Council. And if a multinational force cannot be assembled, then at least some countries should step up and organize Syria’s democratically oriented rebel groups to provide the necessary force on the ground, with air cover from participating nations.

There are precedents to follow. The American-led and United Nations-approved multinational effort in Somalia between December 1992 and May 1993 was authorized to use “all necessary measures” to guarantee the delivery of humanitarian aid. In retrospect, this all-but-forgotten operation was largely successful in humanitarian terms. While public attention has focused on the “Black Hawk Down” battle of October 1993, a military failure, the strictly humanitarian goal of getting food to starving Somalis was in fact a success.

Before any such operation begins, however, Mr. Assad and the rebel groups should be put on notice that they have 48 hours to lift the sieges. There are reasons to believe that the mere threat of coercive action would produce results.
As we saw in September, the threat of force pushed the Assad regime to comply. Faced with President Obama’s threat of an imminent military strike last August, Mr. Assad, under Russian pressure, agreed to hand over his stockpile of chemical weapons (the same weapons he claimed he didn’t have). A similar threat of force could once again compel both Mr. Assad’s government and extremist rebels to make a choice: Allow humanitarian aid to flow or be subject to attack.

Invoking the responsibility to protect would also confront Russia with a choice: Convince Mr. Assad to lift the sieges or be left behind by an international community that is prepared to act.

Humanitarian interventions typically occur when moral principles overlap with political interests. As we approach the third anniversary of the Syrian conflict, this alignment is taking shape. Growing global outrage over the humanitarian nightmare in Syria — replete with refugee flows, sarin gas, barrel bombs, and “industrial-scale” killings and torture, as revealed last month in a collection of 55,000 gut-wrenching photographs — has horrified the world.

Using force to prevent starvation will not immediately resolve the crisis in Syria. It will, however, make a qualitative difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. It will also send a clear message to the Syrian regime and the extremist militias: The international community, after three years of watching this moral and humanitarian catastrophe unfold from the sidelines, is finally prepared to act.

Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi, the associate director and director, respectively, of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, are co-editors of “The Syria Dilemma.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 11, 2014, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Use Force to Save Starving Syrians.

    Use Force to Save Starving Syrians, NYT, 10.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/opinion/use-force-to-save-starving-syrians.html

Economy and Crime

Spur New Puerto Rican Exodus

FEB. 8, 2014
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

SAN JUAN, P.R. — Alexis Sotomayor has many reasons to stay in Puerto Rico: his two children; his mother and their gossip sessions over plates of fried rice; and the balm of salt and sun that leavens his life on the island.

But the artisanal soap business that Mr. Sotomayor built is barely hanging on amid rising costs and taxes, and sales that have sunk by 40 percent in five years. Crime is rampant; his girlfriend was nearly carjacked at gunpoint recently. So last month he boarded a flight to Orlando, Fla., to interview for a job at a rum distillery in the hope of joining the ever-growing Puerto Rican diaspora.

“I don’t see it improving,” said Mr. Sotomayor, a 47-year-old chemical engineer. “I see it getting worse. It’s the uncertainty. What am I going to do — wait until it gets worse?”

Puerto Rico’s slow-motion economic crisis skidded to a new low last week when both Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s downgraded its debt to junk status, brushing aside a series of austerity measures taken by the new governor, including increasing taxes and rebalancing pensions. But that is only the latest in a sharp decline leading to widespread fears about Puerto Rico’s future. In the past eight years, Puerto Rico’s ticker tape of woes has stretched unabated: $70 billion in debt, a 15.4 percent unemployment rate, a soaring cost of living, pervasive crime, crumbling schools and a worrisome exodus of professionals and middle-class Puerto Ricans who have moved to places like Florida and Texas.
Launch media viewer
A woman walking past a closed restaurant in Ponce. Alvin Baez/Reuters

The situation has grown so dire that this tropical island, known for its breathtaking beaches, salsero vibe and tax breaks, is now mentioned in the same breath as Detroit, with one significant difference. Puerto Rico, a United States territory of 3.6 million people that is treated in large part like a state, cannot declare bankruptcy.

From bottom to top, Puerto Ricans are watching it unfold with a mixture of disbelief and stoicism.

Alejandro García Padilla, who was elected Puerto Rico’s governor by a sliver of a margin in 2012, said that after he began to wade deeply into the island’s economic and social quagmire, his fight-or-flight instincts kicked into high gear.

“I thought about asking for a recount,” Mr. García Padilla, 42, said with a grin during a recent interview in La Fortaleza, the 500-year-old government residence, recalling, among other things, the $2.2 billion deficit. “But now it’s too late.”

A sense of pessimism pervades on the island. Streets are lined with empty storefronts in San Juan and in smaller cities like Mayagüez; small businesses, hit hard by high electricity, water and tax bills and hurt by drops in sales, have closed and stayed closed.

Schools sit shuttered either because of disrepair or because of a dwindling number of students. In this typically convivial capital, communities have erected gates and bars to help thwart carjackers and home invaders. Illegal drugs, including high-level narcotrafficking, are one of the few growth industries.

Puerto Rico, about 1,000 miles from Miami, has long been poor. Its per capita income is around $15,200, half that of Mississippi, the poorest state. Thirty-seven percent of all households receive food stamps; in Mississippi, the total is 22 percent.

But the extended recession has hit the middle-class hardest of all, economists said. Jobs are still scarce, pension benefits for some are shrinking and budgets continue to tighten. Even many people with paychecks have chosen simply to parlay their United States citizenship into a new life on the mainland.

Puerto Rico’s drop in population has far outpaced that of American states. In 2011 and 2012, the population fell by nearly 1 percent, according to census figures. From July 2012 to July 2013, it declined again by 1 percent, or about 36,000 people. That is more than seven times the drop in West Virginia, the state with the steepest population losses.
 

A Lack of Hope

Coupled with a falling birthrate, the decline is raising worries about how Puerto Rico will thrive with a rapidly aging population and such a large share of jobless residents. Of the island’s 3.67 million people, only one million work in the formal economy. The island has one of the lowest labor participation rates in the world, with only 41.3 percent of working-age Puerto Ricans in jobs; one in four works for the government.

“Today, Puerto Ricans with jobs are moving to the U.S.,” said Orlando Sotomayor, an economist at the University of Puerto Rico and the brother of Alexis. “Even people in their 40s and 50s, college professors with complete job security, are doing so. Some are starting all over. The phenomenon is highly uncommon and underscores the lack of hope that the ship can or will be righted.”

The current exodus rivals the one in the 1950s, when job shortages on the island forced farmers and rural residents to find factory work in cities like New York and Boston. Today, it is doctors, teachers, engineers, nurses, professors who are leaving Puerto Rico behind.

Just about everyone in Puerto Rico has a relative who left recently for Florida, New York, Texas or Virginia, among others. But the decision is never easy. Fathers leave behind children. Houses must be rented or sold at a loss in a glutted market. Businesses must be shut. And English must be polished, or in some cases learned, in a hurry.

Alexis Sotomayor said that on his January flight to Orlando, two acquaintances sitting nearby were also headed there hoping to find work. “Going out there in the morning and returning in the evening, after an interview,” he said.

After Coca-Cola laid him off in 2001, Mr. Sotomayor started experimenting with distilling plant extracts. He found he could make natural soaps and decided to go into business for himself, a move that would allow him more time to spend with his children.

Business boomed for years. So much so that he moved his homespun facility out of his house in 2005 and into a small building he bought in San Juan. He found that he was earning more money making soap than working as a chemical engineer.

Then in 2008, the recession pounded at his door. For five years, he has tried to lift his business; he went to fairs around the island, set up booths in shopping malls, promoted his flower-infused soaps, candles and lotions on television. He divvied up his store last year and decided to rent out half the building. He let go two of his four employees.

But his expenses mounted, including $600 a month in power bills, more than double what consumers pay on the mainland. The sky-high cost is a consequence of Puerto Rico’s inefficient government-run monopoly on electricity and its 67 percent dependency on petroleum for electric power. Other utilities are exorbitant, too. Last year, water rates rose 60 percent in a bid to help cut the state-run water company’s debt.

The cost of private tuition for his children, a total of $2,000 a month, is one nonnegotiable expense for him. Like most middle- and upper-class Puerto Ricans, he long ago lost faith in the island’s troubled public schools. Public school enrollment has plummeted in recent years, in part because of declining birthrates but also because of the schools’ poor quality.

“Many parents, even lower-middle-class parents, put all their money into their children’s private school, even if sometimes they have to live in rented houses,” said Nilsa Velazquez, an economics professor at the University of Puerto Rico who plans to move to Virginia with her family this summer.

For many, the high rate of violent crime has been the capper. There were 1,136 murders in 2011, a record and far higher than the mainland’s rate. It fell to 883 homicides last year, a point of pride for the governor.

But the damage had been done. Life here has always been full of trade-offs, including a high cost of living. Now, though, there is little left to trade.

 

‘Live Here Just to Survive?’

“Between making less money and not knowing when someone will jump you, that pushed the quality of life very low,” Alexis Sotomayor said. “To live here just to survive? No, thanks.”

For Ms. Velazquez, the tenured professor who lives in Mayagüez, and her husband, who works for the Air Force Reserve, the mental calculations were similar. She is 50, she said. The last thing she wanted to do was give up her job as an economics professor, move her two teenage children and uproot her 76-year-old mother, who speaks no English and has never left the island.

But she has grown so disillusioned with the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez — one of the crown jewels of the island’s higher-education system, where she has worked for nearly three decades — that she no longer views it as a viable option for her children. In the face of continuing economic stress, the University of Puerto Rico has suffered the loss of a steady stream of valued professors and funding for important research projects. Even tenured professors have left, Ms. Velazquez said.
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Mr. Sotomayor's factory thrived for years, but now rising expenses are driving him out of business. Dennis Rivera for The New York Times

“The most important thing for me is my children’s education, and the second is my quality of life,” she said. “You see all of these fees and taxes going up, but the streets are terrible.”

This summer she will try to rent out her house rather than selling it and take a loss, and will move to Fairfax County, Va., where her husband will work for the federal government and her children will attend a top public high school. As an economist with a law degree, she is hoping to find some kind of job.

“I thought I could do anything in Puerto Rico,” she said. “Now that is gone.”

The frustrations of Mr. Sotomayor and Ms. Velazquez speak to the depth of the island’s economic problems.

The origins of the crisis, though, stretch back more than a decade. Tax incentives have long been a draw for corporations seeking to do business in Puerto Rico, and the island in turn has benefited from its ability to offer such breaks, in large part structuring its economy around them.

Tax laws were once abundantly generous, which fueled the spread of factories that made textiles and pharmaceuticals, among other things. That came to a crash in 2006, after the 10-year phaseout of a subsidy that provided American firms operating in Puerto Rico with tax-free income. Changes to the global economy and the worldwide recession exacerbated the situation. Since 1996, factory jobs on the island spiraled from 160,000 to 75,000.

Little was done to try to revamp the island’s economic framework. Instead, deficits climbed and pensions spun out of control. In 2006, the government shut down for two weeks because it lacked the cash to meet expenses. The governor moved to raise taxes. In 2010, the next governor reduced taxes and laid off 33,000 government workers. But Puerto Rico’s governors began borrowing even more heavily to get out of the economic logjam.

“It was cheap and easy to borrow,” said Mike Soto, the president of the Puerto Rican Center for a New Economy. “It got to the point where we tapped out what we can borrow.”

 

Painful Corrections

Last year, Mr. García Padilla, the first governor from the countryside, took over. With the island’s economy a shambles, and credit agencies threatening a downgrade to junk status, he had no choice but to take swift action.

Economists have given him credit for acting to remedy problems that have festered for decades. In one year, he moved to overhaul three major pensions, including for teachers, that were on a pace to run out of money soon. Two of them are still pending final court approval. He reduced the deficit by 70 percent. And he is holding the four main debt-laden government-run companies more accountable and insisting on more transparency.

Vowing not to lay off any more workers, he raised taxes sharply to provide much-needed revenue and then got the legislature to approve incentives to entice wealthy investors, like the hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, who has invested in an exclusive beach resort and condo complex. A number of businesses have left the island, scared away by the groaning economy and the high cost of electricity. But others have arrived or expanded, like Eli Lilly, Seaborne Airlines and Cooper Vision.

Four days before the junk status decision, Mr. García Padilla announced that he would present a balanced budget for next year, one year ahead of his own schedule. But his job just got harder. Analysts said the credit downgrades would make it harder to improve the economy. The governor ordered agencies to cut budgets by 2 percent.

“I’ve done everything I can to avoid a downgrade,” Mr. García Padilla said in an interview, calling the move “unjust.” “Maybe I can’t detain the winds right now, but I can build the windmills. I am an incurable optimist.”

But not everyone is applauding. His tax increases have hit some businesses hard, which could pose a further drag on the economy. Among the many taxes he initiated, the governor raised the corporate tax rate to a maximum of 39 percent. Last year, the economy continued on a slide. “The new administration has a bookkeeping mentality as opposed to an economic development mentality,” said Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting representative in Congress and a political opponent of the governor. “Here you find Puerto Rico with an underlying economic problem charging its corporations — its job creators — 39 percent. Hello!”

Perhaps the most maligned is the new lucrative gross receipts tax, which some owners of small- and medium-size businesses say threatens to put them out of business. Because of the way the tax is structured, it affects companies with less than a 5 percent net profit margin. This means that many food-related companies, like supermarkets, and new businesses, are hit hardest. The smaller the margin, the higher the tax.

Some stores are paying an effective tax rate of 130 percent, said Manuel Reyes Alfonso, the vice president of a trade association that represents the food industry. If the tax is not revised, some will be forced to shut down and others will have to raise prices, he said.

“It is absurd,” said Mr. Reyes Alfonso. “It’s like selling the car to buy gas.”

In response, the governor is forming a committee to take a second look at the new taxes and the island’s complicated tax code. Waivers to the tax are available, but Mr. Reyes Alfonso said they were difficult to obtain.

As he sipped coffee in the bakery section of one of his stores, José Revuelta, the president of SuperMax grocery stores in Puerto Rico, said he managed to expand during the recession. But now, with the gross receipts and corporate tax cutting into his business, he is holding back on capital investments, raises and bonuses. He said he wanted reassurance that the tax hikes would be temporary.

“I can understand doing this on a short-term basis,” he said. “But there needs to be a plan.”

Not many are confident that a long-term plan exists to lift the island from such a sustained crash. But it cannot get much worse, they say.

“Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to restore yourself,” said Mr. Soto, of the Center for a New Economy. “I’m hoping that’s what’s happening.”

A version of this article appears in print

on February 9, 2014, on page A1

of the New York edition with the headline:

Economy and Crime Spur New Puerto Rican Exodus.

    Economy and Crime Spur New Puerto Rican Exodus,
    NYT, 8.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/us/
    economy-and-crime-spur-new-puerto-rican-exodus.html

Russia Claims U.S. Meddling

Over Ukraine

FEB. 6, 2014
The New York Times
By ANDREW HIGGINS
and PETER BAKER

KIEV, Ukraine — The tense Russian-American jockeying over the fate of Ukraine escalated on Thursday as a Kremlin official accused Washington of “crudely interfering” in the former Soviet republic, while the Obama administration blamed Moscow for spreading an intercepted private conversation between two American diplomats.

An audiotape of the conversation appeared on the Internet and opened a window into American handling of the political crisis here, as the two diplomats candidly discussed the composition of a possible new government to replace the pro-Russian cabinet of Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. It also turned the tables on the Obama administration, which has been under fire lately for spying on foreign leaders.

The developments on the eve of the Winter Olympics opening in Sochi, Russia, underscored the increasingly Cold War-style contest for influence here as East and West vie for the favor of a nation of 45 million with historic ties to Moscow but a deep yearning to join the rest of Europe. The tit for tat has been going on since November, when Mr. Yanukovych spurned a trade deal with Europe and accepted a $15 billion loan from Moscow. Months of street protests have threatened his government, and American officials are now trying to broker a settlement — an effort the Kremlin seems determined to block.

The posting of the audiotape represented a striking turn in the situation. It was put anonymously on YouTube on Tuesday under a Russian headline, “Puppets of Maidan,” a reference to the square in Kiev occupied by protesters, and then posted on Twitter on Thursday by a Russian government official who called it “controversial.”

The tape captured a four-minute telephone call on Jan. 25 between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the ambassador to Ukraine, trading their views of the crisis, their assessments of various opposition leaders and their frustrations with their European counterparts they see as passive. At one point, Ms. Nuland used an expletive to describe what should happen to the European Union, a comment for which she apologized Thursday.

The two were discussing Mr. Yanukovych’s offer to bring two opposition leaders, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk and Vitali Klitschko, into the government as prime minister and deputy prime minister. The Americans clearly favored Mr. Yatsenyuk, a former economics minister, and Ms. Nuland said Mr. Klitschko, a former world heavyweight boxing champion, should not go into government. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Ms. Nuland said.

Mr. Pyatt expressed hope for a deal to form a new government but warned that Moscow would try to undo their negotiations. “If it does gain altitude, the Russians will be working behind the scenes to torpedo it,” he said.

A link to the secret recording was sent out in a Twitter message on Thursday by Dmitry Losukov, an aide to Russia’s deputy prime minister, just as Ms. Nuland was in Kiev meeting with Mr. Yanukovych and opposition leaders. The White House pointed to that as an indication of Russian involvement, although it said it was not accusing Moscow of taping the call. “I think it says something about Russia’s role,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said she had no information about who posted the recording but criticized Moscow for promoting it. “Certainly, we think this is a new low in Russian tradecraft,” she said.

Mr. Losukov, responding to messages from a reporter on Twitter, rejected the American assertion that he was the first to disseminate the recording. “Disseminating started earlier,” he wrote, adding that his post was being “used to hang the blame” on Russia. Asked if Russia had any role, he said: “How would I know? I was just monitoring ‘the Internets’ while my boss was off to a meeting with the Chinese leader.”

The secret tape, reported Thursday by The Kyiv Post, came to light as a Kremlin adviser, Sergei Glazyev, accused the United States of funding and arming protesters in Kiev and seemed to threaten Russian intervention.

Urging Ukrainian authorities to crush what he described as an attempted coup by American-armed “rebels,” Mr. Glazyev said in an interview published Thursday in a Ukrainian edition of a Russian newspaper that Washington was violating a 1994 agreement by trying to shape events in Kiev. “What the Americans are getting up to now, unilaterally and crudely interfering in Ukraine’s internal affairs, is a clear breach of that treaty,” said Mr. Glazyev, who advises President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Ukraine. “The agreement is for collective guarantees and collective action.”

This, he said, gave Russia the legal right to intervene in the crisis. He did not specify what form such intervention might take.

Further inflaming the situation, a Ukrainian protest leader who vanished for a week and then emerged from a forest late last month saying he had been “crucified” gave the first full account of his ordeal on Thursday.

The activist, Dmytro Bulatov, appeared with a Lithuanian doctor to rebut government claims that he had only suffered “a scratch” and to accuse Russian agents and a friend of Mr. Putin’s of having a possible hand in his kidnapping and torture.

“It was so scary and so painful that I asked them to kill me,” Mr. Bulatov said at a news conference in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. He described his captors as Russian speakers who were “very professional” in inflicting pain. He said they kept his eyes covered with a mask, beat him constantly, cut off part of his ear and then nailed his hands to a wooden door.

“When they nailed my hands to the door, they said they would leave no marks,” he said. He said he had no proof they were from Russian special services but “from the manner they beat me, they clearly knew what they were doing.”

The Lithuanian doctor attending the news conference said part of Mr. Bulatov’s right ear was missing and he had a deep wound on his left cheek and “multiple bruises on his back and arms.” He did not directly confirm the crucifixion claims but said both of Mr. Bulatov’s hands had wounds, although X-rays had shown no broken bones.

Mr. Bulatov said his captors questioned him closely about links between protesters and the American Embassy in Kiev and about protesters who had broken a fence at the house of Viktor Medvedchuk, the head of a pro-Russia civil society group, Ukrainian Choice, and an old friend of Mr. Putin’s.

Mr. Bulatov helped organize the roaming teams that have staged protests outside and, in some cases, tried to break into the homes of Ukrainian leaders and others viewed as close to Russia. He said his captors “made me say that I was an American spy, that I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency” and that American diplomats had given money “to create disorder.”

All of this was untrue, he added, but “I lied because I could not stand the pain.”

Andrew Higgins reported from Kiev,

and Peter Baker from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Russia Claims U.S. Meddling Over Ukraine.

    Russia Claims U.S. Meddling Over Ukraine, NYT, 6.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/world/europe/ukraine.html

A Spotlight on Mr. Putin’s Russia

FEB. 6, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Olympic Games that open in Sochi, Russia, on Friday are intended to be the fulfillment of President Vladimir Putin’s quest for prestige and power on the world stage. But the reality of Mr. Putin and the Russia he leads conflicts starkly with Olympic ideals and fundamental human rights. There is no way to ignore the dark side — the soul-crushing repression, the cruel new antigay and blasphemy laws and the corrupt legal system in which political dissidents are sentenced to lengthy terms on false charges.

Maria Alyokhina, 25, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 24, of Pussy Riot, the Russian punk band, are determined that the glossy celebration of the Olympics will not whitewash the reality of Mr. Putin’s Russia, which they know from experience. Charged with “hooliganism,” they were incarcerated for 21 months for performing an anti-Putin song on the altar of a Moscow cathedral that cast the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool of the state.

Such political protest is not tolerated in a nation that is a long way from a democracy. In December, the women were freed under a new amnesty law that was an attempt by Mr. Putin to soften his authoritarian image before the Olympics.

But if he thought releasing the two women from prison would silence them, he miscalculated badly. On Wednesday, they told The Times’s editorial board that their imprisonment, and the international support it rallied to their cause, had emboldened them. They plan to keep criticizing Mr. Putin — they were hilarious on Stephen Colbert’s show the night before — and working for prison and judicial reform. Their resolve and strength of character are inspiring.

There is a lot of work to do, beginning with the cases of eight people who are now on trial, charged with mass disorder at a protest at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in 2012 on the eve of Mr. Putin’s third inauguration as president. Amnesty International, which sponsored the Pussy Riot visit to New York, where they appeared at a benefit concert on Wednesday, has called for dropping the charges of incitement to riot against the Bolotnaya demonstrators. The Pussy Riot activists dismissed the charges against those demonstrators as baseless and more evidence of “Putin’s way of getting revenge” on his critics.

A Russian prosecutor has demanded prison terms of five and six years for the eight protesters, with the verdict expected a few days before the Olympics end in late February. Ms. Alyokhina and Ms. Tolokonnikova have called for a boycott of the Olympics, or other protests, to pressure the government into freeing the defendants. The most important thing is that the world speak out now, while Mr. Putin is at the center of attention and presumably cares what it thinks.

More broadly, the Russian penal system is in desperate need of reform. The activists described conditions in which prisoners are cowed into “obedient slaves,” forced to work up to 20 hours a day, with food that is little better than refuse. Those who are considered troublemakers can be forced to stand outdoors for hours, regardless of the weather; prohibited from using the bathroom; or beaten.

Their observations are reinforced by the State Department’s 2012 human rights report, which said that limited access to health care, food shortages, abuse by guards and inmates, inadequate sanitation and overcrowding were common in Russian prisons, and that in some the conditions can be life threatening.

The Olympics cannot but put a spotlight on the host country, and despite all efforts to create a more pleasant image of his state, Mr. Putin is facing a growing protest. On Wednesday, more than 200 prominent international authors, including Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen, published a letter denouncing the “chokehold” they said the new antigay and blasphemy laws place on freedom of expression.

Mr. Putin has unconstrained power to put anyone associated with Pussy Riot and thousands of other political activists in prison. But these women and those who share their commitment to freedom and justice are unlikely to be silenced, and they offer Russia a much better future.

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 7, 2014,

on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Spotlight on Mr. Putin’s Russia.

    A Spotlight on Mr. Putin’s Russia, NYT, 6.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/opinion/a-spotlight-on-putins-russia.html

The Shopping List as Policy Tool

JAN. 25, 2014
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON — THE federal government spends around $500 billion annually on goods and services. So when Uncle Sam throws his weight around, markets move.

Historically, presidents have used this leverage to achieve policy goals that were politically difficult to accomplish through legislation. In 1941, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination by defense contractors after it became clear that federal legislation would be impossible because of the stranglehold that Southern Democrats had on Congress.

Since then, the government has used its purchasing power to promote an array of other social goals, including ending forced child labor, promoting recycled paper, incentivizing the hiring of disabled people and opposing apartheid.

President Obama has made one major foray into this realm. In September 2012, he issued an executive order strengthening rules preventing federal agencies from using factories that relied on forced labor or trafficked workers. “As the largest single purchaser of goods and services in the world,” he wrote, “the United States government bears a responsibility to ensure that taxpayer dollars do not contribute to trafficking in persons.”
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Demonstrators at a rally supporting an increase in Maryland’s minimum wage in Annapolis on Jan. 14. Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

More recently, the White House has been mum on whether it will use this leverage again. But pressure is mounting. Gay-rights advocates have called on the Obama administration to issue an executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors. Environmentalists have said the government could go a long way toward controlling climate change simply by tightening fuel-efficiency requirements on the government’s roughly 600,000-vehicle fleet. This alone would force changes throughout the entire auto market, they say.

Yet most of the discussion in recent months has focused on ways the government can use its buying power to improve wages and working conditions, both domestically and abroad. In response to revelations that many federal agencies rely on garment factories overseas that break local labor laws, several lawmakers said this month that they planned to introduce legislation requiring agencies to reveal which foreign suppliers they used and to submit to third-party audits. And Representative Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and labor advocates wrote the president this month asking him to issue an executive order on the matter.

The State Department also convened a workshop this month to discuss ways for the federal government to bring its low-bid procurement practices more in line with the administration’s high-road policy objectives on labor and human rights.

In December, a congressional report found that the federal government did a relatively poor job preventing taxpayer money from going to contractors with labor violations. The report, written by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said that tens of billions of dollars in contracts had gone in recent years to companies that were found to have violated federal safety and wage laws and paid millions in penalties. At least 18 federal contractors were among the recipients of the largest 100 penalties issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration between 2007 and 2012. The report called on the government to weigh a company’s safety and wage violations more closely as it awarded contracts.

In 2010, the Obama administration considered a plan that did just that. Tentatively named the High Road Procurement Policy, the plan would have disqualified many companies with labor or other violations and given an edge to companies with better levels of pay, health coverage or pensions. One in five American workers are employed by a company that contracts with the federal government. The plan was dropped after strong opposition from business leaders who described it as anti-competitive and an expensive gift to unions.

In recent weeks, congressional Democrats and White House officials have said they hope to seize on growing populism among voters in both parties to push this year for a higher federal minimum wage. They also plan to put state-level minimum wage proposals on the ballot in states with hotly contested congressional races.

“If these efforts fail, a respectable fallback position would be for the president to draw on his procurement powers,” said Christopher McCrudden, a law professor at the University of Michigan and the author of “Buying Social Justice: Equality, Government Procurement and Legal Change.” “At least that would send a powerful signal that Democrats are serious about the issue.”

Using the power of procurement policy to drive social change is not without risks and costs. Some economists say that federal agencies should base their buying decisions solely on price. Giving a leg up in federal contracting to special interest groups like blind people or Alaskan natives makes government only less cost-effective, they argue.

Steven Kelman, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy from 1993 through 1997, added that the officials who did the government’s buying often opposed special requirements put on government contractors because they increased costs to the public. The more complicated it becomes to compete for government contracts, he said, the more it favors companies that are more adept at gaming the government bureaucracy rather than providing the best product or service.

“It reduces competition and access to innovative commercial firms,” Mr. Kelman said.

Efforts to use procurement policy to affect working conditions abroad are also difficult because rules are harder to enforce and can create tensions with free trade efforts.

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, said that an added difficulty was that many federal agencies did not reveal the addresses of their contractors’ overseas factories, which got in the way of independent oversight. By contrast, at least five states and more than 20 cities require garment companies to reveal the location of their domestic and overseas suppliers and to submit to audits if they want to compete for public contracts.

Robert Stumberg, a contracting expert and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, added that procurement rules need not necessarily squelch competition. Federal contractors must be accountable for violating labor standards or human rights, he said. Otherwise scofflaws have a competitive advantage because they can cut costs by breaking the rules. Federal agencies essentially incentivize the illegal competition by looking the other way, he said.

“It creates a market that undermines fair competition, at home and abroad,” he said. “Law-abiding companies cannot compete with lawbreakers based on price alone.”

Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter

for The New York Times.

A version of this news analysis appears in print

on January 26, 2014, on page SR9 of the New York edition

with the headline: The Shopping List as Policy Tool.

    The Shopping List as Policy Tool, NYT, 25.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/sunday-review/
    the-shopping-list-as-policy-tool.html

Iran’s Charm Offensive

JAN. 24, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Hassan Rouhani of Iran made his debut this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he expanded on his government’s charm offensive by wooing investors and reassuring political leaders of his determination to complete a comprehensive nuclear deal with the major powers. But his benign image and deft political skills could not erase or excuse the ugly fact that Iran remains the main ally of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, in the destruction of Syria and its people.

Mr. Rouhani, who took office in August, is eager to fulfill his promises of improving Iran’s relations with the world and reviving an economy devastated by international sanctions and his predecessor’s mismanagement. He quickly reached an interim deal with the major powers that curbs significant aspects of Iran’s nuclear program.

When the deal took effect on Monday, United Nations inspectors confirmed that Iran had begun suspending most advanced uranium-fuel enrichment and taken other agreed-upon steps. In exchange, Iran received what the United States called “limited, targeted and reversible sanctions relief for a six-month period.” At Davos, Mr. Rouhani clearly was looking to speed the day when all sanctions are lifted and Iran can achieve the economic growth and international acceptance that has been lost since the 1979 Islamic revolution. At a meeting with top oil executives, he and his oil minister promised to have a new, attractive investment model for oil contracts by September that could help win back business from Western interests.

For now, it is essential that broad sanctions, including restrictions on Iran’s access to the international financial system, remain in place until a comprehensive nuclear agreement is reached. The United States insists that they will remain in place, though it may not be easy to prevent an erosion of the penalties. Investors are eager to jump back into the Iranian market, as are many governments.

Over the long term, Iran’s full reintegration into the international system will depend on more than just adherence to the interim nuclear deal and completion of a final agreement. It must also be seen as contributing to stability in other ways, including ending the hostility toward Israel. Mr. Rouhani said he sought “constructive engagement” with Iran’s neighbors. But that goal is belied by Iran’s support for the Syrian government, a government that has bombed civilians and obstructed humanitarian aid. Iran, which uses Syria as a buffer between it and Israel, has encouraged Hezbollah to fight on his behalf.

Iran’s support of Mr. Assad is all the more unsettling because Mr. Rouhani was rubbing shoulders with the world’s elite just as a stormy peace conference on Syria was playing out elsewhere in Switzerland. Instead of just bemoaning the civil war as a “major catastrophe” and dismissing all the anti-Assad forces as “terrorists,” he could have given credibility to his “constructive engagement” policy by temporarily suspending arms to Syria while peace talks are underway and negotiating a face-saving way for Mr. Assad to leave power.

The United States has tried to keep the nuclear and Syria issues separate, and there is logic to that. If the nuclear deal were the vehicle to resolve every dispute the West has with Iran, it would likely fail. But the Syrian civil war is a major catastrophe, and Iran has considerable leverage to help bring it to an end.



A version of this editorial appears in print on January 25, 2014,

on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:

Iran’s Charm Offensive.

    Iran’s Charm Offensive, NYT, 24.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/opinion/irans-charm-offensive.html

Region Boiling,

Israel Takes Up Castle Strategy

JAN. 18, 2014
The New York Times
By JODI RUDOREN

JERUSALEM — After a Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon landed in Israel last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Hezbollah, the Shiite militia, and its Iranian backers. But Israeli security officials attributed the attack, as well as a similar one in August, to a Sunni jihadist group linked to Al Qaeda.

That disconnect is representative of the deepening dilemma Israel faces as the region around it is riven by sectarian warfare that could redraw the map of the Middle East.

Mr. Netanyahu and other leaders continue to see Shiite Iran and its nuclear program as the primary threat to Israel, and Hezbollah as the most likely to draw it into direct battle. Still, the mounting strength of extremist Sunni cells in Syria, Iraq and beyond that are pledging to bring jihad to Jerusalem can hardly be ignored.

As the chaos escalates, Israeli officials insist they have no inclination to intervene. Instead, they have embraced a castle mentality, hoping the moat they have dug — in the form of high-tech border fences, intensified military deployments and sophisticated intelligence — is broad enough at least to buy time.

“What we have to understand is everything is going to be changed — to what, I don’t know,” said Yaakov Amidror, who recently stepped down as Israel’s national security adviser. “But we will have to be very, very cautious not to take part in this struggle. What we see now is a collapsing of a historical system, the idea of the national Arabic state. It means that we will be encircled by an area which will be no man’s land at the end of the day.”

Mr. Amidror, a former major general in military intelligence, summed up the strategy as “Wait, and keep the castle.”

Israeli leaders have tried to exploit recent events to bolster their case for a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley, a sticking point in the United States-brokered peace talks with the Palestinians. In a speech this month, Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing Jewish Home party, ticked off violent episodes in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon, and concluded sarcastically, “A really excellent time to divest ourselves of security assets.”

Mr. Bennett, who opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, might seize on any excuse to undermine the talks. But Israeli officials, and analysts with close ties to the government and security establishment, said the argument also had traction in more mainstream quarters. The deterioration in Iraq, which borders Jordan, has revived concerns about vulnerability on Israel’s eastern flank.

“From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Khyber Pass, it’s very hard to come by a safe and secure area,” Mr. Netanyahu told reporters here on Thursday. “Peace can be built on hope, but that hope has to be grounded in facts,” he said. “A peace that is not based on truth will crash against the realities of the Middle East.”

Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli general and former peace negotiator, said that “what you hear in Israeli government circles” is that the regional chaos “highlights the need for solid security arrangements.”

“The U.S. accepts the basic Israeli argument that given what’s happening in the region — suddenly jihadists are taking over Syria, and there’s no telling what will happen elsewhere — there is a legitimate cause for concern,” said Mr. Herzog, who has been consulting with the American team. “How to translate that into concrete security arrangements is something the parties are right now coping with.”

Israeli security and political officials have been unsettled by the rapid developments on the ground and in the diplomatic arena in recent weeks. Washington’s gestures toward Iran, not only on the nuclear issue but also with regard to Syria and Iraq, underscore a divergence in how the United States and Israel, close allies, view the region. At the same time, Saudi Arabia, which shares Israel’s concern about an emboldened Iran, is financing Sunni groups that view Israel as the ultimate enemy.

More broadly, the intensified fighting has convinced many Israelis that the region will be unstable or even anarchic for some time, upending decades of strategic positioning and military planning.

“Historically, Israel has preferred to have strong leaders, even if they’re hostile to Israel,” said Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, citing President Bashar al-Assad of Syria as an example.

“It’s a problem without an address,” Mr. Spyer said of the Islamist groups often lumped together as “global jihad.” “Israel always likes to have an address. Assad we don’t like, but when something happens in Assad’s territory, we can bargain with him. These guys, there is no address. There is no one to bargain with.”

Maj. Gen. Yoav Har-Even, director of the Israeli military’s planning branch, said in an interview published this month in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that global jihad had already “taken control of some of the arms warehouses” in Syria and established a presence in the Golan Heights. He called it a “central target” of intelligence efforts.

“I don’t have, today, a contingency plan to destroy global jihad,” General Har-Even acknowledged. “But I am developing the intelligence ability to monitor events. If I spot targets that are liable to develop into a problem, I take the excellent intelligence that I am brought, I process it for the target and plan action. And I have a great many such targets.”

Since the Arab Spring uprisings began in 2011, there have been two main schools of thought in Israel. One argues that the instability in the region makes resolving the Palestinian conflict all the more urgent, to provide a beacon on an uncertain sea. The other cautions against making any concessions close to home while the future of the neighborhood remains unclear. The camps have only hardened their positions in response to the recent developments.

“The most important lesson from the last few weeks is that you cannot rely on a snapshot of reality at any given time in order to plan your strategic needs,” said Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who recently rejoined Mr. Netanyahu’s team as a freelance foreign policy adviser. “The region is full of bad choices. What that requires you to do is take your security very seriously. And you shouldn’t be intimidated by people saying, ‘Well, that’s a worst-case analysis,’ because lately, the worst is coming through.”

Efraim Halevy, a former director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, views the landscape differently. Iran’s involvement in Syria and Iraq could distract it from its nuclear project, he said. Hezbollah has lost fighters in Syria and faced setbacks in its standing at home in Lebanon. Hamas, the Palestinian militant faction that controls the Gaza Strip, has been severely weakened by the new military-backed government in Egypt and its crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria’s military capacity has been greatly diminished.

“If you look all around, compared to what it was like six months ago, Israel can take a deep breath,” Mr. Halevy said. “The way things are at the moment, if you want to photograph it, it looks as if some of the potential is there for an improvement in Israel’s strategic position and interests. It’s more than ever a see and wait, and be on your guard, and protect yourself if necessary.”

Correction: January 19, 2014

An earlier version of this article incorrectly quoted

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

He made reference to the Khyber Pass, not the Cairo Pass.

A version of this article appears in print on January 19, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Region Boiling, Israel Takes Up Castle Strategy.

    Region Boiling, Israel Takes Up Castle Strategy, NYT, 18.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/world/middleeast/
    region-boiling-israel-takes-up-castle-strategy.html

Syria Militants Said

to Recruit Visiting Americans

to Attack U.S.

JAN. 9, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — Islamic extremist groups in Syria with ties to Al Qaeda are trying to identify, recruit and train Americans and other Westerners who have traveled there to get them to carry out attacks when they return home, according to senior American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

These efforts, which the officials say are in the early stages, are the latest challenge that the conflict in Syria has created, not just for Europe but for the United States, as the civil war has become a magnet for Westerners seeking to fight with the rebels against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. At least 70 Americans have either traveled to Syria, or tried to, since the civil war started three years ago, according to the intelligence and counterterrorism officials — a figure that has not previously been disclosed.

The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said Thursday that tracking Americans who have returned from Syria had become one of the bureau’s highest counterterrorism priorities.

“We are focused on trying to figure out what our people are up to, who should be spoken to, who should be followed, who should be charged,” Mr. Comey said in a meeting with reporters, without referring to specific numbers. “I mean, it’s hard for me to characterize beyond that. It’s something we are intensely focused on.”

Fearing that the handful of Americans who have returned to the United States pose a threat because they may have received extensive training and jihadist indoctrination, the F.B.I. is conducting costly round-the-clock surveillance on a small number of these individuals, according to the officials.

“We know Al Qaeda is using Syria to identify individuals they can recruit, provide them additional indoctrination so they’re further radicalized, and leverage them into future soldiers, possibly in the U.S.,” said a senior counterterrorism official, who, like half a dozen other top intelligence, law enforcement and diplomatic officials interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified discussing delicate national security issues.

In Europe, where larger numbers are leaving for Syria, officials share the same concern and are working closely with American authorities to coordinate measures to stem the flow and track those who return.

Analysts say at least 1,200 European Muslims have gone to fight since the start of the civil war. In a confidential memo on Nov. 26, Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s counterterrorism coordinator, warned that “the first returnees have come back, and there are cases where individuals continue traveling back and forth.”

Most of the Americans who have traveled to Syria are still there, the officials said, though a few have died on the battlefield. Nicole Lynn Mansfield, 33, of Flint, Mich., a convert to Islam, was killed last May while with Syrian rebels in Idlib Province.

Another American, Eric G. Harroun, a former Army soldier from Phoenix, was indicted in Virginia by a federal grand jury last year on charges related to allegations that he fought alongside the Nusra Front, one of the Syrian opposition groups linked to Al Qaeda. In September, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge involving conspiracy to transfer defense articles and services, and was released from custody.

Mr. Harroun’s involvement was hardly a secret. Last February, he bragged about his role, posting a photo on his Facebook page saying, “Downed a Syrian Helicopter then Looted all Intel and Weapons!”

American officials say their concerns about the recruitment and training of Americans are based on intelligence gleaned from passenger travel records, human sources on the ground in Syria, intercepted electronic communications, social media postings and surveillance of Americans overseas who have expressed interest in traveling to Syria. The authorities are also trying to identify Americans traveling there by scouring travel data that the European Union has been providing to the Department of Homeland Security as part of a 2011 agreement.

While the main goal of the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, another group with ties to Al Qaeda, remains toppling Mr. Assad’s government, American officials said the groups had carved out enough space and influence to begin building the apparatus to conduct attacks outside Syria.

Despite the United States’ use of powerful surveillance tools and drone attacks on Qaeda leaders in places like Pakistan and Yemen, Mr. Comey said in the meeting with reporters that he was worried about a “metastasizing Al Qaeda threat” in Africa and the Middle East.

“We’ve had great success against core Al Qaeda in the Af-Pak region,” Mr. Comey said, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan, “but at the same time, in the ungoverned or poorly governed spaces in Africa and around the Middle East, we see a resurgence of Al Qaeda affiliates.”

The group’s attempts to create a pipeline into the United States suggest that it is still not deterred from trying to follow through on its most lofty, and difficult, goal of carrying out an attack on American soil.

“That Al Qaeda would like to get operatives into the homeland or in Western Europe has been a persistent theme over the past several years,” said one senior law enforcement official.

Indeed, the extremists’ efforts in Syria are taking a page from the playbook of Al Qaeda and its associates in Pakistan, where jihadist talent spotters have sought to identify, recruit and train American citizens or residents before they return home.

Both Najibullah Zazi, a former coffee cart operator who unsuccessfully plotted to detonate backpack bombs on the New York City subway, and Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born American convicted in the failed Times Square bombing of 2010, received training in Pakistan.

The challenge of identifying Americans who are trying to travel to Syria is one of the greatest challenges that the United States Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center in Dulles, Va., has faced since it was created in October 2001.

But American law enforcement and counterterrorism officials have dealt with a similar threat over the past few years from roughly three dozen Somali-Americans who have traveled to Somalia to fight there. The F.B.I., local law enforcement agencies and Somali community leaders have overcome initial hurdles to cooperate in identifying individuals who could pose a threat.

But unlike those in the Somali group, largely young men from a few communities like Minneapolis and Columbus, Ohio, the Americans heading to Syria pose a much thornier challenge because they are “a much larger group of people traveling there for a wider array of reasons,” the senior law enforcement official said. “The cross section of folks we’re aware of is very broad.”

Richard Stanek, the sheriff of Hennepin County, Minn., where Minneapolis is, said he had been contacted by several federal officials seeking advice on how to deal with this more diverse potential threat. But his advice carries caveats.

“Our experiences are different than what we’re seeing with Syria,” said the sheriff, who is also president of the Major County Sheriffs’ Association, which represents the nation’s 77 largest sheriff offices. “The same indicators aren’t necessarily there.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 10, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Syria Militants Said to Recruit For U.S. Attack.

    Syria Militants Said to Recruit Visiting Americans to Attack U.S.,
    NYT, 9.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/world/
    middleeast/syrian-groups-try-to-recruit-us-travelers.html

Grim Sequel to Iraq’s War

JAN. 8, 2014
The New York Times
Middle East|News Analysis
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — For two years, President Obama has boasted that he accomplished what his predecessor had not. “I ended the war in Iraq,” he has told audience after audience. But a resurgence by Islamic militants in western Iraq has reminded the world that the war is anything but over.

What Mr. Obama ended was the United States military presence in Iraq, but the fighting did not stop when the last troops left in 2011; it simply stopped being a daily concern for most Americans. While attention shifted elsewhere, the war raged on and has now escalated to its most violent phase since the depths of the occupation.

The turn of events in a country that once dominated the American agenda underscores the approach of a president determined to keep the United States out of what he sees as the quagmires of the last decade. In places like Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Syria, Mr. Obama has opted for selective engagement and accepted that sometimes there will be bad results, but in his view not as bad as if the United States immersed itself more assertively in other people’s problems.

The president’s methods have come under new scrutiny in recent days with flags of Al Qaeda hoisted over Falluja and Ramadi, two names with deep resonance for a generation of American veterans who spilled blood there. And the criticism was fueled by a new memoir by former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates describing an ambivalent commander in chief who did not believe in his own military buildup in Afghanistan and wanted mainly to get out of Iraq.

“The vacuum of American leadership certainly is felt there,” said Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, who last visited Baghdad in August. “It felt as if the administration thought that Iraq was checked off the list and it’s time to move on. And because it was checked off the list, there really was no reason to maintain the kind of relationship that would have been helpful.”

Critics complain that Mr. Obama squandered the military success achieved by President George W. Bush’s 2007 troop “surge” and should have done more to persuade Baghdad to accept a residual American force beyond 2011. They say he should have been more active in restraining Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose Shiite leadership has alienated many Sunnis, fueling the latest uprising.

But if Mr. Obama has pulled back from Iraq and other global hot spots, so has the American public. The president’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq remains popular in surveys, and even his strongest critics generally do not advocate sending ground forces back in. After years of crushing guerrilla warfare, Obama advisers argue the president has simply recalibrated American policy to be more realistic, and many Americans seem content to let Iraqis fight it out themselves.

“There was never a sense at the White House that this is a wrap, that we’ve somehow resolved all the conflict in the country and the U.S. could pull back,” said Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is now at the Center for a New American Security. But for all the effort, she added, “we have to be cleareyed about the limits of U.S. engagement.”

She continued: “At the end of the day, the United States does not control what happens in Iraq.”

Douglas Ollivant, a former national security aide to both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, said the administration could not have pushed Mr. Maliki to do more, while the Iraqi leader is “getting a bad rap” since he faces an active Qaeda insurgency. “At least they’re not fighting over us,” Mr. Ollivant said, now that the American presence is no longer an issue.
 

The strife in Iraq today has turned into part of a larger regional battlefield tied to the civil war next door in Syria. In recent months, American officials said, as many as 50 suicide bombers a month have slipped over the border into Iraq, greatly complicating the nature of the conflict. The Qaeda assaults in Falluja and Ramadi came after a year in which 7,800 civilians and 1,000 Iraqi security troops were killed in attacks, according to the United Nations, the highest levels in five years.

Some Republicans acknowledged the complicated set of dynamics at work. “Is there some responsibility for the United States for this chain of events? Yes,” said Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas, the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “Is it the sole cause? No.”

Mr. Obama has made no public comment about the developments in the Iraqi province of Anbar, leaving the matter instead to Mr. Biden, his point person on Iraq. Mr. Biden called Mr. Maliki on Wednesday in their second conversation in three days, pressing for more outreach to disaffected Sunnis.

The administration is sending Hellfire missiles and surveillance drones to help Iraqi forces and has stepped up efforts to persuade the Senate to permit the lease and sale of Apache attack helicopters. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has held up the Apaches while demanding that they not be used against civilians and that Mr. Maliki take steps to stop Iran from supplying Syria’s military through Iraqi airspace.

After months of waiting, Mr. Menendez received an urgent call from William J. Burns, the deputy secretary of state, on Tuesday promising a response, and Mr. Menendez signaled Wednesday that he may lift his hold. “Provided these issues are sufficiently addressed, Chairman Menendez will be ready to move forward,” said his spokesman, Adam Sharon.

Even so, other senators may still be wary. “I think we have to be very careful,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee. “All of that could fall into the wrong hands.”

And even once it is approved, it could take months for the first of the leased Apaches to arrive, and pilots would need to be trained, officials said. More broadly, the administration has made it clear that Baghdad should not expect the United States to come to its rescue. Secretary of State John Kerry emphasized last weekend that “this is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis,” using the words “their fight” four more times in the course of comments to reporters.

The White House denies that it has neglected Iraq.

“It’s an important relationship that we have with the government of Iraq, with the Iraqi people, and our commitment to assisting them in this effort I think is represented both by the military assistance that we’re providing and speeding up but also by the kind of discourse that we have with Iraq’s leaders,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

Other officials said they have quietly helped guide Mr. Maliki’s response, intervening to stop him from launching an army assault on Ramadi, which they feared would only lead to a blood bath.

Instead, they encouraged him to reach out to Sunni tribal leaders and approve payments to those fighting Al Qaeda.

In doing so, they said, the Iraqi government and its allies have recaptured much of Ramadi in just a week. They hope to try something similar in Falluja, but conceded it is more of a challenge because the city has long been friendlier to Islamic extremists.

“In cases like this, we have to choose between the least bad options,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who just completed a long study of Iraq. “The whole idea that we have some magic wand hasn’t worked out all that well.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

A version of this news analysis appears in print

on January 9, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition

with the headline: Grim Sequel To Iraq’s War.

    Grim Sequel to Iraq’s War, NYT, 8.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/world/middleeast/
    grim-sequel-to-iraqs-war.html

Strategic Corridor in West Bank

Remains a Stumbling Block

in Mideast Talks

January 4, 2014
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

BARDALA, West Bank — The residents of this neglected Palestinian farming village in the northern Jordan Valley area of the West Bank say they get running water once every three days, which they store in bottles and cisterns.

The neighboring Jewish settlement of Mehola is a small paradise by comparison, with green lawns and a swimming pool.

The contrasts across this stark landscape of jagged hills reflect the complexities of the fierce contest for control of the Jordan Valley, and the challenges the Palestinians face in administration. As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators struggle to make headway on peace talks initiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, they have remained bitterly at odds over the strategic corridor that runs between the populous heartland of the West Bank and the border with Jordan.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel insists on maintaining a long-term Israeli military presence along the border to prevent infiltrations and weapons smuggling from the east. Some in his Likud Party say there is no security or strategic depth without the settlements and argue that Israel should annex the area permanently. The Palestinians insist that Israel withdraw its forces and settlements so they can control their own borders as part of an independent and sovereign state.

But for the residents of the Jordan Valley, where the long summers are intense and the black flies ubiquitous, the diplomatic jockeying is secondary to the hard realities facing two intertwined, adversarial communities. While settlers worry they will lose their homes, the Palestinians, who view the fertile valley as the breadbasket of a future state, are concerned that Israel will continue to control nearly all the water and land.

“We live at their mercy,” said Dirar Sawafta, an employee of the Bardala village council.

Some 60,000 Palestinians live here in scattered villages and the ancient oasis city of Jericho. They farm about 8,600 acres of the land, much of it leased from wealthy Palestinian landowners in Jerusalem and Nablus. Many complain of mismanagement and dysfunction on the part of the Palestinian Authority, which administers Jericho and the villages, as well as the strictures of Israeli military rule.

The 6,500 Israeli settlers live in 21 small communities interspersed with army bases. Farming nearly 13,000 acres, they use treated wastewater to irrigate their abundant date groves and employ 6,000 Palestinians in a thriving agricultural enterprise adapted to the semitropical climate.

Palestinian leaders contend that Israel wants to remain here indefinitely out of economic interests. Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator, who lives in Jericho and represents the Jordan Valley in the Palestinian legislature, listed the settlers’ assets: “The biggest palm farms, the biggest grape farms, turkey farms and alligator lakes.”

Yet the Jordan Valley settlers — many of whom came in search of a pastoral life under the aegis of security-minded Labor-led governments after the 1967 war — live with growing uncertainty that the government will support their continued presence there.

In 1997, during his first term as prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu wrote a letter to the settlers saying that “the Jordan Valley will be an integral part of the state of Israel under any agreement.”

But many settlers here note that Mr. Netanyahu now speaks only of maintaining a military presence.

In Bardala, the issues are complex, as occupation and internal Palestinian problems have left the wells dry. Before Israel conquered the area from Jordan in 1967, Bardala’s water came from a nearby spring. But the Israelis dug a deeper well nearby. “Ours dried up,” Mr. Sawafta said.

A deal was made in the 1970s, and the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s brought new water agreements, but with the second uprising in 2000, Palestinians stopped paying their water and electricity bills to the Palestinian Authority. The Bardala council owes the authority about two million shekels (more than $560,000) in unpaid utility bills. So, Mr. Sawafta said, the authority has delayed funding for projects like new roads, a dam and a water network in the village.

Israel deducts the utility debts from the tax revenue it collects on behalf of the authority. Then the ever-cash-poor Palestinian government uses the rest to pay its employees’ salaries.

After that, there is little left to aid the farmers. Rifaat Hamdallah Daraghmeh, a Palestinian who employs 15 families on a farm he runs in the Jiftlik area of the valley and sells produce in Israel, said the authority owed him 300,000 shekels (about $85,000) in unpaid tax refunds over the past four years. Abdul Ghaffar Dawabshe, the deputy director of the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture department in Jericho, said there were 60 such cases in his office.

Khirbet Makhoul, a Bedouin-style encampment in the northern Jordan Valley, has in recent months become a symbol of the continuing struggle over every inch of Jordan Valley land.

In September, Israeli army bulldozers arrived at dawn and razed all the temporary structures, including those that housed animals and people. Supporters brought new tents, but the army came back three more times. The women and children moved to permanent homes in Tamoun, a village near Nablus.

“We used to live like kings,” said Ashraf Bisharat, 30, a member of one of the dozen or so families raising livestock here, who noted that before September, the bare hillside was filled with animal shelters.

Makhoul sits between three army bases, and soldiers in training provide a steady background noise of booms and gunfire. Israeli defense officials said the shelters had been destroyed because they were erected without permits. The families have refused to leave the land they say they have owned or leased for decades. Now the authority is helping them register their plots and obtain permits. One animal shelter was rebuilt. Some of the local men were sleeping under nylon sheets, each on the ruins of his family tent.

Most of the Jordan Valley is classified as Area C, the part of the West Bank that remains under full Israeli control. Permits, whether for agricultural packing houses or zinc-roofed shacks, are hard to come by, and demolitions take place almost daily.

For now, the Jewish settlers are guarding their positions, too. After two Palestinians from the Hebron area bludgeoned a retired Israeli colonel to death in October in the yard of his home in Brosh Habika, an isolated tourism village here, yeshiva students and families from a nearby religious settlement temporarily moved into the holiday chalets to reinforce and demonstrate a presence.

In recent years, the settlers have planted part of a demilitarized zone between the border security fence and the actual border along the Jordan River with thousands of date palms. Children of the founders of the settlements who left for the city are now returning, attracted by cheap housing and rural community living. This week, a senior Likud minister dedicated a new neighborhood in Gitit, a remote, once-secular settlement that has been revived by an influx of religious settlers.

“It took us 30 years to understand what to grow and how to grow it,” David Alhayani, the Likud head of the settlers’ Jordan Valley Regional Council, said in a recent interview. Mr. Alhayani runs an herb farm in his hilltop settlement, Argaman, where he employs more than 20 Palestinians. He spoke of quiet friendship and cooperation with his workers and some local Palestinian notables.

“They called us pioneers, salt of the earth, the true Zionists,” he said of the Israeli mainstream. Now, he said, the Labor Party and many others seem to have abandoned the Jordan Valley settlers.

“We came because our government sent us here — all the governments of Israel,” he added. “If the Israeli government decides differently, we will accept the decision.”

Said Ghazali contributed reporting.

    Strategic Corridor in West Bank Remains a Stumbling Block in Mideast Talks,
    NYT, 4.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/world/middleeast/
    strategic-corridor-in-west-bank-remains-a-stumbling-block-in-mideast-talks.html

Power Vacuum in Middle East

Lifts Militants

January 4, 2014
The New York Times
By BEN HUBBARD, ROBERT F. WORTH
and MICHAEL R. GORDON

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The images of recent days have an eerie familiarity, as if the horrors of the past decade were being played back: masked gunmen recapturing the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Ramadi, where so many American soldiers died fighting them. Car bombs exploding amid the elegance of downtown Beirut. The charnel house of Syria’s worsening civil war.

But for all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds.

Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists have flourished in both Iraq and Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda, as the two countries’ conflicts amplify each other and foster ever-deeper radicalism. Behind much of it is the bitter rivalry of two great oil powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose rulers — claiming to represent Shiite and Sunni Islam, respectively — cynically deploy a sectarian agenda that makes almost any sort of accommodation a heresy.

“I think we are witnessing a turning point, and it could be one of the worst in all our history,” said Elias Khoury, a Lebanese novelist and critic who lived through his own country’s 15-year civil war. “The West is not there, and we are in the hands of two regional powers, the Saudis and Iranians, each of which is fanatical in its own way. I don’t see how they can reach any entente, any rational solution.”

The drumbeat of violence in recent weeks threatens to bring back the worst of the Iraqi civil war that the United States touched off with an invasion and then spent billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers’ lives to overcome.

With the possible withdrawal of American forces in Afghanistan looming later this year, many fear that an insurgency will unravel that country, too, leaving another American nation-building effort in ashes.

The Obama administration defends its record of engagement in the region, pointing to its efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis and the Palestinian dispute, but acknowledges that there are limits. “It’s not in America’s interests to have troops in the middle of every conflict in the Middle East, or to be permanently involved in open-ended wars in the Middle East,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said in an email on Saturday.

For the first time since the American troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters from a Qaeda affiliate have recaptured Iraqi territory. In the past few days they have seized parts of the two biggest cities in Anbar Province, where the government, which the fighters revile as a tool of Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a semblance of authority.

Lebanon has seen two deadly car bombs, including one that killed a senior political figure and American ally.

In Syria, the tempo of violence has increased, with hundreds of civilians killed by bombs dropped indiscriminately on houses and markets.

Linking all this mayhem is an increasingly naked appeal to the atavistic loyalties of clan and sect. Foreign powers’ imposing agendas on the region, and the police-state tactics of Arab despots, had never allowed communities to work out their long-simmering enmities. But these divides, largely benign during times of peace, have grown steadily more toxic since the Iranian revolution of 1979. The events of recent years have accelerated the trend, as foreign invasions and the recent round of Arab uprisings left the state weak, borders blurred, and people resorting to older loyalties for safety.

Arab leaders are moving more aggressively to fill the vacuum left by the United States and other Western powers as they line up by sect and perceived interest. The Saudi government’s pledge last week of $3 billion to the Lebanese Army is a strikingly bold bid to reassert influence in a country where Iran has long played a dominant proxy role through Hezbollah, the Shiite movement it finances and arms.

That Saudi pledge came just after the assassination of Mohamad B. Chatah, a prominent political figure allied with the Saudis, in a downtown car bombing that is widely believed to have been the work of the Syrian government or its Iranian or Lebanese allies, who are all fighting on the same side in the civil war.

Iran and Saudi Arabia have increased their efforts to arm and recruit fighters in the civil war in Syria, which top officials in both countries portray as an existential struggle. Sunni Muslims from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have joined the rebels, many fighting alongside affiliates of Al Qaeda. And Shiites from Bahrain, Lebanon, Yemen and even Africa are fighting with pro-government militias, fearing that a defeat for Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, would endanger their Shiite brethren everywhere.

“Everyone fighting in Syria is fighting for his own purpose, not only to protect Bashar al-Assad and his regime,” said an Iraqi Shiite fighter who gave his name as Abu Karrar. He spoke near the Shiite shrine of Sayida Zeinab near Damascus, where hundreds of Shiite fighters from around the region, including trained Hezbollah commandos, have streamed to defend a symbol of their faith.

Some Shiite fighters are trained in Iran or Lebanon before being sent to Syria, and many receive salaries and free room and board, paid for by donations from Shiite communities outside of Syria, Abu Karrar said.

Although the Saudi government waged a bitter struggle with Al Qaeda on its own soil a decade ago, the kingdom now supports Islamist rebels in Syria who often fight alongside Qaeda groups like the Nusra Front. The Saudis say they have little choice: having lobbied unsuccessfully for a decisive American intervention in Syria, they believe they must now back whoever can help them defeat Mr. Assad’s forces and his Iranian allies.

For all the attention paid to Syria over the past three years, Iraq’s slow disintegration also offers a vivid glimpse of the region’s bloody sectarian dynamic. In March 2012, Anthony Blinken, who is now President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, gave a speech echoing the White House’s rosy view of Iraq’s prospects after the withdrawal of American forces.

Iraq, Mr. Blinken said, was “less violent, more democratic and more prosperous” than “at any time in recent history.”

But the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, was already pursuing an aggressive campaign against Sunni political figures that infuriated Iraq’s Sunni minority. Those sectarian policies and the absence of American ground and air forces gave Al Qaeda in Iraq, a local Sunni insurgency that had become a spent force, a golden opportunity to rebuild its reputation as a champion of the Sunnis both in Iraq and in neighboring Syria. Violence in Iraq grew steadily over the following year.

Rebranding itself as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the group seized territory in rebel-held parts of Syria, where it now aspires to erase the border between the two countries and carve out a haven for its transnational, jihadist project. Sending 30 to 40 suicide bombers a month to Iraq from Syria, it has mounted a campaign of violence that has led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis this year, according to the United Nations, the highest level of violence there since 2008.

In recent days, after ISIS fighters rode into the cities of Falluja and Ramadi, they fought gun battles with Sunni tribal fighters backed by the Iraqi government, illustrating that the battle lines in the Middle East are about far more than just sect. Yet the tribal fighters see the government as the lesser of two evils, and their loyalty is likely to be temporary and conditional.

As the United States rushed weapons to Mr. Maliki’s government late last year to help him fight off the jihadis, some analysts said American officials had not pushed the Iraqi prime minister hard enough to be more inclusive. “Maliki has done everything he could to deepen the sectarian divide over the past year and a half, and he still enjoys unconditional American support,” said Peter Harling, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “The pretext is always the same: They don’t want to rock the boat. How is this not rocking the boat?”

The worsening violence in Iraq and Syria has spread into Lebanon, where a local Qaeda affiliate conducted a suicide bombing of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut in November, in an attack meant as revenge for Iran’s support of Mr. Assad.

More bombings followed, including one in a Hezbollah stronghold on Thursday, one day after the authorities announced the arrest of a senior Saudi-born Qaeda leader.

“All these countries are suffering the consequences of a state that’s no longer sovereign,” said Paul Salem, vice president of the Middle East Institute in Washington. “On the sectarian question, much depends on the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. Will these two powers accommodate each other or continue to wage proxy war?”

For the fighters on the ground, that question comes far too late. Amjad al-Ahmed, a Shiite fighter with a pro-government militia, said by phone from the Syrian city of Homs, “There is no such thing as coexistence between us and the Sunnis because they are killing my people here and in Lebanon.”

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut,

Robert F. Worth from Washington,

and Michael R. Gordon from Jerusalem.

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.

    Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants, NYT, 4.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/world/middleeast/
    power-vacuum-in-middle-east-lifts-militants.html

Kerry Quietly Makes

Priority of Climate Pact

January 2, 2014
The New York Times
By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — As a young naval officer in Vietnam, John Kerry commanded a Swift boat up the dangerous rivers of the Mekong Delta. But when he returned there last month as secretary of state for the first time since 1969, he spoke not of past firefights but of climate change.

“Decades ago, on these very waters, I was one of many who witnessed the difficult period in our shared history,” Mr. Kerry told students gathered on the banks of the Cai Nuoc River. He drew a connection from the Mekong Delta’s troubled past to its imperiled future. “This is one of the two or three most potentially impacted areas in the world with respect to the effects of climate change,” he said.

In his first year as secretary of state, Mr. Kerry joined with the Russians to push Syria to turn over its chemical weapons, persuaded the Israelis and Palestinians to resume direct peace talks, and played the closing role in the interim nuclear agreement with Iran. But while the public’s attention has been on his diplomacy in the Middle East, behind the scenes at the State Department Mr. Kerry has initiated a systematic, top-down push to create an agencywide focus on global warming.

His goal is to become the lead broker of a global climate treaty in 2015 that will commit the United States and other nations to historic reductions in fossil fuel pollution.

Whether the secretary of state can have that kind of influence remains an open question, and Mr. Kerry, despite two decades of attention to climate policy, has few concrete accomplishments on the issue. The climate bills he sponsored as a senator failed. At the United Nations climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, Mr. Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts, labored behind the scenes to help President Obama broker a treaty that yielded pledges from countries to cut their emissions but failed to produce legally binding commitments.

“He’s had a lot of passion, but I don’t think you can conclude he’s had any success,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who has worked on climate legislation with Mr. Kerry in the past.

Yet climate experts point to one significant, recent accomplishment. As a result of midlevel talks Mr. Kerry set up to pave the way for a 2015 deal, the United States and China agreed in September to jointly phase down production of hydrofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air-conditioners.

“He’s pushing to get climate to be the thing that drives the U.S. relationship with China,” said Timothy E. Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado who now works on climate change issues with the United Nations Foundation.

For decades, the world has been skeptical of American efforts to push a climate change treaty, given the lack of action in Congress. But Mr. Obama has given Mr. Kerry’s efforts some help. In September, the Environmental Protection Agency began issuing regulations forcing cuts in carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

The rules, which can be enacted without Congress, have effectively frozen construction of new coal-fired plants and could eventually shutter existing ones. Republicans criticize the rules as a “war on coal,” but abroad they are viewed as a sign that the United States is now serious about acting on global warming.

“It has not gone unnoticed that this administration is now much more engaged on climate change,” said Jake Schmidt, the international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Every international negotiator understands it.” When Mr. Kerry took office, Mr. Schmidt said, “the dynamic changed quite a bit.”

Shortly after Mr. Kerry was sworn in last February, he issued a directive that all meetings between senior American diplomats and top foreign officials include a discussion of climate change. He put top climate policy specialists on his State Department personal staff. And he is pursuing smaller climate deals in forums like the Group of 20, the countries that make up the world’s largest economies.

“He’s approaching this creatively,” said Heather Zichal, who recently stepped down as Mr. Obama’s top climate adviser and worked for Mr. Kerry from 2002 to 2008. “He’s thinking strategically about using other forums.”

But Mr. Kerry’s ambitious agenda faces enormous obstacles.

Not only must he handle difficult negotiations with China — the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases — for the 2015 treaty, but the pact must be ratified by a Senate that has a long record of rejecting climate change legislation. “In all candor, I don’t care where he is, nothing is going to happen in the Senate for a long time,” Mr. McCain said.

The effort is complicated by the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if approved by the State Department and Mr. Obama, would bring carbon-heavy tar sands oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast — and infuriate environmentalists. Approval of the pipeline could blacken Mr. Kerry’s green credentials and hurt his ability to get a broader climate deal.

Mr. Kerry is nonetheless forging ahead. “One of the reasons the president was attracted to Kerry was that we were going to make climate change a legacy issue in the second term,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser.

Former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts to fight climate change, praised Mr. Kerry’s longtime focus on global warming. “He has continued to prioritize the issue even in the face of strong political resistance,” Mr. Gore wrote in an email. Mr. Kerry, he said, “has the rare opportunity to advance international negotiations at a critical time.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Kerry worked closely with Mr. Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, on climate change policy on Capitol Hill. In 1992, Mr. Kerry attended the first United Nations climate change summit meeting, in Rio de Janeiro, where he kindled a connection with Teresa Heinz, who attended with a delegation representing the elder President George Bush.

Married three years later, the couple went on to write a 2007 book together, “This Moment on Earth: Today’s New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future.” By that time Mr. Kerry had run for president and lost, and then was one of the founders of a think tank, the American Security Project, that defined climate change as a national security threat.

After Mr. Obama was elected president in 2008, Mr. Kerry and his wife began holding salons in their Georgetown home focused on climate policy, with guests like John P. Holdren, the new president’s science adviser. By 2009, Mr. Kerry had joined Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, to push an ambitious climate change bill.

At the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December 2009, Mr. Obama promised the world that the Senate would soon pass that bill — but a few months later, Mr. Kerry’s legislation fell apart. Since then prospects for global warming legislation on Capitol Hill have been poor.

Now, Mr. Kerry hopes to use his position as secretary of state to achieve a legacy on global warming that has long eluded him.

“There’s a lot of scar tissue from the U.S. saying it will do stuff” on climate change and not following through, said Mr. Schmidt of the Natural Resources Defense Council. But he said Mr. Kerry’s push abroad and Mr. Obama’s actions at home were changing expectations among other nations.

“They’re still waiting to see what we’re going to do,” Mr. Schmidt said, “but the skepticism is much thinner than it was a few months back.”

    Kerry Quietly Makes Priority of Climate Pact, NYT, 2.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/world/asia/
    kerry-shifts-state-department-focus-to-environment.html

Qaeda-Aligned Militants

Threaten Key Iraqi Cities

January 2, 2014
The New York Times
By YASIR GHAZI
and TIM ARANGO

BAGHDAD — Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda threatened Thursday to seize control of Falluja and Ramadi, two of the most important cities in Iraq, setting fire to police stations, freeing prisoners from jail and occupying mosques, as the government rushed troop reinforcements to the areas.

Dressed in black and waving the flag of Al Qaeda, the militants commandeered mosque loudspeakers to call for supporters to join their struggle in both cities in the western province of Anbar, which have increasingly become centers of Sunni extremism since American forces withdrew from the country at the end of 2011.

For the United States, which asserted at the time that Iraq was on track to become a stable democracy, Anbar holds grave historical significance — as a place for America’s greatest losses, and perhaps its most significant success, of the eight-year war.

Nearly one-third of the American soldiers killed in the war died trying to pacify Anbar, and Americans fought two battles for control of Falluja, in some of the bloodiest combat that American troops had faced since Vietnam.

The violence in Ramadi and Falluja had implications beyond Anbar’s borders, as the Sunni militants fought beneath the same banner as the most hard-line jihadists they have inspired in Syria — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

That fighting, and a deadly bombing in the Beirut area on Thursday, provided the latest evidence that the Syrian civil war was helping breed bloodshed and sectarian violence around the region, further destabilizing Lebanon and Iraq while fueling a resurgence of radical Islamist fighters.

It was not possible, amid the unfolding chaos, to determine a precise number of casualties, but officials in hospitals in Anbar reported at least 35 people were killed Thursday and more than 70 were wounded. Security officials in Anbar said the total killed over several days of fighting was 108, including 31 civilians and 35 militants. The rest of the dead were Iraqi security force members.

The fighting began after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, ordered security forces to dismantle protest encampments in Falluja and Ramadi.

The order came after fighting erupted following the government’s arrest of a prominent Sunni lawmaker who had been a supporter of the protests, which had been going on for more than a year and had become an outlet for disenchanted Sunnis angered over their treatment by Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. The arrest attempt set off a firefight that left several bodyguards and the brother of the lawmaker dead, and led to clashes between the government and armed tribesmen.

Officials later seemed to have calmed the situation, and in a deal between local tribal leaders and the central government, Mr. Maliki agreed to withdraw army troops from Anbar on Tuesday.

But as soon as any trace of government authority vanished, large numbers of Qaeda-aligned fighters attacked the cities, and by Wednesday the prime minister reversed his decision. He sent troops to try to secure the support of local tribal leaders, offering them guns and money to join forces with the regular army.

In a telephone interview on Thursday, one tribal fighter loyal to the government, Abu Omar, described heavy clashes across Falluja, and said the government had started shelling militant hide-outs.

“We told all the families to leave their houses,” he said over the phone, with the sound of gunfire in the background. “Many of the families fled from the city, and others are still unable to because of the heavy clashes. We have reports that the hospital in Falluja is full of dead and wounded people.”

Many of the tribesmen fighting alongside government security forces have been doing so reluctantly, making the calculation that, in this case, the government is the lesser evil than Al Qaeda.

Sheikh Hamed Rasheed Muhana echoed what many Sunnis in Iraq feel when he complained that the government had alienated Sunnis with harsh security crackdowns and mass arrests of Sunni men, militants and ordinary civilians alike. He said the government had worsened matters by “creating more depressed people willing to join Al Qaeda because of the sectarian behavior and ongoing arrests.”

Also on Thursday, in a move that seemed calculated to appease Sunni resentment, the government arrested a Shiite militia leader in Baghdad who is believed to be the leader of the Iraqi affiliate of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group.

Thursday was the fourth consecutive day of battles in Anbar. Late in the afternoon, security officials said the government had regained some territory in Ramadi but that fighting was still fierce in Falluja, where militants controlled a much larger portion of the city than they did in Ramadi.

With Iraqi casualty rates at their highest in five years, the United States has rushed to provide the Iraqi government with new missiles and surveillance drones to combat the resurgence of Al Qaeda.

American officials have been in touch with the Maliki government and its Sunni critics, trying to encourage them to join forces against Al Qaeda.

“We’ve encouraged the government to work with the population to fight these terrorists,” said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman.

The chaos in Anbar has underscored the steady deterioration of Iraq’s security since the withdrawal of American forces. The battles have heightened fears that Iraq is descending into the type of sectarian civil war that it once faced during the American-led occupation.

The center of that unrest was in the desert region of Anbar, a cradle of Sunni discontent where swaggering tribesmen defied authority even under Saddam Hussein. An American pact with those Anbar tribesmen in 2007 — to pay them to switch sides and fight alongside the United States against Al Qaeda — became known as the Awakening and is considered partly responsible for turning the tide of the war.

Abu Risha, a leading tribal sheikh in Ramadi, was perhaps the Americans’ most stalwart partner, and even today he is likely to show visitors the plaques he received from American officers, and old pictures of him with American soldiers, even as he speaks of what he calls betrayal by the United States for leaving without finishing the job.

In a statement released this week, he exhorted his men to again fight Al Qaeda, and hinted at business left unfinished by the Americans.

“We were all surprised that the terrorists left the desert and entered your cities to return a second time, to commit their crimes, to cut off the heads, blow up houses, kill scholars and disrupt life,” he said. “They came back, and I am delighted for their public appearance after the security forces failed to find them. Let this time be the decisive confrontation with Al Qaeda.”

Violence continued elsewhere in the country on Thursday, with a suicide attack in a market in Diyala Province killing at least 17 people, and two explosions around Baghdad that killed eight.

In another indication that the war in Syria is reverberating back here, Iraqis who fled the country by the thousands after the American invasion and then began to return as the fighting eased are becoming refugees again.

On Thursday, Andrew Harper, an official with the United Nations refugee agency in Jordan, posted a message on Twitter saying that over the past three weeks the number of Iraqi refugees entering Jordan, which borders Anbar Province, had increased fivefold, with an average of 415 Iraqis leaving their country each week.

Analysts have long worried that the war in Syria would engulf Iraq, as hard-line Sunni rebels in Syria have said they see the two countries as one battlefield in the fight for Sunni dominance. For some time, the Syrian war has dragged in Iraqis along sectarian lines, with Iraqi Shiites rushing to Syria to support the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and Iraq’s Qaeda affiliate fostering the most extremist Sunni fighting units across the border.

These fears of spillover have been most acute in Anbar’s ungovernable desert, which borders Syria and where tribal loyalties cut across national boundaries, making it fertile territory for Al Qaeda’s resurgence.

Earlier in the week many tribesmen fought against the government, following the arrest of the Sunni lawmaker and the dismantling of the protest tents, but when Al Qaeda returned many quickly switched sides.

“We don’t want to be like Syria,” said Sheikh Omar al-Asabi, who led a group of fighting men in an area east of Falluja.

For many men of Anbar over the last several years, fighting has been a constant, even as the enemy has shifted. “We fought the Americans, and we fought the Maliki army, and now we are fighting Qaeda,” said Firas Mohammed, 28, who is an engineer when he is not at war. “We will not allow any outsider to come here and impose his will on us.”

Yasir Ghazi reported from Baghdad,

and Tim Arango from Istanbul.

An employee of The New York Times

contributed reporting from Falluja, Iraq,

and Michael R. Gordon from Jerusalem.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 2, 2014

A picture, which appeared on this article earlier, contained incorrect caption information. Using information from Agence France Presse, the caption misidentified the city in which the photograph was taken and the date it was taken. The photograph, of a burning police vehicle, was taken in Falluja on Wednesday, not Ramadi on Thursday.

    Qaeda-Aligned Militants Threaten Key Iraqi Cities, NYT, 2.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/world/middleeast/
    Al-Qaeda-threatens-Iraqi-cities.html

Settlement News to Wait

Until Kerry Leaves Israel

January 1, 2014
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — The Israeli government will delay an expected announcement of bids for new settlement construction for the next few days while Secretary of State John Kerry is in the region, an Israeli official said Wednesday, avoiding a potential high-profile clash over the contentious issue.

Mr. Kerry is scheduled to arrive here on Thursday and to stay at least until Sunday on what will be his 10th visit to the Middle East as secretary of state in a push to advance difficult Israeli-Palestinian talks.

“We will respect John Kerry and not act to spite him,” the Israeli official said, adding that there was an understanding between the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Housing Ministry that no bids would be published until Mr. Kerry had gone.

When it comes to settlement building, “a day here or there makes no difference,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate diplomacy around the issue.

Palestinian leaders have condemned Israel’s repeated announcements of new construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories that Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 war and that the Palestinians view as part of their future state. The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, says the settlement activity undermines any chance of peace, and Palestinian leaders say they plan to fight it in the International Criminal Court should the peace talks fail. Most of the world considers the settlements illegal under international law.

The Obama administration considers settlements illegitimate and an obstacle to peace.

Relations between Mr. Netanyahu and Washington have often been tense. In an episode in March 2010 that particularly enraged the White House, Israel’s Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox area of East Jerusalem, while Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was visiting Israel.

More recently, Mr. Netanyahu has made a point of tying settlement announcements to the release of Palestinian prisoners in an effort to appease his right-wing coalition members. Israel agreed to release 104 long-serving prisoners, many convicted of deadly attacks on Israelis, in four groups as part of an American-brokered deal to resume the peace talks. The Palestinians have been infuriated by the linkage between the releases and the announcements and Israeli suggestions that they agreed to such a deal.

The third prisoner release took place early Tuesday, and in the prelude Mr. Netanyahu came under intense international pressure not to upset the peace talks by making another simultaneous settlement announcement. But Mr. Netanyahu, apparently angered by a string of attacks on Israelis in the past few weeks and a lack of any condemnation of them by Palestinian leaders, decided to go ahead. A week ago, Israeli officials said that an announcement of new settlement building could be expected around the time of the prisoner release, without specifying exactly when.

Xavier Abu Eid of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s negotiations unit said that Israel was “under an obligation to cease all settlement activities, not for one or two days, but forever.” He said a delay of a few days might avoid embarrassing Mr. Kerry during his visit but would not help Palestinians or the peace process.

    Settlement News to Wait Until Kerry Leaves Israel, NYT, 1.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/world/middleeast/
    israel-to-delay-settlement-announcement-during-kerry-visit-official-says.html