Incredibly Obvious Middle East

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http://watchingamerica.com/News/229816/incredibly-obvious-middle-east/

The “smart diplomacy” that Barack Obama is so proud of earlier helped Libyan Islamists to turn the country into a black hole.

Incredibly Obvious Middle East
Argumenti i Fakti (January 9, 2014), Russia

Incredibly Obvious Middle East
By Igor Vittel
Translated By Elena Michalski
9 January 2014
Edited by Robert O’Connor

Suddenly, a few days after the new year, the U.S. government noted that the situation in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon is “somewhat uneasy.”*

The U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made this statement unexpectedly. The statement sounds, of course, rather sharp, but it immediately attracts attention and may even provoke such objections as, for example, “What do you mean by 'somewhat uneasy?' There is war there.” Or “What is happening in Lebanon now?” It is impossible to disagree with the first objection, and there is something to be said about the second one. In short, a civil war is starting in Lebanon again. In late December in Beirut a former minister, one of the leading opposition figures, was killed in a bomb explosion. The explosion was so massive that it injured another 80 people. Gun, artillery and missile shootings in various areas that border with Syria have become so common that they cannot be looked at as separate and unrelated cases.

Now that we have briefly outlined the current situation in Lebanon, we can go back to Iraq and Syria. Let's start with Iraq, where, as noted earlier, it is “somewhat uneasy.” The problem with evaluation of judgments is subjectivity and its ties to such concepts as what is “good and bad” for the one who presents those judgments. As in the famous joke, “It is horrible, but not horrible horrible horrible.” So, “uneasy” for Iraq means almost daily attacks on civilians. In 2013 alone, more than 8,000 people were killed.

Of course, this is only one point of view, and 8,000 victims in Iraq compares to the situation in Syria like a runny nose or a poke in the eye compares to the plague. In Syria, everything is so “uneasy” that, not surprisingly, the U.N. officially ceased to track the number of fatalities, having declared that the most recent data that they have is 100,000 victims as of June 2013. And even that figure they got by some unclear manipulations with “six different numbers from different sources.”* Since then, as Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the Commissioner for Human Rights, declared, the U.N. has no access to Syria and has no sources of information about the victims that it can trust. Therefore, the U.N. will no longer continue to track the number of victims in Syria. 120,000? 150,000? 200,000? What is the difference? It is uneasy there …

[bemildred]

1. That dry Russian wit.

And was that some sort of threat at the end?
Interesting.