Saudi Arabia rejects U.N. Security Council seat

Saudi Arabia has declined a seat on the U.N. Security Council, accusing the organization of failing to resolve the world’s conflicts. Saudi Arabia was selected for the first time Thursday for a two-year rotating seat on the 15-member international body along with Chad, Chile, Lithuania, and Nigeria. In a statement on Friday, the Saudi Foreign Ministry said, "The kingdom sees that the method and work mechanism and the double standards in the security council prevent it from properly shouldering its responsibilities towards peace." Saudi Arabia specifically criticized the Security Council for failing to end the decades long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for "allowing the ruling regime in Syria to kill and burn its people by the chemical weapons, while the world stands idly."

Syria

Senior Syrian military intelligence officer Jama’a Jama’a was killed Thursday in the largely rebel-held eastern province of Deir al-Zour, according to Syrian State TV and opposition activists. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said snipers shot Jama’a in the midst of clashes, however government reports were unclear on where, when, and how he was killed. He was reportedly among President Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle as well as one of the country’s most prominent military officials. Jama’a was one of the highest-ranking officers in Lebanon during Syria’s deployment to the neighboring country from 1976 through 2005. Clashes were reported overnight in several neighborhoods of the city of Deir al-Zour, and government air strikes hit the area Friday morning. Rebel fighters appeared to have seized territory near the Rashdiya district, and according to the Observatory captured and executed 10 regime soldiers. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia have denied a date has been set for a peace conference on Syria in Geneva, a day after Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil said talks were scheduled for November 23 and 24. U.S. State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki said, "We have discussed potential dates but nothing has been finalized."

Headlines

• Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man after he drove a tractor through the gate to an army base between Ramallah and Jerusalem.
• A suicide bomber and a group of militants attacked the Ahwar military base in the southern Yemeni province of Abyan Friday killing an estimated 12 soldiers and injuring six others.
• After two days of talks over Iran’s nuclear program, from which many officials left optimistic, U.S. Congressional Republicans are calling for increased sanctions, maintaining that Tehran cannot be trusted.
• Four former Blackwater guards are facing new charges over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007, which killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians and wounded 18 others.

Arguments and Analysis

‘Anything But Politics: The State of Syria’s Political Opposition‘ (International Crisis Group)

"In providing a stamp of legitimacy to exile-based umbrella groups — first, in October 2011, to the Syrian National Council; later, in November 2012, to the Coalition — on-the-ground activists were not endorsing a specific political leadership. Rather, they saw the political opposition as the uprising’s diplomatic expression, a body whose job essentially was to mobilise international support. This understanding rested on an implicit wager: that as regime violence intensified, the West would follow the Libya precedent and, through military action, contribute to President Bashar Assad’s demise.

The problem is that this outlook was at sharp odds with that of relevant Western governments, Washington’s in particular. For the Obama administration, such direct military intervention never appears truly to have been in the cards. Instead, it saw the priority as getting the opposition to unite and present a more broadly appealing vision of the post-Assad future. In contrast, the opposition saw value in those tasks — made all the more difficult given its diversity and distance from the ground — only insofar as they were accompanied by substantially more Western support. Washington waited for the opposition to improve itself; the opposition waited for Washington to empower it. Both shared the goal of a Syria without Assad, but neither developed a strategy to achieve the goal that took account of the other’s constraints, triggering a cycle of frustration and mistrust that discredited the political opposition and Western governments alike in the eyes of the uprising’s rank and file."

‘Nuclear diplomacy, not force, offers the safest, surest route to rein in Iran‘ (Heather Hurlburt, The Guardian)

"If the Iranian regime is going to hanker for nuclear weapons capability no matter what, would we prefer to have its activity completely unsupervised and unknown? Or would we prefer to have inspectors intrusively swarming over the country’s facilities, catching sight of things they weren’t supposed to see, getting tips, and able to offer advance warning should Iran mount an uranium enrichment rush for a bomb? This is the flip side of the North Korea example: Pyongyang was most able to surprise outsiders when it had little or no outside observation.

Under such a scenario, an agreement that broadens and deepens Iran’s inspection regime, takes away its most-enriched uranium (20%), and commits Iran to living under the terms of the international agreements that other non-nuclear weapons states have accepted actually makes the US and our allies more secure, not less.

Above all, it gains time. By removing Iran’s most-enriched uranium, the number of months or years it would take Tehran to successfully complete a bomb increases substantially, giving us more warning. This is the same result proponents of an Israeli bombing raid say they want, while admitting such a raid would, in fact, not end the program. But an agreement achieves this without splintering the coalition arrayed against Iran or unleashing retaliation on the US and its allies — or killing Iranians."

–Mary Casey & Joshua Haber