{"id":192,"date":"2014-01-07T18:34:06","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T18:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/?p=192"},"modified":"2014-01-07T18:34:06","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T18:34:06","slug":"syrian-cw-the-next-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"Syrian CW \u2013 The Next Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong> OPCW head Mehmet Uzumcu announced today that the initial removal of some chemicals from Syria had taken place today.\u00a0 Chemicals in their specially designed and built containers were loaded onto the Danish ship Ark Futura at the port of Latakia.\u00a0 OPCW said some materials from 2 (of 12) locations were loaded.\u00a0 Presumably the ship will go back out into the Mediterranean and sail around in circles until the next batch is ready to pick up. That’s not exciting.<\/p>\n

Hold your breath though because insurgents could easily decide to hit a convoy headed to Latakia with an IED attack<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Starting the process to whittle done the stocks of mustard agent and sarin nerve agent chemical \u201cprecursors\u201d \u00a0is good, but not amazing.<\/p>\n

Bashir made his big decision in September and the guts of the Syrian CW facilities have already been demolished.\u00a0 The Big decision now is whether insurgents will decide to attack.\u00a0 They can if they want to.\u00a0 Attacking convoys with IEDs was a specialty in Iraq.\u00a0 The same guys who trained and taught those skills there are in Syria now. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Focus on the slippage in the UN\u2019s own schedule (the target date was to have all these high priority chemicals out of Syria by 31 December) was overblown.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of chaos in Syria (and the UN).<\/p>\n

Consider a partial list:<\/p>\n

Russian trucks, Chinese monitors, US containers, UN staff supervisors, Syrian army staff, Norwegian and Danish ships, Russian ships, Chinese ships, Russian security at Latakia, US ship-borne destruction vessel (MV Cape Ray), clearance at an unnamed Italian Port for cargo transfer, secure (unannounced) ground transportation, 15-members of the Security Council who think they are important, a Nobel Prize-winning Chairman of OPCW who never expected to be doing any of this, etc.<\/p>\n

Sergei Lavrov said to me in the mid-1990\u2019s when he was Russia\u2019s ambassador to the UN that American criticism of the UN was too harsh.\u00a0 We focused on UN inefficiencies.\u00a0 He said there was a Russian expression along the lines that, \u201cIt\u2019s not that dancing bears dance well, but that they dance at all.\u201d
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Remaining Risks<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Getting the chemical stocks to Latakia is the key risk.\u00a0 Secrecy about the movements is a good thing\u2014but probably hard to achieve on the ground.\u00a0 There are 12 sites and the footprint of the convoys of armored trucks will be large.\u00a0 An IED attack along one of the obvious routes has to be a major risk.<\/strong>\u00a0 Surveillance of the routes by drones and electronic measures can mitigate but not eliminate such risks.\u00a0 Intelligence about insurgents will be coming from a mix of sources and channeled to Syrian\/Russian officers coordinating the convoy movements.\u00a0 I doubt it will be very clear cut.<\/strong>\u00a0 Again, the same guys who taught Iraqis how to make very effective IEDs (and rockets) are active in Syria. There is a lot of wisdom floating around about how to do these attacks. The US never solved that problem.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the other hand, there is almost zero risk of back-sliding by the Damascus regime on its commitment to get rid of its CW.\u00a0 Bashir has no use for CW now.\u00a0 It may have served its purpose in deterring some actions by Israel, but in Syrians current circumstances its greatest utility is in the international legitimacy Bashir gets by ridding himself of it.\u00a0 And Bashir made his tough decision back in September.<\/p>\n

One other risk is the process of moving and destroying the chemicals once they leave Syria.\u00a0 This is quite small.\u00a0 The hype over the danger of accepting \u201cchemical agents\u201d into countries for destruction was way overblown.\u00a0 Most of the chemicals are precursors to the final agent.\u00a0 It sounds glib, but if they were just dumped in the ocean, it would not be a big deal\u2014environmentally.\u00a0 Politically, it would be a disaster or course.\u00a0 Certainly countries have done that before on a vastly bigger scale.<\/p>\n

Getting rid of Syrian CW is great.\u00a0 We are doing it in a complicated way, but that\u2019s international politics.\u00a0 The real mess in Syria is not chemicals.\u00a0 It’s a regional conflict that keeps getting worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OPCW head Mehmet Uzumcu announced today that the initial removal of some chemicals from Syria had taken place today.\u00a0 Chemicals in their specially designed and built containers were loaded onto the Danish ship Ark Futura at the port of Latakia.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[71,70,12,19,74],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesduelfer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}