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| Seeking a Syria consensus despite US-Russia divide |
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Ahead of a Group of Eight joint statement on Syria to be issued Tuesday, the U.S. remained committed to Obama's recent decision to arm the rebels and Russia did not budge from its weapons sales to President Bashar Assad's regime.
Yet even as Obama found common ground among European allies against Putin at a G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, the U.S. president also struggled to convince some of those same allies to join him in sending armaments to the Syrian opposition.
“Of course, our opinions do not coincide, but all of us have the intention to stop the violence in Syria, to stop the growth of victims, and to solve the situation peacefully,” Putin said after meeting for two hours with Obama. “We agreed to push the parties to the negotiations table.”
“We do have differing perspectives on the problem,” Obama concurred. “But we share an interest in reducing the violence; securing chemical weapons and ensuring that they're neither used nor are they subject to proliferation; and that we want to try to resolve the issue through political means, if possible.”
In an interview on PBS that was taped Sunday and aired late Monday, Obama was much blunter, and pessimistic.
“What's been clear is that Assad, at this point — in part, because of his support from Iran and from Russia — believes that he does not have to engage in a political transition, believes that he can continue to simply violently suppress over half of the population,” Obama told interviewer Charlie Rose. “And as long as he's got that mindset, it's going to be very difficult to resolve the situation there.”
Even so, Obama in the interview portrayed himself as a reluctant participant in the civil war.
“We know what it's like to rush into a war in the Middle East without having thought it through,” he said in obvious reference to the war in Iraq.
British officials said Cameron was looking for consensus among the G-8 members on five areas of potential agreement that could win Russian support, including securing chemical weapons, pursuing extremists and creating an executive authority for Syria after it undergoes a political transition.
But despite their shared belief that Assad must leave power, the U.S., Britain and France were also showing cracks in their unity. Britain and France appear unwilling — at least for now — to join President Barack Obama in arming the Syrian rebels, a step the U.S. president reluctantly finalized last week.
Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, downplayed those differences, saying the Syrian opposition could be strengthened either politically, through humanitarian aid or as a military force.
“Different nations are going to feed into that process in different ways,” he said.
The G-8 leaders were all smiles Tuesday morning as they walked in unison under cloud-covered skies at the lodge, where they posed for a “family photo” in front of a lake before Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper set off for a walk. Talks on how to combat corporate tax-dodging balanced out the effort to find some modicum of consensus on Syria in the waning hours of the summit as the leaders huddled in meetings and at a working lunch.
The sensitive Syria discussions unfolded in the midst of awkward revelations that the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ tapped into the communications of foreign diplomats during the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London, including those of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev. That report, in the newspaper The Guardian, came on the heels of reports about the high-tech surveillance methods and record-gathering employed by the National Security Agency in the United States.
While the disclosures added a layer of controversy to the summit, U.S. officials said heads of state at a summit like the G-8 are perfectly aware that such spying goes on. As for the issue coming up in talks with Putin, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters, “It was a non-event at this meeting.”
Indeed, in his interview with PBS, Obama made it clear such eavesdropping is commonplace, and tried to distinguish it from the cyber-hacking his administration has accused China of carrying out.
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| Last Updated on 18 June 2013 16:43 | |||
