Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday reaffirmed Russia’s intention to continue blocking United Nations Security Council resolutions to resolve to Syrian crisis by launching a military campaign similar to those that were waged by the West in Iraq and Libya. Lavrov implied that the Kofi Annan plan has failed so far because of sabotage by the West:

“The hopeful signs that started to emerge after the unanimous adoption of this plan on April 12th have apparently come into conflict with the designs of those whose real goal is more and more trouble. These folk need trouble in order to use it as a justification of foreign military intervention in Syria. This is why Kofi Annan’s peace plan has started to stall. Russia wants to change this by improving coordination among foreign countries that can influence the Syrian situation. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear whether the current diplomatic disarray over Syria is the result of inadequate coordination or of a deliberate strategy aimed at torpedoing Annan’s plan.”

Lavrov endorsed Kofi Annan’s new peace plan ( “7-Jun-12 World View — Kofi Annan tries Syria ‘Peace Plan’ number 2”), which involves putting together a “contact group” of Western and Arab nations, plus Russia, China, Turkey and Iran, to hold endless committee meetings to discuss what to do next. Voice of Russia

Preposterous new Kofi Annan peace plan has already collapsed

The idea that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would agree to cooperate with The Great Satan (the United States) in a plan to get Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to step down is so preposterous and absurd that no one could possibly consider it to be more than a joke — or a ploy to give al-Assad more time to exterminate as many innocent Sunni Arabs as he likes. That’s why reports that peace plan #2 was actually proposed by President Obama’s administration and given to Annan as part of the President’s “lead from behind” strategy indicates an enormous amount of dysfunction somewhere. One possibility is that the Obama administration is so out of touch with reality that it actually believes this plan might work, but I tend to discount this possibility mainly because Secretary of State Hillary Clinton really does know what’s going on in the world, in my opinion. The other possibility is that these reports were leaked to discredit the Obama administration, and it’s quite possible that the Russians did that. At any rate, Russia has endorsed the plan, and has made it clear that they’re going to sabotage it, at the same time as they blame the West for sabotaging it. In the meantime, the al-Assad regime will going on exterminating one Sunni Muslim village after another. Debka

Spain asks Europe for €100 billion bailout for banks

After insisting for months, and continuing into recent days, and even on Saturday morning, officials in Spain’s government, led by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, insisted vehemently that Spain would not need or a request a bailout. So imagine everyone’s shock and surprise when, on Saturday afternoon, Spain’s Economy Minister Luis De Guindos announced that Spain had requested a €100 billion bailout during a three hour conference call with other European officials. De Guindos claimed that the bailout was “not a bailout but a loan,” provided to Spain under very favorable terms, and without requiring the severe austerity measures that Greece has had to implement. Of course, the bailouts to Greece, Ireland and Portugal were also loans, but what’s a little detail or two. The €100 billion will most assuredly not be enough. Spain’s banks are hobbiled with more than €180 billion in failing real estate loans, following the collapse of Spain’s humongous real estate bubble. And there are several hundred more billion euros of bad regional debt in Spain.Once again, I have to point out that Prime Minister Rajoy and other Spanish government officials have been openly lying for days, and possibly weeks. And once again I have to point out that lying is the norm in Washington, on Wall Street, in Brussels, and elsewhere. It really astonishes me to see, over and over again, open, full-throated lying, and NOBODY CARES. This is part of the same Generation-X culture whose prosecutors refuse to investigate and charge the banksters who knowingly created tens of trillions of dollars in fraudulent assets, and sold them as AAA rated, thus causing the financial crisis, and who are still in the same jobs, still committing fraud. Bloomberg

World View, June 10: Russia Blames the West for Syria Failure

COMMENTS