Free Republic

Syria Crisis: Geneva Peace Talks End In Recriminations The Syrian government and opposition have traded insults after a week-long peace conference in Geneva ended with no firm agreement. Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said the opposition were immature, while the opposition's Louay Safi said the regime had no desire to stop the bloodshed. However, UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said he had seen some "common ground", and scheduled more talks for 10 February.

"My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience." It was close to midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, "Are you up, can you talk?" When I called, he told me that Barack Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. "No one knows this yet. Don't tell anyone. Well, maybe...

support on Saturday for international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi but insisted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's exit cannot be a precondition for a deal to end the country's conflict. A Foreign Ministry statement following talks on Friday with the United States and Brahimi, whom the Syrian government has labelled "flagrantly biased", reiterated calls for an end to violence in Syria, where more than 60,000 people have been killed since March 2011. At the meeting in Geneva with Brahimi and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov "expressed unfailing support for Brahimi's mission as the U.N.-Arab...

The Syrian crisis unbelievably took another turn for the worse Saturday, Dec. 29: After making no headway with Bashar Assad in Damascus, the UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was told in no uncertain terms by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow: “There is no possibility of persuading Syrian ruler Bashar Assad to leave Syria.” As they spoke, a record 400 people died in hostilities in the country. The burnt remains of hundreds of people slaughtered by the army were discovered in a Homs district. And Syrian opposition leaders have repeatedly preconditioned their acceptance of the Russian invitation to talks...

Lakhdar Brahimi has embarked on one of the world's toughest jobs. But as one of the UN's most experienced troubleshooters, he may offer the skills needed in a conflict where both sides seem to believe they have no choice but to fight to the end. Mr Brahimi often deployed a "no victor, no vanquished" power-sharing approach in previous mediations, including the 1989 agreement that ended Lebanon's 15-year civil war. UN sources who have worked closely with Mr Brahimi over many years say he will be more involved in the minutiae of the process, engaging personally with all the key players,...

Hailed as the cure for ill will toward Washington and other diplomatic problems at the United Nations, the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, was taken down a peg over the weekend, as his own — and his country's — prestige were thrown into question. What will one of President Bush's favorite operators do now? Mr. Khalilzad sold to the 15 members of the Security Council a resolution in support of the Palestinian Arab-Israeli negotiations at Annapolis. But he acted like a star quarterback who botched the signals, ran ahead with the football, got the backs and coaches all confused, and ended...

Hand it to Secretary of State Rice. She knows how to make lemonade out of lemons. When asked on CNN this week her reaction to a communique signed by Iraqi leaders on Monday that recognized a "legitimate right to resistance," she said, "I think what they were trying to do was to get a sense of political inclusion while recognizing that violence and terrorism should not be a part of resistance." 'snip' The State Department, according to Iraqi officials I've spoken with, put tremendous pressure on elected leaders to attend this parley in Cairo. And the see-no-evil reaction to the...

NAIROBI, Kenya, May 22 - The United Nations, burdened by its inability to stave off the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 and by failed missions in Bosnia and Somalia, is allowing its peacekeepers to mount some of the most aggressive operations in its history. The change has been evolving over the last decade, as the Security Council has adopted the notion of "robust peacekeeping" and rejected the idea that the mere presence of blue-helmeted soldiers on the ground helps quell combat. It is most obvious in Congo, which commands by far the largest deployment of United Nations troops in...

<p>America shows weakness in Iraq by passing the buck to the U.N.</p> <p>Tuesday, April 20, 2004 12:01 a.m.</p> <p>One mystery of the last year in Iraq is that a U.S. occupation that is supposed to midwife democracy has put so little trust in Iraqis. The Bush Administration may be compounding that error now by abdicating decisions about the June 30 transition to Iraqi rule to U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.</p>

WASHINGTON - President Bush's first step toward creating a democratic Iraq may be the most problematic: "Transfer full sovereignty." Each part of the plan is marked by uncertainties that could undermine the entire process. A look at possible roadblocks in the run-up to the June 30 political handover: _transferring full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens. U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is expected to recommend leaders of the new interim government within days. It is unclear if Brahimi will succeed in naming a government that satisfies Iraq's main factions. Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds have different views about who should serve...

A critic of Arab patriotic bluster he is not. A man without ideological blinkers he is not. A universalist questioning racial privilege and the limits of nationalism he is not. On the contrary, Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi is a voice of Arab particularity. For him, roundly defeating Kurdistan was not good enough; Kurdistan had to be canceled, even if it was on a napkin. It is a voice that sees the Arab nation as a perennial victim of western imperialism and Zionism, a voice that vehemently opposed the American intervention in Iraq, a voice that, rather speaking out against Saddam’s authoritarian...

UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi joined the ranks of Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda by echoing the well known radical Islamist positions of Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, Sheikh Yassin and Rantisi. UN Envoy also reinforced that a world body that is dominated by undemocratic states can neither advance the cause of peace nor can be entrusted with the job of establishing a democratic basis in Iraq. In fact, Barahimi's anti-American statement underlined that the United Nations with its present composition can never be expected to share the burden of the free societies. Brahimi told France's Inter radio that Israeli policies...

WASHINGTON U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, the Bush administration's great Arab hope to appoint a transition government that would bring democracy to Iraq, is off to a troubling start. His first mistake was to announce on French radio that "the great poison in the region is this Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians," as well as the "equally unjust support of the United States for this policy." That freelance condemnation was too much for even Kofi Annan, who sent out his official spokesman to explain that Brahimi was "a former foreign minister of Algeria" who...

Bonn - Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in Germany late on Sunday under tight security for a conference aimed at returning Afghanistan's pressing problems to the international spotlight. Monday's meeting, which marks the anniversary of an historic deal creating a post-conflict government for Afghanistan, will also measure progress made since last year's fall of the radical Islamic Taliban regime, which harboured the al-Qaeda network. Karzai will attend the one-day event in Petersberg, near Bonn, along with other senior Afghan leaders. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana...