China, U.S. divided over Syria, sea dispute, but vow goodwill

• Clinton and Yang upbeat despite tensions
• Island disputes create friction
• China paper suggests Washington trying to "sow discord"
• Both sides disagree on Syria, Iran

By Andrew Quinn

BEIJING, Sept 5 (Reuters) - China and the United States were divided on Wednesday over how to end the bloodshed in Syria and defuse tension in the South China Sea and other global troublespots, but stressed hope for steady ties as they navigate political transitions at home.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi vowed goodwill after talks which had been preceded by criticism from Beijing of Clinton's calls for a multilateral solution to the territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas.

Clinton told reporters that such disagreements did not have to hobble cooperation.

"I'm very proud of the strength and resilience that we have built into our relationship," she said after talks with Yang in the cavernous Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Russia Could Lose Last Arab Ally as Assad Regime Teeters

A member of the Free Syrian Army holds a burning portrait of President Bashar al-Assad, in Al-Qsair, southwest of Homs, Syria. (Alessio Romenzi/AFP/Getty Images)

Vladimir Putin, Russia's president. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

By Henry Meyer - Jul 19, 2012
Bloomberg

Vladimir Putin is being caught on the wrong side of the Arab Spring as the threat to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime raises the prospect that Russia may be left with Iran as its only friend in the region.

The day after a bomb decapitated Assad’s security command as fighting engulfs Damascus, Russia teamed up once more with China yesterday to block United Nations sanctions against Syria.

“The Kremlin has pushed itself into a corner that it can’t get out of, and it should have been smarter about the new order in the Middle East,” Theodore Karasik, director of research at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, said in a phone interview yesterday. “Losing its last Arab ally and alienating all other former Arab partners, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is a huge strategic loss for Russia.”

Politiktoons No. 213: The Newly Elected President

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Politiktoo​ns No, 210 : Al-Assad's Friends

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Assad says Syria at war as battle reaches capital [_Another dictatorial regime unfolding?]

Syrian National Council leader Burhan Ghalioun (C) poses with Syrian free army in Sarmada, near the Turkey-Syria border June 26, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/ABDO)

Tue Jun 26, 2012
By Oliver Holmes

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad declared on Tuesday that his country was at war and ordered his new government to spare no effort to achieve victory, as the worst fighting of the 16-month conflict reached the outskirts of the capital.

Video published by activists recorded heavy gunfire and explosions in suburbs of Damascus. A trail of fresh blood on a sidewalk in the suburb of Qudsiya led into a building where one casualty was taken. A naked man writhed in pain, his body pierced by shrapnel.

Syria's state news agency SANA said "armed terrorist groups" had blocked the old road from Damascus to Beirut.

The declaration that Syria is at war marks a change of rhetoric from Assad, who had long dismissed the uprising against him as the work of scattered militants funded from abroad.

Politiktoons No. 200 - Al-Assad's Peace Plan

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Politiktoons No. 197: Syrian People

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Politiktoons No. 194: Kofi Anan

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

2010 photo encapsulates Mideast transformation

In this Oct. 10, 2010 file photo, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, center, with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, right, and his Yemeni counterpart Ali Abdullah Saleh, center left, pose for a group photo with Arab and African leaders during the second Afro-Arab summit in Sirte, Libya

30 March 2012
By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY | Associated Press

BEIRUT (AP) — Laughing for the cameras, the Arab leaders appear nothing if not secure in their power, four longtime members of the Middle East coterie of rulers-for-life.

How times have changed. The photograph from an October 2010 Arab-African summit shows the  now deposed — and in one case dead — since the Arab Spring revolutions beleaders of Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia, all of themgan sweeping through the Middle East last year.

In the photo, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi wears black sunglasses and distinctive robes, with his arms draped around Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, both of them grinning. To one side is Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, standing with his hands clasped, smiling and relaxed.

Today, Saleh is out of power, Ben Ali is in exile, Mubarak is on trial and Gadhafi is dead, killed by rebel fighters. Their countries are enduring often-painful transitions.

Politiktoo​ns No. 186 : Bashar al- Assad

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com and http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Politiktoons No. 184: The Arab League

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Politiktoons No. 178: Peace without Hatred

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Politiktoons No. 160: US Umbrella

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Rioting continues in Syria

Men scale a monument to tear down a large poster of Syrian President Bashar Assad, in the city of Daraa, Syria. (Credit: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Americans held

March 27, 2011 
By Richmond Times-Dispatch Staff

DAMASCUS, Syria --Syrian authorities have detained two Americans, relatives and state media said Saturday.

Syria's state news agency Sana alleged that a man with dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship had "confessed" to selling photos and videos of demonstrations to a Colombian woman. He was later identified by relatives as Mohammed Radwan, 32, of Austin, Texas.

Meanwhile, a Vermont man said his 21-year-old son Pathik "Tik" Root — who had been missing since March 18 — has been found to be safe in Syrian custody. Tom Root said his son, a Middlebury College student who had been studying Arabic in Damascus, was detained during a demonstration in the capital.

Violence erupts around Syria, protesters shot

(Photo AFP)

People gather outside the main courthouse in the southern Syrian city of Deraa. (Reuters/Khaled al-Hariri)

Friday, March 25, 2011
By ZEINA KARAM and BASSEM MROUE
Associated Press

DAMASCUS, Syria – Violence erupted around Syria on Friday as troops opened fire on protesters in several cities and pro- and anti-government crowds clashed on the tense streets of the capital in the most widespread unrest in years, witnesses said.

Soldiers shot at demonstrators in the restive southern city of Daraa after crowds set fire to a bronze statue of the country's late president, Hafez Assad, a resident told The Associated Press. He said he heard heavy gunfire in the city center and later saw two bodies and many wounded people being brought to Daraa's main hospital.

He said thousands of enraged protesters snatched some weapons from a far smaller number of troops and chased them out of the Roman-era old city, taking back control of the al-Omari mosque, which has been the epicenter of eight days of protests in Dara.

US Treads Fine Line as Ally in Yemen Could Fall [-Another dictatorship about to fall?]

March 23, 2011
By BRADLEY KLAPPER

WASHINGTON (AP) The Obama administration sought Wednesday to avoid undermining an embattled ally in Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, offering no prediction whether Saleh could ride out spirited street protests to remain in power and refusing to acknowledge any contingency plans in case he is removed.

The caution from top officials such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton represented a careful balancing act for the administration. The U.S. does not want to add pressure on Saleh, who has proven himself a key partner in the fight against al-Qaida, even as American officials have become increasingly perturbed by the harshness of his government's crackdown on peaceful protesters.

In Cairo for meetings, Gates said that while things are unsettled in Yemen, it was too early to know the outcome. He stressed that the United States had a good relationship with Saleh, whose offer to step down at year-end after more than three decades in power has been rejected by the opposition. And, Gates said, the administration had not formulated an approach to the country for when the aged president leaves office.

Muammar Gaddafi's presidential bolt-hole [-Hun Xen's Tuol Krasaing fortress rivals with Gaddafi's compound?]

A monument has been erected outside the building bombed by the US in 1986

23 March 2011
By Kathryn Westcott
BBC News

Bab al-Aziziya - Splendid Gate - the nerve-centre of Col Muammar Gaddafi's regime has long been a symbol of the Libyan leader's defiance.

At the heart of the sprawling presidential compound in downtown Tripoli is the shell of his former residence, partially destroyed by American laser-guided "smart" bombs in 1986.

Col Gaddafi claimed that his adopted baby daughter Hanna had been killed in the attack, ordered by former US President Ronald Reagan. The Libyans had been accused of the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque in which two American GIs were killed.

The building has not been rebuilt and has been renamed House of Resistance. In front of it stands a giant, gold, clenched fist crushing an American plane.

In the past few months, the iconic building has formed the backdrop for Col Gaddafi's televised addresses, as it did in 2001 when the Libyan leader spoke out angrily against the Lockerbie verdict.

The Libyan "Iron Fist" is about to keel over: A WARNING to the Cambodian Iron Fist?

Squaring Off With Libya's Iron Fist

March 18, 2011
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times

PARIS — Almost from the minute he seized power in 1969 as he and a group of other young officers toppled Libya’s monarchy, Muammar el-Qaddafi has displayed an overwhelming urge to secure the world’s attention — often as not through maverick support of violent groups committed to overthrowing the existing order.

Over time, in the quest for acknowledgement as a leader not only of his own people but also of much broader constituencies, he has sought the mantle of pan-Arab champion and pan-African redeemer, often as not uninvited. His armies have crossed his neighbors’ frontiers, and he has spent part of his country’s vast oil wealth on alliances with lands the West calls pariahs and with groups labeled terrorists. In 2003, a dramatic about-face even found him courting the United States and Britain in his quest for recognition as a statesman.

In the last month, though, Colonel Qaddafi’s desire for the center stage has been fulfilled in a spectacular fashion that he probably neither coveted nor imagined as his forces sought to roll back an uprising that had once harbored the same dreams of revolution in his own country as those that unseated the elites in Libya’s neighbors, Tunisia and Egypt.

Missile Strike Hits Building in Gadhafi's Compound [-Will Tuol Krasaing order a NEW Tomahawk-proof BUNKER?]

A view of the building, destroyed in what the government said was a western missile attack, inside Bab Al-Aziziyah, Muammar Gaddafi's heavily fortified Tripoli compound March 21, 2011. Western forces pounded Libya's air defences and patrolled its skies on Sunday, but their day-old intervention hit a serious diplomatic setback as the Arab League chief condemned the "bombardment of civilians". (REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra)

Libyan army soldiers display pieces of shrapnel from what the government said was a western missile attack on a building inside Bab Al-Aziziyah, MuammarGaddafi's heavily fortified Tripoli compound March 21, 2011. Western forces pounded Libya's air defences and patrolled its skies on Sunday, but their day-old intervention hit a serious diplomatic setback as the Arab League chief condemned the "bombardment of civilians". (REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra)

Defiant Libyan Leader Vows 'Long War' As Coalition Air Strikes Pound Libya

March 20, 2011
By MARTHA RADDATZ, DEVIN DWYER and LUIS MARTINEZ
ABC World News (USA)

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's compound was hit by a missile strike late today,as a barrage of airstrikes by U.S. and European militaries destroyed Libyan defenses, rocked the capitol of Tripoli and buoyed the spirits of the opposition.

The strike, however, was not carried out by U.S. forces, an official said. Vice Admiral William Gortney said earlier today that the United States was "not targeting Gadhafi."

According to various reports, Gadhafi's compound was badly damaged, but it was not immediately known how many people were injured or killed.

A United Nations-backed no-fly zone enforced by the U.S. British and French aircraft is being enforced from Tripoli to Benghazi and the top third of the country. Spain, Belgium, Denmark, and Qatar have also joined the coalition.

Politiktoons No. 155: The Libyans

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com
and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)