Syria

You know you're in trouble when you can't even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama's fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to the New York Times that Obama's initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted and therefore unserious. The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: "Red line" was intended and deliberate. Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough, sound like a real world leader,...

David J. Kramer is president of Freedom House . Can everyone please stop pretending that Russia can be a partner with the United States and others in solving the crisis in Syria? Recently, there has been a flurry of visits to Moscow by senior Western and U.N. officials: U.S. national security adviser Tom Donilon was there in mid-April, followed by Secretary of State John F. Kerry in early May, then British Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

BEIRUT — Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah vowed Thursday that Syria would provide the Shiite Lebanese movement with even more powerful weapons to supplement those destroyed by Israel in a series of airstrikes against Damascus over the weekend, but he refrained from threatening retaliation for the attacks. In the first official response by Hezbollah to the Israeli strikes, Nasrallah said Syria would provide his movement with "game-changing" weapons that would "break the balance" of power in the region.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration denounced Russia on Friday for providing Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime with anti-ship missiles, saying the weapons would only worsen a war that Washington and Moscow have been promising to work together on stopping. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized what he called an "unfortunate decision that will embolden the regime and prolong the suffering. " He spoke at a news conference after the New York...

President Obama took questions from the press at the White House on April 30, 2013. Read the full text of his remarks below. PRESIDENT OBAMA:   Hello, everybody. Hello. Good afternoon -- or good morning, everybody. I am here to answer questions in honor of Ed Henry, as he wraps up his tenure as president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Ed, because of that, you get the first question. Congratulations. Q : Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that.

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a critical U.S. ally in the Muslim world, is struggling with the crisis in Syria, which has strained his country's fast-growing economy, swamped it with hundreds of thousands of refugees and created unusually public friction with Washington. The urgency of Erdogan's concerns over Syria was underscored by Saturday's car bombings that killed 46 people in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli, where thousands of Syrian refugees have taken...

Four prints by the 19th-century Scottish painter David Roberts hung in the Beirut apartment that I rented in the early 1970s when I was a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Roberts produced them from sketches he'd made during his tours of what was then called the Near East. One, " Sidon Looking Towards Lebanon ," shows a group of caravanners, garbed in turbans and the baggy trousers known as sherwal, resting beside kneeling camels and tethered horses on the Mediterranean shore.

ISTANBUL As the decisive battle for Damascus approaches, the array of Syrian opposition forces facing President Bashar al-Assad appears to share one common trait: Most of the major rebel groups have strong Islamic roots and backing from Muslim neighbors. The Free Syrian Army has developed a rough "order of battle" that describes these rebel groups, their ideology and sources of funding. This report was shared last week with the State Department. It offers a window on a war that, absent some diplomatic miracle, is grinding...

Zalmay Khalilzad was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2007 to 2009. The use of chemical weapons in Syria has increased pressure on President Obama to arm the opposition. Earlier in the conflict, I endorsed such a step . But circumstances have changed. Instead, the United States should focus on working with Russia to disarm Syria. A U.N. Security Council resolution mandating an inspection and disarmament process for Syria could open the door to wider negotiations on a political resolution.

THE MUDDLE that is President Obama's policy on Syria has grown still muddier. On Tuesday the president backed away from a " red line " he had drawn on the use of chemical weapons by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, setting the threshold for proof of a violation in such a way as to virtually exclude the possibility that one could ever be confirmed. Yet that same day his aides leaked to The Post and other news organizations the news that the president might soon reverse his long-standing opposition to...

ANKARA, Turkey — Officials say a container of fuel being smuggled into Turkey from Syria has exploded, killing 10 people. The governor's office in Hatay province said Friday's blast occurred in Tunisma village when the smuggler set the tank on fire after realizing Turkish security forces had rushed to the scene. Hatay is the Turkish border province where two car bombs exploded in the town of Reyhanli last week, killing 51 people. Turkish authorities have blamed Syrian intelligence...

UNITED NATIONS — Armed men broke into a U.N. outpost in a buffer zone separating Israel and Syria and abducted three U.N military observers, the U.N. peacekeeping chief said Thursday. Herve Ladsous told a group of reporters that the unarmed observers were held by the Syrian men for about five hours and released unharmed Wednesday morning. It was the third abduction of U.N. peacekeepers in the tense region since March and underlined again their vulnerability in the...

In his May 12 Outlook commentary, " Syria's war, outside the red lines ," Fouad Ajami cited colonial cartographers, that much-loved scapegoat for crises in the Middle East and Africa, as if there would be no conflict if artificial borders had not been drawn many decades ago. I doubt that would have been the case. History shows that tribal societies have always fought among one another, and the formation of nation-states seemed a development that helped, over hundreds of years, to stem such violence (or at least to...

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan projected a united front Thursday on Syria, keeping stark differences about how much the U.S. should intervene behind closed doors as they looked to Russia and the global community to close ranks behind efforts to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. Under a pair of umbrellas outside a drizzly White House, the two leaders offered no hints about new actions either country would take, but pledged to keep upping the...

President Obama's critics have pounced on his use of the phrase "red line" to urge military intervention in Syria. They argue, in the words of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, that the " credibility of the United States is on the line. " Presumably they mean that Iran, North Korea and others are watching. Recall how another American president dealt with a crisis of credibility. In 1983, just after the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, Ronald Reagan was certain that staying involved militarily was "central to our...

THE BOMB BLAST in Damascus on Wednesday blew a hole in the regime of Bashar al-Assad and could lead to the government's loss of control over territory. That, in turn, could leave his chemical weapons vulnerable. Syria holds one of the largest stockpiles of chemical weapons in the Middle East, composed of blister and nerve agents, including sarin, for which it has manufacturing facilities. It is believed to have sought out the deadliest nerve agent ever created, VX . The chemicals have been weaponized in aerial bombs, missile...

WASHINGTON — Obama: No ‘magic formula" for dealing with Syria; Geneva talks with Russia ‘may yield results' Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.