Syria's Chemical Weapons.

As I think I've mentioned before the issue that the US and others were trying to push onto the agenda for the COP18/CMP8 was the situation in Syria. Matters came to a head at the beginning of the high level segment of the summit when the US announced that it had evidence that Syria was mixing it's chemical weapons preparing them for use. I personally believe this to be true however in order to understand why you first need to go back a bit.

The US undoubtedly played a key role in starting the Syria conflict by providing media training and communications equipment to Syria activists from as far back as 2008 in order to better protect Israel by being able to destabilise the Syrian government should their support for Hezbollah become too significant a threat. However now almost two years in with around 120 people being killed a day we are clearly far beyond the point of activists posting videos of beatings on YouTube. What's happening now is that Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) nations led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar are providing a high volume of weapons and training to Jihadist groups within Syria in order to overthrow the Syrian government as quickly as possible. A clear preference being given to the most devout and therefore most extreme Jihadists. This means that the US is now very much in the background of what is going on in the Syrian war. So the US is currently actually trying to slow down the fall of the Syrian government so they can buy time to gain influence within the Jihadist groups in order to contain the threat they present. Slowing the conflict down also has the effect of sucking money out of Iran as they try to support Syria. The Syrians know this so made sure they were seen preparing their chemical weapons for use in order to put pressure back on the US in the hope the US would realise that their containment strategy is not likely to be successful and therefore back down. After all it is one thing for terrorist groups to obtain the component parts for chemical weapons but quite another for them to mix them ready for use without killing themselves. The GCC is aware of all of this which is why their media has been presenting US concerns over Syrian chemical weapons as similar to US concerns over Iraq's chemical weapons - i.e a complete fiction - in order to push the US further into the background on the conflict.

The Chris Brown/Rihanna angle to this which everything seems to have these days is that discussions about containing the domestic violence threat that Brown presents to Rihanna could be used as a coded way to discuss containing the domestic violence threat that Syrian Jihadists present primarily to Israel. The only problem is that everybody in the business not only accepts that the violence threat Brown presents will be contained but view it as an essential part for what comes next. What everybody is concerned about is the damage that containment strategy will do and the price the US will attempt to extract for putting it in place. It should come as no surprise then that Brown has added an extra date to his Carpe Diem tour and tomorrow (11/12/12) will be playing Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) - the only member of the GCC liberal enough to tolerate western entertainers.

20:05 on 10/12/12.