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| UN inspectors leave Syria as US pushes forward with plans for military action - Washington Post Posted: 31 Aug 2013 08:37 AM PDT BEIRUT — A team of U.N. inspectors investigating last week's suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria left the country on Saturday, opening the door for U.S.-led punitive military strikes. The 13-car convoy crossed into neighboring Lebanon via the Masnaa border checkpoint in the early hours of the morning, according to reporters at the border. Their presence in Syria had been an obstacle to the expected military action against the country. The departure follows clear signals from the White House on Friday that the administration plans to proceed with what President Obama described as "limited and narrow" military action against the Syrian government. Laying out details of U.S. intelligence on the incident, Secretary of State John Kerry said that 1,429 people had been killed, including 426 children. Syria said that military intervention would "claim hundreds of innocent victims whose blood will be on the hands of the United States and those who join it in this aggression," according to a statement on the official state news agency Web site on Saturday. U.S. intelligence based on an intercepted phone call between Syrian officials after the attack is "too ridiculous to be discussed," the statement said. On Syrian state television Saturday, a stream of pro-government pundits took to the air to voice their outrage at the prospect of intervention. On a live talk show, Salim Harba, a political analyst close to the Syrian government, said that if the United States gambled with a military strike, it would be the "biggest strategic mistake they made in their history." Allies such as Russia would increase their support for the Syrian government and the United States would be forced to "tactically retract" or go ahead and "strategically fail," he said. Phoning in from Beirut, another commentator, Kamel Wazni, described the United States as "addicted to wars." "This is not a war on Syria. It's a war on the region," he said. "The friends of Syria will not give up on Syria." Coverage was interspersed with national songs praising the Syrian military. The U.N. experts, who were already in the country to investigate previous allegations of chemical weapons use when the Aug. 21 attack took place, have spent four days interviewing witnesses and taking blood and urine samples at sites where rockets loaded with poisonous gas are believed to have fallen in the Damascus suburbs. They are expected to brief U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on their findings later Saturday. The Syrian government had asked the U.N. team to extend its mission to investigate its claims of rebel attacks involving chemical weapons — a request widely seen as a stalling tactic. Syria rejects any "incomplete" report that does not include investigations of sites where Syrian soldiers were exposed to toxic gases, said Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem, in comments published on the state news agency site. |
| Comfort is best found in Seamus Heaney's poems - Irish Times Posted: 31 Aug 2013 07:53 AM PDT Like all great poets, Seamus Heaney was an alchemist. He turned our disgrace into grace, our petty hatreds into epic generosity, our dull clichés into questioning eloquence, the leaden metal of brutal inevitability into the gold of pure possibility. He lacked the arrogance to tell us who we are – much more importantly, he told us what we are. He reminded us that Ireland is a culture before it is an economy. And in the extraordinary way he bore himself, the dignity and decency and the mellow delight that shone from him, he gave us self-respect. The Irish Times takes no responsibility for the content or availability of other websites. In The Tempest, Miranda exclaims "O brave new world, / That has such people in it." Seamus Heaney made us gasp in wonder that, for all its follies and terrors, Irish culture had such a person in it. He was out and about again this spring and summer, reading, opening, presiding, blessing. After he suffered a stroke in 2006, he had cut down on his public engagements, resisting the incessant clamour for his presence. But this year he seemed happy to be a public man again. He had something to convey – especially, it seemed, to his fellow citizens. It was what his whole life as a poet had articulated with such astounding eloquence. In a speech at the National Museum in March he put it directly: "We are not simply a credit rating or an economy but a history and a culture, a human population rather than a statistical phenomenon." No one did so much to make us feel like creatures of a long-working imagination rather than figments of a short-term market. Great poets speak for themselves but they also create the voices through which something beyond themselves finds articulation. What Heaney articulated, above all, was the way in which – in the words of his friend Brian Friel – confusion need not be an ignoble condition. He grew up in a literally divided landscape – "the lines of sectarian antagonism and affiliation", he wrote, "followed the boundaries of the land" — and lived through the hopes and horrors of the Troubles.
His genius lay in his ability to hover between them, to give each side of a political or emotional equation its full weight and proper due without becoming the prisoner of either. WB Yeats, the poet whose influence he both absorbed and transcended, wrote in a time of Irish violence that "we are closed in and the key is turned/ On our uncertainty" . Heaney told us that, though we are indeed fated to uncertainty, it need not necessarily be a locked room in which we play out the same scenarios of doom over and over. Uncertainty may simply be the human condition. Heaney humanised uncertainty, made ambiguity rich with possibilities. As he put it in the beautifully homely metaphor of Terminus:
He was not, in that sense, a national poet. He knew too much about the dangers of tribalism and the foolishness of slogans to ever want to be a spokesman for the collective. He would have agreed with Yeats's dictum that "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." In Heaney's The Flight Path, an IRA sympathiser has his demands for political commitment refused: |
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A Free Syrian Army fighter takes position behind sandbags in the old city of Aleppo, Syria, on Tuesday, August 27. Syria has warned Western leaders against taking any military action after international outrage over the country's suspected use of chemical weapons. Tensions in Syria began to flare in March 2011 and have escalated into an ongoing civil war. Click through to view the most compelling images taken since the start of the conflict. 