The story of the hour is the rush to judgment on who was responsible for the deaths in a Syrian town said to be due to some kind of gas. The one responsible is none other than Assad, Mad Dog Ophthalmologist. The amount of intellectual dishonesty one has to wade through in listening to very eminent men convinced of this fact is stunning.
On grounds of cui bono alone a reasonable person would have to conclude the opposite, namely, that Assad gains nothing by reckless chemical weapon use against civilians, or even military ones. The very indiscriminate nature of chemical weapons makes them a poor choice and Assad's forces have been doing very well with conventional weapons alone. Why mess with success?
Chemical weapons are also such as to make Western statesmen suffer hysterical collapse. Aiding and abetting al-Qaida and ISIS scum in a war that has cost over 400,000 civilian casualties in Syria and otherwise doing our utmost to keep the attack on Syria a going concern is not morally reprehensible but something like 60-120 civilian deaths and other casualties in this town are enough for WonderNikki to show photos in the U.N. and threaten that the U.S. will go it alone if the U.N. doesn't drink our bathwater. Wasn't the U.N. supposed to be the sacred collective security and peacekeeping mechanism after WWII? Our democratic values apparently include ignoring such nonsense and doing whatever the hell we want wherever we feel like doing it. Bombs away, suckahs!
Seymour Hersh and Richard Lloyd, former UN Weapons Inspector, and Theodore A. Postol, Professor of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology cast much doubt on the "Assad the Monster" thesis with respect to the 2013 Sarin attack in Ghouta. Yet, hardly 48 hours after this new incident important people, including Donald Trump unfortunately, are wringing their hands and exclaiming about "little babies" as though all on-the-scene investigations by impartial observers had been concluded in a day and the results were in. Some moron U.S. Senator thought the presence of fixed-wing aircraft, which could only have been Syrian Air Force planes, was the long and the short of The Case Against Assad. QED, Mothertruckers! He managed to get in something about barrel bombs too IIRC. The stark horror of unaesthetic ordnance!
Maybe it's just me but that doesn't do much for me in the absence of chemical analysis of the gas, and crater and bomb casing analysis.
The grand jury in St. Louis County, Missouri, took longer and had more integrity in the matter pertaining to Officer Darren Wilson, and the stakes there were nothing like what they are in Syria with its seeming infinite opportunities for the U.S. and Russia to go at it with very modern and destructive toys.
It's as though this incident took place and someone immediately whispered "Execute Plan A" and important Americans instantly began to fall over themselves to be the first to declaim about the innate evil of Assad and the unwisdom of leaving him in place in the New Syria. Oh, sure. Assad doesn't remember how close it was he came to being at war (overtly) with the U.S. Why not make a gas attack just for the hell of it? And infuriate Putin in the process. The man whose artful diplomacy headed off further catastrophe in Syria, even given the flexible nature of "catastrophe" in Syria since 2011 when this mad attack on Syria go going.
Like Will Farrell in "Zoolander" I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.
I take a little trip and suddenly (?) everyone goes nuts.
I am beginning to think that President Trump is very easily distracted and does not think strategic like in matters of statecraft. It's vital that the U.S. step back from mindless military involvement and this "let no sparrow fall/oh look, a squirrel!" kind of strategic thinking is not something I find reassuring.
Have your peeps contact my peeps if you know what vital U.S. interest is implicated in our war against Syria unless Syria has the only supply of sanctimony on the planet and our strategic reserves have been pumped dry. (98% utilization just in the last 24 hours, I estimate.)
this started and still is about blocking the russian pipeline thru syria to europe. the saudis are out of oil but the natural gas remains and with an exclusive pipeline deal thru iraq they might be able to save their royal necks. they paid hillary to block the russians and promised 10 million a year for the life of the pipeline if she could pull it off. hillary had the now leader of isil released from the iraqi prison he was locked away in to facilitate assad's demise. she needed arms so she begat an uprising in Libya against the worn out and dicile moomar. i can't believe trump is falling for the assad story. they know isil had the chem plant and were trying to make sarin and that the 5 previous attacks were false flag isil attacks. why would they risk millions of american lives on a pipeline?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your informative comment. I feel like such a rube trying to get a handle on all this. I can see the false hysteria and the willful ignoring of known facts. Also, Trump's unseemly rush to judgment in a matter of 24 hours or so is also obviously dishonest. However, piecing together the underlying financial motives is much harder for me, not least for the skilled efforts to conceal them I say in my defense.
ReplyDeleteThe huge amounts paid to Hillary and Bill and the Clinton Foundation are the giveaway, of course. But the obvious corrupt purposes of these payments didn't raise an eyebrow over at the NYT. But they're all over Assad's history of chemical weapon usage, secret executions, and siege warfare. The corruption and dishonesty here is staggering.