Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Here We Go Again: Another Syria Chemical Weapons Tale


MORE WAR PORN TO PUSH FOR US ATTACK ON SYRIA
It is hard not to be completely distracted by the endless torrent of war propaganda over Ukraine and getting Americans whipped up into a bloody frenzy of hatred towards Russia and Vladimir Putin but there is another lurid tale of Syrian gas attacks on civilians making the rounds this week. While it is nowhere near as intense an effort to promote lies upon which to base the long-desired apple of the neocon's eye that is regime change in Damascus as we saw back last summer when Obama and his incredible shrinking Secretary of State John Kerry were trying to close the deal for yet another regime change in the Middle East.
There aren't those war porn videos of the poor children who were allegedly the victims of the use of chemical weapons by the "New Hitler" of the week Bashar al-Assad on civilians that the missing airplane network CNN looped over and over again in excruciating detail. The sheer cynicism of the Obama regime, one that has always been built upon a foundation of horseshit was laid bare for all to see before Putin saved the day, an act that was a terminal blow to the embedded neoconservatives and according to journalist Robert Parry over at the great Consortium News may have been - along with the desire to sink the P5+1 Iran talks - the impetus for the unfolding debacle in Kiev. This certainly resonates with the sort of tactics that the Leo Strauss inspired Machiavellian masturbators resort to in selling their illegal wars of aggression.
Despite the US war machine having never been able to definitively prove that the Sarin used in Ghouta indeed came from Assad's government and despite the account that was too volcanic to mention in the poisoned state-corporate media in The Homeland by Seymour Hersh that writes of a potential false flag Turkish involvement the neocons are flogging the fairy tales about gas attacks anew. The latest offering from the mighty megaphones of living high on the hog US war propagandists and their NATO allies is the claim that chlorine gas has been used nine times since February. According to a story in The Guardian (also with an image of suffering children as a sales tactic):
The global body supervising the surrender of Syria's chemical weapons is to investigate fresh claims that a less dangerous – but still lethal – chlorine gas has been used in recent attacks on opposition areas.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has announced it will investigate allegations that chlorine has been used at least nine times since February, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.
The move follows intensive lobbying from the US and France who have both indicated in the past fortnight that they believe the Syrian government has been responsible for the attacks.
Note the hypocrisy in that now the neocons are throwing in with those previously mocked and detested "cheese eating surrender monkeys" in Paris whose failure to support Bush-Cheney's military misadventures resulted in much outrage back in 2003. Such stupid behavior as the US House of Representatives (as big a collection of childish assholes that exists today) to rename french fries as freedom fries and a scary proposal by Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite who represents the textbook example for gerrymandered districts in Florida's 5th to exhume the bodies of the American war dead who were killed during the "good war" at Normandy and returning them home for burial as a retaliatory gesture to the "ungrateful French" are now forgotten but in attention deficit America a decade may as well be eternity.
Just as forgotten as the lessons of the ruinous - although massively profitable - war in Iraq and to a lesser degree the one in Afghanistan that Obama adopted like a Portuguese water dog puppy. With everything now focused on the support of the coup regime in Ukraine and the ongoing Russia bashing don't discount the ability of the neocons to work to slide a military attack on Syria under the radar. This piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department per her byline at a website Project Syndicate is indicative of the sorty of deranged thinking that has helped to punch the ticket of this once great country towards damnation. I excerpt from the following "Stopping Russia Starts in Syria":
The solution to the crisis in Ukraine lies in part in Syria. It is time for US President Barack Obama to demonstrate that he can order the offensive use of force in circumstances other than secret drone attacks or covert operations. The result will change the strategic calculus not only in Damascus, but also in Moscow, not to mention Beijing and Tokyo.
Many argue that Obama’s climb-down from his threatened missile strikes against Syria last August emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex Crimea. But it is more likely that Putin acted for domestic reasons – to distract Russians’ attention from their country’s failing economy and to salve the humiliation of watching pro-European demonstrators oust the Ukrainian government he backed.
Regardless of Putin’s initial motivations, he is now operating in an environment in which he is quite certain of the parameters of play. He is weighing the value of further dismemberment of Ukraine, with some pieces either joining Russia or becoming Russian vassal states, against the pain of much stronger and more comprehensive economic sanctions. Western use of force, other than to send arms to a fairly hapless Ukrainian army, is not part of the equation.
That is a problem. In the case of Syria, the US, the world’s largest and most flexible military power, has chosen to negotiate with its hands tied behind its back for more than three years. This is no less of a mistake in the case of Russia, with a leader like Putin who measures himself and his fellow leaders in terms of crude machismo.
It is time to change Putin’s calculations, and Syria is the place to do it. Through a combination of mortars that shatter entire city quarters, starvation, hypothermia, and now barrel bombs that spray nails and shrapnel indiscriminately, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have seized the advantage. Slowly but surely, the government is reclaiming rebel-held territory.
Realist” foreign policy analysts openly describe Assad as the lesser evil compared to the Al Qaeda-affiliated members of the opposition; others see an advantage in letting all sides fight it out, tying one another down for years. Moreover, the Syrian government does appear to be slowly giving up its chemical weapons, as it agreed last September to do.
 The problem is that if Assad continues to believe that he can do anything to his people except kill them with chemicals, he will exterminate his opponents, slaughtering everyone he captures and punishing entire communities, just as his father, Hafez al-Assad, massacred the residents of Hama in 1982. He has demonstrated repeatedly that he is cut from the same ruthless cloth.
Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, Assad has fanned fears of what Sunni opposition forces might do to the Alawites, Druze, Christians and other minorities if they won. But we need not speculate about Assad’s behavior. We have seen enough.
 A US strike against the Syrian government now would change the entire dynamic. It would either force the regime back to the negotiating table with a genuine intention of reaching a settlement, or at least make it clear that Assad will not have a free hand in re-establishing his rule.
Jesus Christ.. Colonel Kurtz has reached the end of the river here. Ms. Slaughter (how apropos a name) is indicative of the thinking that has set this country on the road to historical damnation if not the compilation of a body count that in the end would exceed that of all of the 'great" mass murderers of history driven by an insane ideology and that it is now pretty much the conventional wisdom bodes very ill for all of the subjects of the Empire as well as humanity itself.

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