Posted on 04/19/2018 4:34:19 PM PDT by detective
It is illogical that Assad would resort to gas warfare on civilians, when almost all observers believe that he is on the verge of victory.
Assad would have to know that the one thing that he could keep him from winning the war, at this point, is intervention by the British, the French, and especially America. And the only thing that would cause the U.S. public to support yet another military adventure in the Middle East would be gruesome pictures of the aftermath of just such a chemical attack.
this must be the 500th time I’ve seen this same crap story, or some slight spin on the same crap story.
it’s still a crap story.
Trump’s Wicked Precedent
CounterPunch
by ROBERT FISK
JANUARY 30, 2017
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/30/trumps-wicked-precedent/
“There’s no getting round it. Call it Nazi, Fascist, racist, vicious, illiberal, immoral, cruel. More dangerously, what Trump has done is a wicked precedent.”
Hum. Robert Fisk— I had to clean some of that off my shoe a while back.
A friend of mine sat on the RJ flight into Baghdad from Amman about 10 years ago and was seated next to Fisk. He thought he was a bit of a wacko liberal anti-war conspiracy bird... Fisk has lived in the ME four 40 years.. Long enough to see countless mirages and drink the Turkish Coffee kool-aid. Not one bit of doubt in my mind our folks went over the recorded conversations of the Syria military for a couple weeks after and found conversations to the Chem weapons attack.. We listen to EVERYTHING in the the region. Have a huge underground operations center just out of Amman, that collects hoards of stuff.
“this must be the 500th time I’ve seen this same crap story, or some slight spin on the same crap story.
it’s still a crap story.”
Yep. The same article from the same publication was posted at least once here yesterday. They were recruited by our foreign enemies and are trying to help those foreign enemies with propaganda to cover for their nuclear weapons buildups overseas.
There’s no getting round it. Call it Nazi, Fascist, racist, vicious, illiberal, immoral, cruel. More dangerously, what Trump has done is a wicked precedent. If you can stop them coming, you can chuck them out. If you can demand “extreme vetting” of Muslims from seven countries, you can also demand a “values test” for those Muslims who have already made it to the USA. Those on visas. Those with residency only. Those – if they are American citizens – with dual citizenship. Or full US citizens of Muslim origin. Or just Americans who are Muslims. Or Hispanics. Or Jews? Refugees one day. Citizens the next. Then refugees again.
No, of course, Trump would never visit such obscene tests on Jewish immigrants – for they would be obscene, would they not? — and nor will he stop Christians from Muslim countries.
According to Rahaibani, “People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a ‘White Helmet,’ shouted ‘Gas!,' and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other.”
Certainly not an expert, but I wonder if wind and dust could create conditions of hypoxia, and people can use a cloth to filter out most dust and continue breathing. And why did the videos show people being rinsed with hoses? Dust on the body would not create any medical emergency that required such hosing off.
Well if a journalist said it , it must be true.
The UN team were shot at yesterday and weren’t able to conduct any investigatory work - and it can’t be blamed on the rebels because, gee, they were searched for evidence and herded on buses a week ago. So you’ve got Assad loyalists, Assad troops, and Russian troops, jointly claiming to have control of Douma, all claiming there was no attack, so who shot at the UN team?
I saw a interview with one of the children who was taken to the hospital by Al Qaeda and appeared in their video.
He wasn’t injured, not a thing wrong with him.
The people who want to go to war over this fake news should have their heads examined.
I support everyone that shoots at the UN. Now and for all time.
Well that proves it. A journalist and young child being interviewed by a journalist, proof that nothing happened.
I do not have any magic formula for getting to the truth on any subject. But I do trust Donald Trump. I don’t trust Putin. Syria has done this stuff before so I would not be surprised if they did it again.
We aren’t going to war. Putin gave us a bright red line that Trump just walked through without batting an eye.
Arab children...
Assad and company...
Putin...
The West’s MSM...
The Western Left...
George Soros and his global operation...
Our Democrats...
Many of our Republicans...
All these people are on the same page trashing Trump and our military leaders.
It seems they only see Trump and our military leaders as capable of being corrupted, and all those other entities as the truth-tellers of our time.
I can’t wait to hear who all those traditional enemies of the West support for president in 2020 now that they own the moral high ground in some “Conservative’s” mind.
The New American is a John Birch publication with a subscription of less than 20,000. That it would repeat the crap spewed by Fisk seems par for the course.
There’s a lot of sigint that our spooks are privy to. Russian, Syrian and Iranian disinformation aside, it’s 100% certain that the Syrians did this. And the entire point of the gas attack is probably aimed at getting Sunni Arabs to leave the country.
Look at how much trouble the Palestinians have caused the Israelis, and there are fewer of them than Jews in Israel. Whereas Sunni Arabs outnumber Alawites 7 to 1 in Syria. Sunni Arabs have been in periodic armed revolt against Alawite rule for 50 years, ever since the first in a string of Alawite rulers, Salah Jadid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salah_Jadid, took power in 1966.
The current civil war is simply the closest the Sunni Arabs have come to taking power. The problem for the Alawites is that they have not come close to inflicting a 7 to 1 kill ratio* on the Sunni Arab population. That is why - just to maintain the demographic balance prior to the revolt, they need to force a large number of Sunni Arabs out. The gas attack may or may not have helped, but it couldn’t have hurt in that effort.
* My guesstimate is that at the very best, they’ve managed a 1.5 to 1 kill ratio. The pre-war Alawite population was about 2.5m. They’ve lost perhaps 100K Alawite mostly combatant dead. At 4% of the total, that’s a huge number. Japan capitulated after the A-bombs in 1945. By that point, they had lost 3.5% of their population from both combat and Allied strategic bombing. Japan’s eventual defeat wasn’t in doubt - the Allies had done nothing but advance against Japan in the Pacific after the Battle of Midway in June 1942.
We used A-bombs on Japan after losing 400K dead (300K fighting Germany), 0.3% of the US population at the time, despite the certainty of victory because we were just tired of losing men. Assad, after losing perhaps 4% of the Alawite population to Sunni Arab rebels, is way past tired of losing men. Even if the rebels nominally hand over some of their weapons to the regime (while burying a good bunch of it in caches around the country), Alawites can’t stay in power in a country with an Iraqi-style low level insurgency crippling the economy. He needs large numbers of Sunni Arabs to leave permanently.
Sunni Arabs were so close to power they could taste it. That is why large numbers must be evicted forever, if this Alawite victory is to be anything but a Pyrrhic one. And gassing them is probably the best way to encourage this population movement, much as Menachem Begin’s massacre at Deir Yassin successfully convinced a large number of Palestinian Arabs to depart Israel ahead of the combined Arab invasion of 1948, thereby establishing Jewish demographic superiority in Israel after the Arab armies were defeated at huge cost in Jewish lives, relative to their numbers at the time.
The kid from the Douma video is alive and unharmed, that's all the proof a reasonable person needs.
Meanwhile the "white helmets" who grabbed this kid off the street and took him to the hospital claiming he was suffering from exposure to chemical toxins have all magically disappeared...along with their Al Qaeda brethren.
It's also becoming fairly obvious that British intelligence is being run by enemies of the Trump administration aligned with his enemies in the United States.
Your thinking is too clever by half. Like your Israeli example showed, you don’t need chemical weapons to get people to leave. Gun down all the adult men, rape the women and children. People will get the message and leave. Starvation is an even more effective tool to precipitate large scale population transfers. Immediate hunger and thirst will force undesirable Sunnis out of Syria faster than a random once a year chemical weapon attack.
The biggest problem with the American strategy in Syria is fundamentally because the Americans demand that they be the “goodies” and other people be “baddies” and thus the mountain of lies peddled by the American luggenpresse regarding America’s role in Syria.
The most beneficent reading of America’s intention in Syria is that the CIA/Pentagon/State Department honestly thought a foreign Jihadi backed Sunni radical movement could affect a relatively quick and painless regime change to a more Pro-American government and that simple bureaucratic inertia kept with this strategy for years past its sell by date even when it became obvious it wasn’t going to work. This is plausible because the American establishment is precisely that combination of delusionally stupid and cravenly careerist that this is a realistic explanation.
The alternative hypothesis is that the CIA/Pentagon/State Department knew exactly what it was doing in funding Jihadists and forming an alliance of opportunity with Al Qaeda and really has no expectation of actually overthrowing Assad. The entire purpose of the War is only tangentially related to Syria and it is instead primarily a method to bleed Iran and to a lesser degree Russia of men and material at relatively modest financial cost to itself. Afghanistan redux. The hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead are simply irrelevant roadkill in this strategy.
The rather bold faced lies coming from American state media could be reconciled by either explanation. The first theory is that the lies are to shield their gross incompetence. The second theory is that the lies are to shield their Machiavellian scheming which soft hearted American voters wanting to be the good guys would never publically approve of.
“Your thinking is too clever by half. Like your Israeli example showed, you don’t need chemical weapons to get people to leave. Gun down all the adult men, rape the women and children. People will get the message and leave. Starvation is an even more effective tool to precipitate large scale population transfers. Immediate hunger and thirst will force undesirable Sunnis out of Syria faster than a random once a year chemical weapon attack.”
I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea about deliberate American sponsorship of jihadists. The reality is of a very foggy understanding of realities on the ground, compounded by political correctness. People in the State Department (and indeed, Americans in general) really think inside every (insert nationality) is an American struggling to get out. It’s of a piece with the idea that on average, blacks aren’t more criminal than anyone else and just as talented in fields outside of sports and entertainment. It’s the fundamental assumption underlying American foreign policy since the waning days of the Cold War, as far back as the Reagan era - a policy that holds that liberal democracy in foreign countries is good in and of itself, even if it brings our opponents (and in some cases our enemies) to power. This was how we ended up losing Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to a hostile, equally kleptocratic set of rulers. It’s how the PI ended up with a witless retard like Duterte in power, a man who makes Marcos look like the PI’s Alfred the Great.
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