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.
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?
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.