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Looks like Bashar al-Assad, the
hereditary dictator of Syria, has taken the measure of U.S. President
Barack Obama, and isn't impressed.
A while ago in the two-year-old Syrian
uprising, Obama announced a “red line.” The “line” was the
use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Obama in effect was
saying, you better not cross this line. You can bomb your own people,
you can shell your own towns, you can slaughter civilians
indiscriminately, you can institutionalize rape as a weapon of
repression, you can torture and execute people, and all I'll do is
“demand” that you “step down.” (And prohibit you from having
a bank account in an American bank. And we won't sell you arms, which
we don't do anyway.) But you better not use chemical weapons! Because
then you'll have to deal with the righteous wrath of the mighty
U.S.A!
Well, Israel, and Britain, and France,
now all say Assad has crossed the line. At first the Obama regime,
including in the person of War Secretary Chuck “Wagon” Hagel,
said there was no proof. Now, however, they've reluctantly conceded
it seems to be so. (A British lab had samples of something to test,
blood or soil.) But doubt has been cast on the claims of sarin use.
[1] No surprise that Israel
might try to instigate U.S. involvement, just as its American agents
helped instigate the Iraq invasion and wants the U.S. to bomb Iran.
Assuming sarin use is confirmed, the
question is: So now what happens? Nothing much, probably. Some
verbal backing and filling and “clarifying” and more hollow
warnings, most likely. A slight increase,maybe, in the dribble of
“non-lethal” and “humanitarian” aid to the rebels (equipment
and food and medicine, no guns or bullets or other stuff that shoots
or explodes).
The U.S. “security” establishment
now says sarin was probably used. So Obama is stalling. This is
reflected in New York Times headlines, on the “World” page of its
website, “Obama Not Rushing To Act on Signs Syria Used Chemical
Weapons” (no, he sure isn't “rushing,” in fact he's dragging
his feet) and
a similar headline in the 4/27 print edition. ("Obama Avoids Swift Response to Report on Syria Arms." Love that mealy-mouthed Timesese, "Avoids Swift Response." Sounds so much better than "ducks" or "dithers" or "stalls" or "is indecisive.")
The website version thumbnail of the story says:
The website version thumbnail of the story says:
The
president said he would respond “prudently” and “deliberately”
to evidence
that
Syria has used chemical weapons, tamping down any expectations that
he would
take swift
action.
In
other words, don't rush me,I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
The
first paragraph spells things out even more clearly, that Obama, by
his words, was:
tamping
down any expectations that he would take swift action after an
American intelligence assessment that the Syrian government had used
the chemical agent sarin on
a small scale in the nation’s civil war.
The
NYT says that Obama's “remarks”
Congressional leaders, said that the nation’s intelligence agencies had assessed “with
varying degrees of confidence” that the Syrian government had used sarin, the president
said he was seeking further proof of culpability for chemical weapons attacks. It is a
laborious process that analysts say may never produce a definitive judgment. But Mr.
Obama is also trying to preserve his credibility after warning in the past that the use of
chemical weapons would be a “game changer” and prompt a forceful American response.
“Knowing that potentially chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria doesn’t tell
us
when they were used, how they were used,” Mr. Obama told reporters
in the Oval Office.
“We have to act prudently. We have to make
these assessments deliberately.”
“But
I meant what I’d said,” the president added. “To use potential
weapons of mass
destruction
on civilian populations crosses another line with respect to
international norms
and
international law. And that
is going to be
a game changer.” [Obama's use of the future
tense emphasized by
me.]
What
a bunch of doubletalk. He's stalling as hard as he can, then he
repeats his empty threat, as if nothing has happened. And
what the NYT means by Obama's “quandary” is that he
painted himself into a corner with
his bluffing. But they're too genteel and “respectful” to U.S.
“authority” to ever be so blunt.
The
UK Independent reports thusly:
Obama,
in his first comments about the new intelligence disclosure, said
yesterday
[April
26] : "For the Syrian government to utilize chemical weapons on
its people
crosses a line that will change my calculus and how the United States
approaches
these
issues." "I've meant what I said."
Some
lawmakers voiced concern that if Obama doesn't make good on his
promise
to
respond aggressively if it's shown that Assad used chemical weapons,
his inaction
could
send a damaging message to the world. [2]
Namely
the “message” that the U.S. is a paper tiger, whose bluff can be
called. But I think the U.S. has a long enough record of savagery
that it would be foolhardy for other nations to test it. and the U.S.
has a history of sneaky attacks using cyberwarfare, SEALs, financial
sabotage, and so on. For example, a number of Syrian undercover
officers were bumped off in retaliation for the Marine barracks
bombing in Lebanon during the Reign of Reagan.
At
the same time, UK Prime Minister David Cameron says a “very clear
warning” should be sent. He forgot to say the word, “again.”
Well, he's just fulfilling the now-traditional role of a UK Prime
Minister as a parrot sitting on the shoulder of the U.S. Emperor. (A
recent exception to that role was Margaret Thatcher. Reagan, under
the influence of the loathsome Jeane Kirkpatrick and Al Haig, tried
to talk Thatcher out of a military response to the Argentine junta's
invasion and conquest of the Falkland Islands, which were and are
inhabited by British people. Thatcher was having none of it.)
Obama's
minions are also using the lies about WMD that the Bush regime used
to gin up war fever to invade Iraq as an excuse to inaction. Which of
course continues to promote the lie that what happened prior to that
invasion was a case of “faulty intelligence,” not BALD FACED
LYING by the U.S. Government and the entirety of the corporate media.
The- the establishment- have since constructed this myth that the CIA
“got it wrong” somehow, that they made mistakes. In fact, they
were fabricating “intelligence,” as has been extensively
documented. All the history is being systematically ignored by the
U.S. establishment in foisting this lie on the public, that the lies
weren't lies, but were honest mistakes.
Let's
briefly review a few salient points on that score. There was the man
the Egyptians tortured into saying what the CIA said they wanted to
hear, that there were Al-Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein. This
“confession” was used by Bush and Powell as part of their
“proof.” (Later the victim was handed over to Qaddafi for
disposal. Jane Mayer of The
New Yorker
has described the details of this case.)
The
con man code named “Curveball” by his German secret police
handlers was a known liar, and the Germans told the CIA this, but his
bullshit about “mobile chemical weapons vans” was a key part of
Colin Powell's lies to the UN.
The
Niger yellowcake hoax was exposed as false BEFORE the war by the man
tasked with investigating it, Joseph Wilson. You might remember what
the Bush regime did in retaliation- they publicly blew the cover of
his CIA officer wife, Valerie Plame.
The
NYT was part of the mendacious propaganda campaign designed to
lead to war. It assigned the egregious reactoinary Judith Miller (who
already had a long history of dubious propaganda disguised as “news”
for that paper) to act as a conveyor belt for the disinformation of
the con man and embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
The
corporate media was so solidly behind the Bush regime's aggression
that MSNBC canceled its top-rated show, Phil Donahue, because he
refused to drink the Kool-Aid and presented dissenting views from the
rush to war propaganda.
I
could go on, but it would fill (another) book.
The
point is, it is particularly disingenuous for the establishment media
(and no doubt much of academe will follow along) to pretend that the
U.S. made an honest error about Iraqi WMD, that the phone
“intelligence” was honest but “flawed,” “mistaken,” not
deliberately fabricated on orders of Cheney and Rumsfeld. This is
reminiscent of how they rewrote the history of the Vietnam War, to
present it as well-meaning, even noble, but impractical (because the
U.S. couldn't “win,”), a “mistake,” not criminal and vicious.
(A “mistake” that killed several million Vietnamese, devastated
their country, left a land poisoned by dioxin which produces birth
defects and disease to this day, killed another million in Laos and
Cambodia and led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who killed another
million plus Cambodian, and oh yes, killed a bunch of foolish
Americans who consented to being used as instruments of crime. That's
quite a “mistake.” A real whopper, you could say. And part of
what so upsets the establishment about it is that it caused powerful
resistance movements inside the U.S. But they managed to cool that
all out. Now they're busily going back in time to the 1950s, at
least- the 1920s if the GOP and their rich scum backers get their
way.)
Anyway,
now Obama the Ditherer is once again on display. Oh well. He
can always kill some more poor Yemeni villagers as compensation, to
feel powerful. And now there's a 19 year old prisoner to execute, the
surviving Boston Marathon bomber. (Well, why not? If you can kill
innocent children, and even target a 16 year old American because
you'd just killed his dad two weeks ago and are afraid the son might
try to not let it be forgotten- the al-Awlakis, of course- why not a
guilty 19 year old bomber, an impressionable young fool under the
malign influence of a zealous older brother?)
But
Obama is slippery. Like Bill Clinton, a very similar Democratic Party
political con man and dangerously intelligent operator, Obama is
careful to plant weasel words and trapdoors and outs in his various
speeches. So for example when he first laid down the “no chemical
weapons, OK Assad?” marker back in August, he qualified it with a
lot. Just don't use a lot of chemical weapons. I'm not
sure that will get Obama off the political hook now. Senator John
McCain has started beating his intervention drum again.
Obama explaining complex matters to the less intelligent- us. April 26.
I think the U.S. should help the Syrian
people with small arms, and maybe a no-fly zone, or at least taking
out some Syrian aircraft. A brief reminder: 70,000 people are dead, hundreds of thousands are refugees, and thousands have experienced traumatic loss of loved ones, homes, livelihood. Many are maimed, others have survived torture and rape. Cities and towns are being systematically reduced to rubble.
I realize morality is irrelevant to our
rulers, so I won't bother going over at length my moral reasons for why the U.S. should intervene. I believe that might should be used to defend right,
instead of the operative principle of might makes right, that
says power is its own justification, which is completely amoral. But
here's an argument U.S. rulers might understand: politically
it makes sense for the U.S. to try and head off jihadi influence in
Syria by helping the bulk of the rebels succeed or at least
strengthen their position. Instead, fear of jihadis seems to be a key
reason the U.S. refuses to do this. Also, if the U.S. really cares
about winning support from the Syrian people and Arabs and Muslims
generally, supporting the uprisings of oppressed Arabs and Muslims is
the best way to do this. Instead the U.S. is stubbornly sticking to
its policy- a global policy- of wanting people to be controlled by
dictatorships, and dealing with dictators, who are their kind of
people. That is, people who are into power and rule. The U.S. figures
it can just keep conning people with its cynical blather about how
much they love freedom and democracy and human rights, and the
ludicrous claim that these are “our values” and “principles,”
that this is what the U.S. “stands for.” An empire founded on
genocide and slavery, with a long record of conquest, aggression,
subversion, destruction of democracies, and support for death squad
dictatorships, saying this with a straight face. Wow, that is
discipline, to be able to say that without cracking a smile. I guess
repetition makes it easier.
There are two habitual U.S. practices
that are principles-
namely basic principles
of propaganda: The Big Lie, and Repetition. Just keep repeating the
lie, in this case, a Big Lie. These are well-established principles
of modern propaganda practice, consciously understood by their
practitioners.
1) Some of these doubts are summarized
in the British Independent, excerpted below:
The
picture which is emerging from accounts given by Western and Middle
Eastern officials and members of the Syrian opposition is this:
the test so far have not yielded conclusive results; they have been
based on blood, hair and soil samples as well as photographs and
video footage; the samples have not been collected independently by
Western investigators inside Syria but handed over by the rebels or,
at least on one occasion, by Turkish intelligence; some of the
footage may have been faked; the tests had been carried out at the
UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratories ( DSTL) and multiple
locations in America: conclusions on them vary within US intelligence
agencies and the experience of 'Iraq and WMD' is a very present
source of caution among officials in Washington and London.
Dr
Sally Leivesley, a chemical and biological analyst, a former
scientific advisor to the Home Office who has worked for a number of
western governments, said "There are things here which do not
add up. A chemical attack using Sarin as a battlefield weapons would
leave mass fatalities and very few people alive. From what one hears
about the symptoms it's possible that a harassing agent rather than a
nerve agent was used".
See article and video of hospital
patients allegedly exposed to sarin at “HasAssad crossed ‘red line’? Graphic video footage emerges claimingto show victims of nerve gas attack in Syria, but doubts cast onevidence of use of chemical weapons”-
Independent.co.uk, 27 April 2013.
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