Speaking for an audience gathered by the New America Foundation, U.S. Ambassador and National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice laid out the Administration’s case for intervention in Syria on the basis of the regime’s chemical weapons use.
Hitting the keys:
Chemical weapons are different from conventional in scope and scale;
Syrian stockpiles among the largest in the world;
Only Assad has chemical weapons stocks, “the opposition does not”;
Senior officers planned the August 21 attack and covered the evidence with subsequent shelling;
The Assad regime has used chemical weapons since March, and with fewer casualties, but the regime appears to be lowering the threshold for use;
Failure to respond means that more will die from similar attacks, that the same will bring us closer to the day when chemical weapons are used against Americans abroad and at home, and that the door will be opened to the use of other weapons of mass destruction and the madmen that would use them.
That leaves out a lot (I just couldn’t scribble fast enough), but Rice went on to discuss the meaning of a limited, defined, proportional response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, noting that such an effort would take away any battlefield advantage to the regime relative to their cost to use.
Said Rice: “The United States will not take sides in sectarian struggles . . . but can and will stand up for certain principles in the region.”
Update – 9/9/2013/1337ET
” . . . this atrocity has been most gut wrenching . . . children lined up in shrouds, their voices forever silenced, devastated mothers and fathers kissing their children goodbye, pulling the white sheet up around their faces as if tucking them in. There are no words . . . for capturing such infinite cruelty. Where words fail us, actions must not.”
Kerry also said he had no doubt that Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in east Damascus on 21 August, saying that only three people are responsible for the chemical weapons inside Syria – Assad, one of his brothers and a senior general. He said the entire US intelligence community was united in believing Assad was responsible.
In state-level affairs, the sovereign or government-in-power may be held accountable for what takes place within its purview. So right off the bat this week, the nit of The Guardian headline, “Assad did not order Syria chemical weapons attack, says German press” has a disingenuous cant to it.
If not Bashar, what about Maher?
If not Maher, what about an officer in charge under his command?
The German intelligence findings concerning Assad’s personal role may complicate US-led efforts to persuade the international community that punitive military action is justified. They could also strengthen suspicions that Assad no longer fully controls the country’s security apparatus.
______
I’m not making the call, but the single case for pointing to a rebel false flags seems to stand on an accident involving the mishandling of chemical weapons stocks.
Or a recording — edited, underscored, produced, disseminated — showing a successful launch of a “blue bonnet” style rocket (using what looks like a launch vehicle matched to the purpose).
One case: two stories . . . .
That leaves the public with a spy story in a world waiting for the journalists to get into what I’m going to call “Political Spychology” — the massive, multinational industry devoted to capturing, listening, sniffing, stealing, interpreting signal for military as well as industrial purposes.
I am of the mind that the Syrian Civil War has degraded the central power of the Assad regime but neither installed nor shifted the same toward any coherent and responsible party: instead, it has drawn the state toward gross political anarchy and with a look in many places not dissimilar to Mogadishu’s: hard destruction around and through which shifting tides of suffering humanity amid armed gangs, loosely aligned at best, state or rebel, make their way.
Their situation will worsen as the lack of honesty and integrity across the field and the presence of grandiose ambitions in some ensures greater anarchy, brutality, and political dissolution.
To get the chemical weapons off the field is not to solve the war: it’s to make it a little more discerning (at least between combatant and noncombatant targets), humane, and secure because while other weapons projectiles explode or hit something with finite effect, poisonous gasses drift and are indiscriminate even on the gentlest of their lethal breezes.
To solve the war is to address the poetry of the mind of the warrior romantics involved in imagining themselves “God’s darlings” — Haider Mobarak’s phrase related to the narcissism involved — and striving to prove as much so through the intimidation, murder, and subjugation of all presumably less admirable and beloved-by-God others.
Live today at 12:30 PM ET, White House National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice. Ambassador Rice will discuss the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, the longstanding international norm against the use of chemical weapons, and the need for action to deter the Assad regime from future use of chemical weapons.
Russia? We are living in an alternative universe. This is what America should be doing. Instead, our President is going to Congress to intervene militarily on behalf of the jihadists attacking the Christians. Shameful.
Perhaps in “enemy of my enemy” fashion, American anti-Jihad conservatives may seem to be aligning with anti-Jihad Assads.
The Janus-faced brutality would more seem everyone’s enemy.
With Syria, the only good side is either outside of it or, perhaps, hunkered down quietly within the storm and praying to God for it to end with neither a dictator nor a Jihadi left standing.
______
The Other Side, Possibly, of Anti-Obama, Pro-Assad Endorsement
Who would be wearing the boots and uniforms, holding helmets and assault weapons?
The YouTube counter says “7 views” as I watch it.
Published today by “Ryan Hughes” there are questions about it I can’t answer: who is being beaten? Where? On what day? Why?
Thus al-Qaeda terrorists eagerly await U.S. assistance against the Syrian government, so they can subjugate if not slaughter Syria’s Christians, secularists, and non-Muslims — even as the Obama administration tries to justify war on Syria by absurdly evoking the “human rights” of Syrians on the one hand, and lying about al-Qaeda’s presence in Syria on the other.
To this day, many Jews continue to decry an evident lack of interest in saving Jewish lives either at the start of Hitler’s genocidal campaign or toward the end when rail lines may have been bombed to slow the feed to the ovens.
Well, here we are again, but it’s not the Jews who are suffering.
In fact, many in the path of Assad’s brutality would seem to hate America and Jews and “the west” at the very least out of language habit, although with the large and loose assembly of Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda-type forces displaying their own brutality in the field, more than and other than talk must be shaping defense and political policy between the White House and the Pentagon.
This business of discerning who to save continues to have a “no good dog in the fight” feel to it, this despite assurances from Qatar and the rallying presence of General Salim Idris, who may be the commander in the western suit but not the supreme disciplining force across his own battle space.
* * *
Syria may also remind how for all the philosophical and political talk, the business of war remains intensely geographical (spatial) and physical in nature.
For one thing, Syria has become the most isolated and transparent hot conflict and political laboratory on the planet. Not only do the primary antagonists rate among the least sympathetic of human figures — again: the forces of a brutal dictatorship would seem to share the field, in part, with those of the most absurd religious extremism — but they’re doing “their thang” across a landscape broad and remote enough (and, damaged and emptying enough) to afford, from the talk to the walk, their own display.
Approach it with a toolkit — a few ships, say — or roll it into the operatory known as the UN, but give it a good look because, at the moment, the Syrian Civil War is its own machine with the broken and working parts fairly well lit up for viewing.
* * *
No one really wants to bring peace to that sandbox of a nation, no more than the local constabulary wants to knock on the door behind which a vicious domestic has broken out with flying furnishings, which one hears through the walls, and perhaps broken bottles, knives, and guns, which, alas, one must open the door to see.
At least on a “domestic” the scale is small and the police a force larger than it.
A civil war across a landscape awash in criminal and gambler’s money, arms, blood, death, and suffering and steeped in obsessive cruel and vengeful thinking — that’s a whole other threshold for crossing, one for which the confirmed use of chemical weapons takes the absurdity and inhumanity of it beyond the capacity of conscience for either bearing or controlling.
Truly, a whole world is watching Syria, and I should think that it must be thinking about what it is actually seeing and doing so in ways apart from immediate self-interest, for in the theater we may now call “Syria On Display” what would seem to be on display would seem to comprise also the worst of the worst behavior in humanity.
* * *
Just a moment for fiction here:
“I kill you and cut out your heart and eat it!”
______
“I make you and your people — infants, children, mothers, old men — die in agony without warning. And I do it with impunity!”
* * *
Which world do you want to live in: the one that intervenes — or the one that let’s it go on?
Syria has serious problems, but it appears no one has yet figured out to whom those problems belong.
Then too while the world believes it watches such a spectacle from the outside, that would seem true only until it discovers itself inside of it after all.
Indeed, in the First Age of the Internet (or is it “Internet 2.0” or “3.0”) and an era filled with agressive Islamism and related violence, we all may have to ask whether state boundaries serve to isolate cultural and political systems in necessary ways while also guiding and defining a practical global politics in ways that may have been more helpful as little as 15 years ago.
The congressman, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the military surge in Afghanistan, strongly supports a “surgical strike” against Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities.
From the start of the Syrian conflict, President Obama has wanted to take two very different approaches to it. On the one hand, he has been disciplined about the definition of American interests and the use of force. On the other hand, he has sought a way to respond to Bashar Assad’s human-rights atrocities.
The United States must intervene in Syria for humanitarian reasons.In 1994, the world watched as Hutu soldiers, armed with machetes, hacked apart the Rwandan countryside. Despite clear evidence of genocide from the United Nations observers and human rights watch groups, the U.S. decided it had no permanent interests in the region and sending a small deployment of soldiers would have been too risky. By the time the civil war ended three months later, 900,000 Rwandans had been slaughtered.
They are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.
It seems as though the Iranian government is certain about the damning evidence that confirms the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. This causes an ethical dilemma for the Islamic Republic, including in how it presents the case to its citizens. Turning a blind eye to this information would also undermine the decades-long attempts by the Iranian government to punish those responsible for targeting citizens with a similar campaign during the Iran-Iraq war, using internationally banned chemical weapons. Iranian records indicate that the Iranian government is seeking to prosecute 400 international companies accused of providing assistance in the field of chemical weapons to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime (Al Jazeera Net, 2007).
His breath was loud and hard, his mouth open wide as he struggled to force air into his lungs. ”I am,” said Muhammad Moussavi, a ”living martyr.”
Almost 15 years after Iran’s war with Iraq ended, Mr. Moussavi and thousands of others like him are painful reminders of the long-lasting effect of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in that eight-year conflict.
And the reason why is in the reaping today: “By any means necessary,” is not only never necessary — for whatever it may be, there are plenty of means limited only by imagination, perhaps, and a little money: on this, in fact, on might at last take a lesson from the Mujaheddin — but the lapse of ethical and moral investment in choice, even in war, perhaps especially in war, provides The Enemy opportunity for smug one-upmanship the next historic day.
In this way, the pot rightly calls the kettle black.
In the course of Iran’s brutal eight-year war with Iraq, it turns out President Reagan knowingly shipped dual use “poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses” — including anthrax and bubonic plague — to Saddam Hussein.
When in 1988, Hussein gassed Kurdish forces, the White House, by comparison with the same today, seemed . . . complacent.
This line of rant gets a bump with George W. Bush’s poker-faced claim about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear WMD capability, a claim helped along, actually, by Saddam’s own belligerent deflections of UN inspections.
Nonetheless, Iraq didn’t have those goods, and Bush, the CIA, Colin Powell, and the United States of America not only lost some integrity in the matter but took on the mantle its idiot enemies — far worse, as such tykes go — would give it: i.e., a big, clumsy, lumbering imperial power.
Of course, he who points that finger — or those who point it most often — should point it back at himself (themselves).
Moreover, such American misdeeds in still recent history may be mightily overshadowed by presence and depth of evil involved. Truly, Saddam Hussein was not such a nice guy.
Evidently, while flinging spittle at the Zionist Entity for the cause of entertaining its ignorant masses, Iran has a serious (gasp!) ethical dilemma going with Syria’s use of chemical weapons.
Then noted by Fatima Alsmadi in the above cited World Affairs piece: “The Martyr Foundation claims that 100,000 people in Iran were injured as a result of exposure to chemical gases during that war.”
If there’s a real basis for justice in the world, it may not be in what some (or one) may think God told them.
It may reside in this one fragment of thought indicating a glimmer of appreciation and consideration for others as well as one’s self: “Because it could happen to you.”
Updates
9/8/2013
At the German Bundestag Parliament in Bonn, then- German opposition leader Rudolf Dessler told CNN radio that German firms circumvented the ban on Germany exporting such lethal substances through a loophole allowed German firms to establish subsidiaries in the US, in an arrangement that operated with the full consent of the German government.
These firms worked on contractual arrangements with clearance and confidentiality agreements signed with the US Department of Defense.
From 1987 to 1993, Timmerman published the Middle East Defense News and was international correspondent for Defense Electronics. He also wrote monographs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center on efforts by Iraq , Syria and Libya to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Named in the current report are 300 firms in 36 countries, which have supplied Iran, Syria and Libya with “dual-use” technology — materiel and equipment ostensibly for civilian uses but easily diverted to military purposes.
Germany led the list with 100 companies, followed by the United States, France and Britain. Timmerman noted, however, that Germany has recently enacted tough new laws to “prevent German companies from creating another Iraq.”
What the United States has not done is provide the evidence itself — the satellite images, communications intercepts, and other data that would allow a fair-minded observer to reach the same conclusion on more than blind faith in the competence and integrity of our political leaders and intelligence services.
Perhaps the two boys are playing an old game with old cards and broken chips.
“I see you lost some states there,” says one.
“The cause lost some states, but, you know, people don’t change much. They’re still ours, and I see there’s more like them on the table.”
* * *
It’s an evil old game cooked by one party with crude assumptions: the other cannot walk away; the other cannot win; the other is there for beating and controlling; the stakes will be useful, pleasing, but of themselves are not important.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Thursday the United States — which, in addition to being one of his country’s chief adversaries, has led the push to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government over chemical weapons — has no right to make “humanitarian claims (given) their track record” in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Putin said this week that any one-sided action would be rash. But he said he doesn’t exclude supporting U.N. action if it’s proven that the Syrian government used poison gas on its own people.
“Leaning forward” is one of Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite expressions. An old cold-war term, familiar to soldiers and spies, it means the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks. “I want every one of you to know how forward-leaning we are,” the secretary of Defense told a room full of Marine generals and Navy admirals at the North Island Naval Air Station, near San Diego, last month.
So somebody overheard something — purely circumstantial guff is what that comes to.
So we’ll go on but with something like ‘preponderance of the evidence” for guidance.
* * *
With Maher al Assad well known and with a peerless reputation, some media have dragged out an old familiar (to policy wonks): Bandar bin Sultan.
Beneath the banner, “Saudi Arabia’s ‘Chemical Bandar’ behind the Syrian chemical attacks?”, RT came out shouting, “Nothing the US claims about what happened in Syria adds up. We are being asked to believe an illogical story, when it is much more likely that it was Israel and Saudi Arabia who enabled the Obama Administration to threaten Syria with war” about half a day ago.
Of course, those who may lie know it’s the first one that counts, so going on to say, “The Obama Administration’s intelligence report on Syria was a rehash of Iraq,” seems only fair.
This finger pointing at the Saudi prince has been joined by, among others DigitalJournal, CounterPunch, OpEd News (from the video on the page and within its first 11 seconds, “It is growing increasingly possible that public outcry might make the imperial force of American exceptionalism with its humanitarian war sites set on Syria back down or at the very least delay”), PressTV, MintPress News, Larouche Pac, InfoWars, etc.
For InfoWars, Paul Joseph Watson wraps up with something between a disclaimer and validation:
UPDATE: Associated Press contacted us to confirm that Dale Gavlak is an AP correspondent, but that her story was not published under the banner of the Associated Press. We didn’t claim this was the case, we merely pointed to Gavlak’s credentials to stress that she is a credible source, being not only an AP correspondent, but also having written for PBS, BBC and Salon.com.
Proving integrity may be as difficult — it certainly is a sensitive issue — as proving dishonesty in a dimension or region in behavior in which plans, good or evil, rife with brutality, deflection, dishonesty, and disingenuous speech or listening, searching, defensive, and protective — are put together out of range of public sight and oversight.
* * *
If rebel forces suffered a mortal oops, it would seem more characteristic in Arab language culture to point the finger at someone else.
If a brigade under Maher al Assad’s command done it, it would be mafia cool to do it — record it, leak it, plaster it across the web — as rebels.
According to Iran’s PressTV, Bandar was under house arrest for an attempted coup,[35][36] while opposition sources said he was in Dhaban Prison.[34] Some rumors alleged that his coup was exposed by Russian intelligence services because of his frequent trips to Moscow to encourage cooperation against Iran.[34]
A month ago rebels fired rockets at Bashar’s motorcade as he headed for a Mosque in the centre of Damascus. The attempt to kill the President failed but one of his bodyguards, said to have been a particular favourite of his children Hafez, Karim and Zein was killed.
Many inside and outside Syria believe this may have been the last straw for the hot-headed Maher. No assassination attempt of Bashar al-Assad could go unpunished, especially not one in the heart of the capital.
The answer to “Syria’s CW Whodunit” may come to light if one intelligence industry or another turns up its cards and reveals its methods, capabilities, and limitations.
“So-and-so said” seems to be working to confuse rather than inform the public.
In addition to the challenge involving “Political Spychology” there is that other political psychology involving the character in personality associated with “malignant narcissism”, the features of which include delusions of grandeur, messianic complexes, paranoia, resistance to criticism, etc. (I’ll lay out a page on the language associated with that subject soon).
Through the lens that looks into dictatorship and across dictatorships, things may look a little different, for the want to control the subjugated by controlling a large information environment (“gaslighting” on a large scale) would seem inseparable from other behaviors having to do with hiding things while deeply controlling others.
This humility about the difficulty of reporting on a covert, invisible attack in the midst of a chaotic civil war actually adds to the credibility of the Mint account. It’s those who are most certain about matters of which they clearly lack firsthand knowledge who should make us most skeptical.
It’s not such a silly question. After all, the Americans are continually attacking everybody, aren’t they?
Then there’s the Israelis always doing a bit of assassinating, phosphorus spraying and creeping genocide in Palestine (although they’re never particular about confining their activities to Palestine).
This morning’s live feedfrom Fox featuring President Obama and Prime Minister Reinfeldt stunned me, really, as being the most open, most candid, most off-the-cuff press conference I’ve been aware of since the inauguration.
In it, Obama talked about Syria every which way — either he couldn’t get away from the subject or the reporters could not — including asserting that a transition from the Assad regime seemed impossible given the tens of thousands of civilian lives taken by the regime. Obama then noted that President Putin seemed to disagree with that logic, thereby throwing the policy-on-Syria hot potato to Putin who may look increasingly disingenuous and transparent clinging to his lines on behalf of Bashar and Maher al Assad.
If the “center will not hold” will there be a center?
When I started receiving the CTC Sentinel (from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) I don’t believe I was vetted in any way but, so my impression was, on a controlled list for a publication neither secret nor to be redistributed.
Again, that was some years ago, and here I may be merely befuddled, paranoid, whatever.
Over the years, I’ve kept reference to CTC to myself and partially for the effects of its “granularity” — the detail in reported relationships — involved in combat arenas from Afghanistan to Somalia. Such material, I thought, wouldn’t tell anyone involved on any side of “field operations” what they didn’t already know, but it would suggest how deeply American defense intelligence and analysis gets into societies of interest, and that may have promoted some resentments in my social networks.
A few weeks ago I had cause to ask CTC (Facebook) about distribution and got back this answer: “We publish all of our research in the open source (on our website and in social media), and from there, we don’t have any control over its distribution.”
So there.
Short of subscribing to Jane’s, taking lonely walks (in the rain) around Foggy Bottom, and hanging out in Georgetown (now that I’m 90 minutes northwest of all of that — way out of town!), I think the following two links to Combating Terrorism Center and Foreign Policy (Magazine) reports are pretty good — and granular.
Rebels have been told by these states that they must endorse the SMC and its politics to gain access to future arms shipments.[5] Recently, the United States, the United Kingdom and France have all indicated that they will channel money and possibly weapons via the SMC.[6]
The SMC has provided wildly varying estimates of the total number of fighters in its member groups. In June 2013, Idris claimed to control 80,000 fighters, but days later an SMC representative insisted that the true figure is 320,000.[7] In practice, a meaningful headcount of rebels is almost impossible to make, both due to the scarcity of reliable information and to myriad problems of definition.[8] There is no disputing, however, that most of Syria’s large rebel factions have chosen to publicly align themselves with the SMC, recognizing it as the best way to tap into Gulf, Western and other support.
BackChannels 