“We cannot resolve someone else’s civil war by force.”
“On that terrible night, the world saw the terrible nature of chemical weapons . . . a violation of the rules of war.”
In 1997, the U.S. Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention . . . 189 participating governments . . . representing 98 percent of humanity . . . .
“We know the Assad regime was responsible . . . fired rockets into 11 neighborhoods . . . . Senior figures in the Assad regime reviewed the results of the attacks . . . .”
“When dictators commit atrocities, they depend on the world to look the other way . . . and forget . . . .”
” . . . not only a violation of international law, also a threat to our security.”
“I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.”
” . . . targeted strikes to deter the use of chemical weapons . . . .”
” . . . over the last two years . . . diplomacy, sanctions . . . credible threat (to get) Putin to urge Assad to join the international community . . . give up chemical weapons . . . .’
“I have asked the members of Congress to postpone the vote on whether to (strike Syria).”
______
That’s less how I heard it and more how I scribbled it (with really bad handwriting).
Nonetheless, Obama made clear that eleven neighborhoods suffered chemical weapons attacks, that senior figures in the Assad regime reviewed the results of those attacks, and that the Administration was considering a limited, targeted strike specifically to deter the regime’s use of chemical weapons in the future.
In response to Putin’s offer, Obama requested the postponement of a Congressional decision on the matter, garnering time for diplomacy and for the UN to present its findings Syria’s chemical weapons use.
Obama noted he had ordered the military to maintain its current posture and ability to respond.
One more partial quotation: ” . . . that’s what makes America exceptional — humility with resolve.”
______
With live television and “live streaming” in “webcasting” the second row seat to history becomes the front row seat, and that advance in technology fairly invites one to report a little even knowing someone else already has the complete transcript, complete and completely accurate quotations, but, nonetheless, if you haven’t read it here first, you just about could.
With Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in play, no one really cares about the details: with Syria, the threshold ventured in March would seem to have been crossed in August, scaling up a dollop of death in one context to a brazen full-scale assault — 1,400 dead, 400 of them children, according to the Obama Administration — on innocents.
Must something be done?
______
MOSCOW — Syria on Monday quickly welcomed a call from Russia, its close ally, to place Syrian chemical arsenals under international control, then destroy them to avert a U.S. strike, but did not offer a time frame or any other specifics.
Whether a disingenuous gesture to buy time or a sincere one to wage its war with the will of men and conventional machinery and materiel rather than with invisible, odorless clouds of poison, the gesture would seem to acknowledge culpability and guilt, and that with Russian encouragement to assemble, surrender (to international control), and destroy chemical weapons stores while also joining the signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention.
It appears that a kind of monster born in German laboratories, manufactured in U.S. subsidiaries, and shipped out to several middle east states under cover of the “dual use” use label — all along the conception, development, and delivery line knew it would come to this, even though Syria worked out the details itself — must now be contained and destroyed in an active, “existential”, zero-sum kind of battleground.
Rick Ungar writing for Forbes today notes well the motivation: “Putin understands very well that he stands to gain far more by being the man responsible for taking Assad’s chemical stockpile out of the game than he stood to gain by being responsible for any future use of the same.”
It’s hard remaining evil when one wants most to look good and to be perceived as just and heroic.
Still, one recognizes that one recognizes a correct and right course and side, and that is the consequence of the presence of conscience.
And if Putin has a conscience . . .
😉
It’s not all public relations.
The world will not care whether Obama or Putin or other forces remove from battlefields — and if for all time, then good — the chemical weapons option. It is the other side of the equation — the one that would forestall the wanting to use such weapons — that would seem troublesome, i.e., the cultivation of conscience sufficient to turn a destructive capacity and drive, also the license afforded grandiose ambitions and delusions, toward courses more empathetic, kind, liberating, noble, and productive.
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Aside: a world that wants for basic resources, starting with energy and possibly ending with oxygen, must tame war itself, even if starting with the most barbaric of its rough edges, for the contemporary mix of exceedingly dangerous nuclear technologies and equally fragile alternative wonders (like solar-electric farms) demands that the exceptionally egotistical and reckless among leaders — those who too readily sacrifice others, including their own constituents and their children — be no more.
Such have become everyone’s monsters.
Fast Reference
By dragging Truthout URLs to this section, I have not joined the left, but I have as broad a spectrum of civil and gracious friends as I believe it possible to have in the online social networks, and so, as may we all, I get a good walk around the dimension of subjects of interest.
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.
German manufacturing of lethal chemicals –> via U.S. subsidiaries –> middle east countries with Reagan and Bush era Department of Defense aid and consent.
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.
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).
Chemical and biological weapons are absolutely prohibited under international humanitarian law. Debates and questions surrounding the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria are not fading away. Robert Mardini, the ICRC’s head of operations for the Near and Middle East, explains the organization’s position.
Tell me about the world in which you would like to live.
Will it be a world that holds itself to time honored ethical and moral standards?
Will it be a world in which self-awareness and the awareness of others inspires an integrating compassion and consideration for the humanity shared?
Will it be a world in which the most notable and powerful of public speakers may be trusted to keep their own laws, to restrain themselves from excessive or unbridled appetites, and to tell the truth whether it becomes them or not?
If you should wish to live in some other world, don’t bother with this blog.
* * *
Unknown to Syrian officials, U.S. spy agencies recorded each step in the alleged chemical attack, from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials. Those records and intercepts would become the core of the Obama administration’s evidentiary case linking the Syrian government to what one official called an “indiscriminate, inconceivable horror” — the use of outlawed toxins to kill nearly 1,500 civilians, including at least 426 children.
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