Only Fools and Liars will Blame Assad

2018-10-06White Nettle

So, here’s how it is:

1) There is still no evidence – that has been presented to the public – that Assad ordered a chemical weapons (CW) attack.

2) Yes, that evidence should be made public, discussed and debated by Congress, and a vote taken before we use force. I acknowledge that the War Powers Resolution gives the President the authority to use force for 60 days – but the interests of peace and stability are better served through a debate and a democratic process as opposed to a unilateral decision made in secret, especially when the military action is punitive and not in our immediate national defense interests.

3) Even if Assad ordered the attack and is responsible, the above still applies – that is, if “America First” actually means “America First”, though it is becoming rapidly clear that it means nothing at all from Trump’s mouth.

4) Our government has lied us into wars in the past and may be doing so again.

5) We are relying on “intelligence” from countries and organizations with vested personal interests in seeing Assad removed from power – just as we did with the Iraq and Libya fiascoes. History is repeating itself beat for beat here.

6) The Syrian government’s account of things makes sense to me, though I will listen to anyone who wants to point out holes in the logic – yes, Syrian warplanes did fly over that town, and yes, they did drop something from their planes. They were conventional bombs that took out a depot housing chemical weapons owned and controlled by one of the rebel groups (probably not ISIS). This accounts for the low number of casualties and the fact that aid workers in the pictures are not in full protective gear. It was the amount of sarin that might be released from the bombs being destroyed as opposed to detonated. Am I wrong? I admit I am certainly no expert and I will gladly accept correction here.

7) No foreign policy decision has ever been based upon “protecting innocent lives.” I’m sorry, but that isn’t the way the world works. This is about escalating conflict with Russia, as part of a long-term, ongoing geopolitical strategy to prevent the rise of superpowers that can challenge the United States. The speed and hysterical pitch of Nikki Haley’s denunciations of Russia at the UN today are proof enough of this.

8) Assad really had no reason to do this – to risk the wrath of the international community and Western military intervention – to kill fewer than 100 people and obtain no strategic advantage. You have to have a Saturday-morning cartoon supervillianish view of the man to believe this. It is not an adult, rational analysis or perception of reality.

9) ISIS and other jihadist fanatics have been emboldened by these strikes and are attacking targets once under the protection of the airfield that was hit – proving once again that you cannot simultaneously fight ISIS and the enemies of ISIS.

10) It is not in our interest to escalate tensions with Russia. It is not in our interest to avenge the deaths of people who may have been killed by Assad. In fact, it is the height of hypocrisy. How many children did we kill in Mosul just recently? How many children were blown to bits in Yemen by weapons we provided to Saudi Arabia? How many dead in Libya? How many in Iraq? The United States has the blood of hundreds of thousands of children on its hands. It has no moral high ground. NO COUNTRY DOES in this regard. So if you allow yourself to be moved by such arguments, you are a dupe, a sucker and a fool. It is a non-issue, because we are all guilty.

In this photo taken on Sunday, April 20, 2014, and released on the official Facebook page of the Syrian Presidency, Syrian President Bashar Assad, right, checks a damaged church during his visit to the Christian village of Maaloula, near Damascus, Syria. Assad visited on Sunday a historic Christian village his forces recently captured from rebels, state media said, as the country’s Greek Orthodox Patriarch vowed that Christians in the war-ravaged country “will not submit and yield” to extremists. The rebels, including fighters from the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front, took Maaloula several times late last year. (AP Photo/Syrian Presidency via Facebook)

If you blindly cheer a course of action that can lead to a third World War, on a planet full of nuclear weapons, you’re not only a fool – but all of your moral posturing is in vain, because “your team” has murdered far more people, including children, than “their team.” So even your own sense of self-righteousness, no matter how hotly it burns within you, is in objective reality a total delusion.

Originally published on 2017-04-09

About the author: Joe Hargrave is a political commentator and lecturer based in Southern California

Source: Fort Russ

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]

CNN Fake News

READ MORE!

Freedom Rider: Churchill, Columbus, and Leopold Fall Down

Millions of white people glorify mass murderers because their sense of identity and place in society is deeply tied to white supremacy.“It is important to name and shame the mass murderers.”The perpetrators of crimes against humanity are often elevated to positions of respect and admiration. It all depends on who did the killing, and who was killed. Now the murderers are being called to account. The new movement in the United States against police and other state violence has inspired this welcome change taking place all over the world. The criminals are being exposed decades and even centuries after their atrocities ...

Trump’s UN Speech (September 2017)

I listened to part of Trump’s UN speech this morning. I was so embarrassed for him and for my country that I had to turn it off.I wonder if whoever wrote the deplorable speech intended to embarrass Trump and inadvertently embarrassed America as well, or whether the speechwriter(s) is so imbued with the neoconservative arrogance and hubris of our time that the speechwriter was simply blind to the extraordinary contradictions that stood out like sore thumbs all through the speech.I am not going to describe all of them, just a couple of examples.Trump went on at great length about how ...

Neo-Nazi Network in German Army Exposed

The arrest of a German army officer suspected of plotting the assassination of leftist politicians and high-ranking state officials has exposed the operations of neo-Nazi forces at the highest levels of the German military (Bundeswehr). The information that has emerged thus far indicates that the suspected officer-terrorist was part of a broader network of fascists within the Bundeswehr, and that his activities were known to his superiors and covered up by them. Most astonishing is the official reaction to these alarming revelations. They have prompted an outpouring of anger in the German media and from the establishment parties directed not at the ...

“The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?” [Review of John Marciano’s Book]

In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman Charon ferries the dead across the Acheron to a place where they lose memory. Nothing of what made them human remains—happiness, suffering, love, hatred, guilt, regret, redemption, betrayal, forgiveness. From Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Aeneas, the living heroes of the epic descend into the Underworld at a point of despair in the sense of their quest. Burdened by a fate that requires momentous courage and tragic self-sacrifice for the sake of their people’s survival, they resent ...

Media Erase NATO Role in Bringing Slave Markets to Libya

Twenty-first century slave markets. Human beings sold for a few hundred dollars. Massive protests throughout the world. The American and British media have awakened to the grim reality in Libya, where African refugees are for sale in open-air slave markets. Yet a crucial detail in this scandal has been downplayed or even ignored in many corporate media reports: the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in bringing slavery to the North African nation. In March 2011, NATO launched a war in Libya expressly aimed at toppling the government of longtime leader Muammar Qadhafi. The US and its allies flew some 26,000 sorties ...

Ratko Mladic’s Sham Trial and Conviction

The Western-controlled International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was charged with delivering victor’s justice, polar opposite the real thing.In March 2016, it wrongfully convicted Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on multiple counts of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and crimes against humanity, sentencing him to 40 years in prison.At age-71, it was a virtual life sentence. He served as Bosnian Serb Republika Srpska president from 1992 – 1996, part of Bosnia and Herzegovina.Alleged genocide at Srebrenica was more myth than massacre. Deaths were hugely inflated, the ICTY established to blame Serbs for war crimes committed by both sides.Srebrenica ...

Muslim Albanian Women from Kosovo are Training ISIS Terrorists

Accoring to the “Zeri” news agency from the city of Priština, women who join the Islamic state are mostly 23 years of age, and before joining them they were “modern girls“. One of them is Laura Huseni who was, according to the editor-in-chief of the “Zeri” magazine, a typical teenage girl from Kosovo who used to go out and have fun with her mates. – She would take a cab and go with her friends for a drink. She used to dress like all her friends, she would wear skirts of jeans. She was very modern – said Faik Ukasmajli, whose son married ...

The Harvesting of Palestine. The Zionist Project Prevails?

A picture taken on July 4, 2018 from the Israeli-annexed Syrian Golan Heights shows displaced Syrians from the province of Daraa staging a protest (top L) calling for international protection, in the Syrian the village of al-Rafid, near the border fence with Israel. / AFP PHOTO / JALAA MAREYWith the recent failed bid by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Arab League at the UN security council, to try and end Israelis’ occupation of Palestinian land and to create a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders, it seems an appropriate moment to review the situation for Palestinians since 1915.What ...

Netanyahu Victory Lays Bare Israel as Racist, Colonial State

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is elating after his right-wing Likud Party secured a firm victory in the Israeli elections on March 17. It was a very close race against the Zionist Union Party, led by Isaac Herzog. Our next guest, Shir Hever, in an interview he did with us last month, predicted that Prime Minister Netanyahu would win in spite of many strikes against him at the time. So, defying election polls leading up to the election, Prime Minister Netanyahu has ...

For Decades Russia Has Been Forced to Respond to NATO Expansion

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949 on the pretext of “containing Soviet influence”, has almost doubled in size within the past two decades alone. In 1998, NATO comprised 16 member states, but with repeated expansions up to Russia’s very borders, it now contains almost 30 countries.Though seldom mentioned in mainstream discourse, NATO is a US-dominated organization, whose orders are issued from Washington and customarily obeyed. The US is by far the largest contributor to the alliance, spending more than all other member nations put together.One of the critical reasons behind NATO’s formation almost 70 years ago, was ...

Аbout a Greater Serbia

The Western-backed myth of a Greater SerbiaMuch space, time and efforts have been devoted in the recent history of West Balkans, and in particular in the latest political upheavals, about the alleged project of a Greater Serbia especially by the Western authors either academic scholars or journalists.[1] The issue must be, however, considered together with its counterparts from Croatia (a Greater Croatia) and Albania (a Greater Albania). There are two focal questions that arose here:Were all these projects serious and what was the origin of this maximalist concept of forming the national states in the otherwise ethnically mixed area?Whose exact ...

(Quasi)Academic Foundations of a Racist Greater Albania

The topic to be addressed in this text is the basic misconception on the question of the Balkan Albanian ethnogenesis and national identity that was framed by extremely geo-politically coloured the German-based “Illyrian” theory of the Albanian ethnic and cultural origin. This (quasi)theory, unfortunately, has very deep and negative regional political-security consequences during the last century.The implementation of the “Illyrian” (quasi)theory of the Albanian ethnogenesis was accepted firstly by the Rilindja, (the renaissance) – the Albanian nationalistic and chauvinistic political movement in 1878–1913 for the sake to create the ethnically pure Greater Albania as a national state of all Balkan ...

A New Islamic Occupation of Iberian Peninsula?

"Evicted five centuries ago by crusading Christians, the Arabs are back in Spain, using their oil dollars to buy land that was seized from their ancestors by the sword". — James M. Markham, The New York Times, 1981. The Madrid daily ABC wrote that 800 mosques in Spain are out of control. The Spanish daily La Razon charged that Gulf donors, such as Qatar, were a source of Spain's Islamization. The Saudis also launched a new Spanish television channel, Córdoba TV, as did Iran. They dream of, and work to, regain the "lost Caliphate" of Spain. Some Islamists do ...

Hearts Beat in Kosovo for Islamist Warriors

As Kosovo tries to stop its sons from going off to fight in Iraq and Syria, sympathy for their cause remains strong among some hardline Muslims.The calls stopped coming more than three months ago.Even while fighting in Iraq and Syria for the militants of Islamic State, Musli Musliu still checked in with his family regularly. He used to post photos on Facebook, showing a beaming young man posing with his comrades. One even shows him in a sweet shop.It was during one of those calls, in April, that he broke the news that his brother, Valon, had been killed. The ...

Kosovo’s Great Martyr

The Battle and the Nation The consciousness of a distinct Serbian ethnic identity had been present among the Serbs since the times of the founder of an independent medieval Serbian state, veliki župan (Grand Duke) Stefan Nemanja (1166−1196).[1] These consciousnesses were further strengthened by both when Serbia became a kingdom in 1217 and with the establishment of an autocephalous archbishopric in 1219 as a national independent (Christian Orthodox) church.[2] However, the Battle of Kosovo (on the morning of June 28th, 1389)[3] which the Serbs de facto lost to the Ottoman Turks and the death of a Serbian ruler, Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović ...

Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest. Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations. [wpedon id="4696" align="left"]

Dresden Terror Bombing, Like Hiroshima, a Maniacal Warning to Moscow

This weekend 75 years ago, the German city of Dresden was razed to the ground by British and American aerial bombardment. At least 25,000 mainly civilians were destroyed in raid after raid by over 1,200 heavy bombers, indiscriminately dropping high explosives and incendiaries. It took seven years just to clear the rubble.The destruction of Dresden, a world-famous cultural center of Baroque majesty, has been long dogged by controversy. Official British and American military accounts claim it was necessary to hasten the collapse of the Third Reich; with a reasoning that resonates with US claims for dropping the atomic bombs on ...

Afghanistan: The Forgotten Proxy War

July 3, 2019 marks the 40th anniversary of when the United States’ first military assault against Afghanistan with the CIA-backed Mujahideen began. It would be a mistake to treat the present-day conflict as being separate from the U.S. intervention that began in 1979 against the then-government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Afghanistan was not always known as the chaotic, ‘failed state’ overrun by warlords as it is now; this phenomenon is a product of that U.S.-led regime change operation. The article below, originally published on March 30, 2019, summarizes and analyzes the events that transpired during and after the Cold War ...

As the Election Turns: Trump the Anti-Neocon, Hillary the New Darling of the Neocons

Just as the Republican convention demonized Hillary (“Lock Her Up”), so the Democrats are demonizing Donald Trump. They refuse to support any policy that he backs, even when he says something progressive.One might think that at least Bernie’s supporters would applaud Trump’s left-wing transformation of the old conservative, pro-corporate neocon Cheney-Bush core of the Republican Party. But nobody had a single good word to say about Trump’s assertions that he would wind down confrontation with Russia, reduce military spending on the grounds that NATO is obsolete, and oppose the TPP and TTIP as well as rewrite NAFTA’s terms.The Democrats are ...

The Complete History of Monsanto, “The World’s Most Evil Corporation”

First published by Waking Times, posted by Global Research in May 2014, this article provides a historical viewpoint. It is of particular relevance in relation to the Monsanto-Bayer merger. Of all the mega-corps running amok, Monsanto has consistently outperformed its rivals, earning the crown as “most evil corporation on Earth!” Not content to simply rest upon its throne of destruction, it remains focused on newer, more scientifically innovative ways to harm the planet and its people. 1901: The company is founded by John Francis Queeny, a member of the Knights of Malta, a thirty year pharmaceutical veteran married to Olga Mendez Monsanto, for which Monsanto Chemical Works ...