Saturday, April 14, 2018

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE MISSILE ATTACK ON SYRIA - MORE ON THE RELATED SKRIPAL POISONING AFFAIR IN BRITAIN - AND REFLECTIONS ON THE KIND OF WORLD INTO WHICH WE HAVE BEEN THRUST - NO RULE OF LAW - NO ETHICS OR MORALITY - JUST MIGHT MAKES RIGHT

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT



‘Russia has been spying on the Skripals for at least five years, Britain claims”



That is hardly any logical person's idea of proof.

Just one more government spokesperson, in effect, saying the same thing but using some embroidered details to make it interesting for the press.

And, of course, the press happily complies in publicizing it.

By the way, the claim that Russia took an active interest in the Skripals for five years is close to laughable. He was never a truly important spy, and his active service goes back too many years to make him of the least threat to Russia.

Not one of the real and hard questions about this matter has been answered. Not one. Such as how you can touch nerve gas but walk around for a considerable length of time before collapsing? Or why the doctor, who first treated the daughter on an emergency basis where she was discovered collapsed on a bench, was wholly unaffected? Or why Salisbury was not immediately evacuated and cordoned off upon the poison’s "discovery"? Or why no one can speak to the Skripals? All those questions and many more.

This then seems to have become the standard of British justice, at least in all matters involving Russia: accuse and punish before proving anything. And Theresa May and Company have now proved they can get away with doing so.

The same standard was applied to the missile strike in Syria. The international chemical weapons investigators, the OPCW, who are to closely examine the area where it is claimed the Syrian government used poison gas, had not even yet fully deployed to begin their work before the attack. Why the rush?

This is just sick, and anyone supporting such a standard deserves the contempt of all honest thinking people.

What could drive Britain - with the United States and France, as though three bullies somehow made an assertion into hard proof and made their acts just - to behave in this extraordinary way?

The answer is clear for those who follow events closely, but of course most people have neither the time nor inclination to do so, making it easy for governments  like Britain’s to behave in such awful ways.  The war in Syria is basically lost. A six-year investment in recruitment, training, paying, supplying, and covertly assisting gangs of mercenaries posing as jihadi types is pretty much down the drain.

The goal was the destruction of Syria and its effective Balkanization, exactly the same fate imposed upon Libya and Iraq. All part of a long-term American-Israeli plan for the “birth of a new Middle East,” a “birth” which so far has cost about two million lives and millions of desperate refugees with the promise of yet more ahead.

Only in Iraq, national armies were openly used. Here, in Syria, the effort was to avoid having to do that and yet achieve the same result.

Of course, the use of national armies - U S and British - had many disadvantages in the Iraq War, from being accused of illegal invasion - exactly what Iraq was - to having leaders like Blair and Bush end up publicly disgraced.

Besides, that cost a great deal of money. This phony-jihadi approach has been largely financed by Saudi Arabia’s princes - people, by the way, for whom the presence of large foreign armies in the Middle East becomes a serious domestic political liability. The Saudi princes are also people who have worked for years trying to regain the good will of America after 9/11. They are willing to do almost anything which doesn’t generate instability at home.

So, America teamed up with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, France, and originally Turkey to launch and sustain a six-year work of destruction in Syria. Because the actors employed were "rag-heads," it was possible to sit back and pooh-pooh the horrors you were in fact assisting.

Britain and America pretended to bomb outfits like ISIS while largely in fact destroying Syrian infrastructure, thus providing ISIS and other ugly mobs like al-Nusrah effectively with an air force. All of the above-named countries supplied weapons to the mercenaries - many caches have been discovered by advancing Syrian forces with the countries of manufacture clearly stamped on them - and they periodically sent in covert special forces to assist them. British and Americans have been spotted there in the past, and, of course, now France openly moves troops illegally into the Kurdish region.

But the effort in Syria has largely failed, and the Israel Lobby is very unhappy about the fact. The evidence for that is seen in a score of little clues - Israel is hardly going to publicly "own" the Syrian horror although it always verbally attacks Assad, even while its own army is busy slaughtering unarmed Palestinians - clues from renewed attacks on Jeremy Corbyn - whose true glaring fault is that he does not support this kind of nasty stuff - to calls by various Israelis and Israeli apologists in the United States openly calling for Assad's assassination.

Only the other day, an apologist at the American Enterprise Institute, one of America's privately-endowed "think-tanks" which basically serve as academic-looking propaganda mills, Michael Rubin, openly suggested that it was time to kill Assad.

His call just mimicked the recent words of an Israeli minister, almost like an effort to give a public call for state murder some respectability. That's sure my idea of a principled approach, but that is just a part of the ugly realities of the Syrian War – so often deliberately misrepresented as a civil war.

After all, with the disappearance of the Syria we know, Israel hoped not only to further legitimize its illegal occupation of Syria's Golan Heights but to grab still another slice of Syrian property for its Greater Israel project. It also would see a neighbor who did not agree with all its illegal and unethical behavior swept conveniently away.

Well, now with all the missile explosions in Syria - again, all completely illegal under international law - Trump and May and Macron can crow and boast and thump their chests like the apes they imitate. They get to strut around and tell their people what strong leaders they are. Maybe get a little adulation and support, all of them being unpopular in their own countries. After all, it is well-known effect on the psychology of populations that they tend to close ranks in conflicts.

And they want to be seen as leaders of such high principles as that no injured child could possibly go unrevenged. America should try telling that to the parents of the vast pile of child corpses which it left in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Iraq, and in still other places.

A million children killed by this wonderful country would be an extremely conservative estimate. You see, in poorer countries, populations are very young with a high proportion of children compared to adults, and when you bomb such places, you absolutely kill vast numbers of children. And, boy, does the United States like bombing such places.

Even were the United States not in fact what it is – the world’s greatest killer of children over the last half century or so – who or what appointed them to revenge events in other places, even were the events genuine, as they very much are not Syria? America completely ignored many genuine mass murders – in Rwanda, in Indonesia, in Cambodia, in the Iraq-Iran War, in Chile, in Palestine. Why? Because there was nothing politically to be gained. America’s self-appointed role as “punisher of injustice” seems limited only to countries where it is politically engaged and has something to gain.

The attack was carefully planned not to affect Russia, who had made it very clear what the consequences of doing so would be, and, in truth, it accomplished little. The dirty foreign-inspired Syrian War is mainly over, and the bad guys lost.



FURTHER THOUGHTS ON AMERICAN AND BRITISH ACCUSATIONS OF SYRIA’S USING CHEMICAL WEAPONS:

The authorities responsible for what is virtually certain to have been a staged false gas attack in Syria have little regard for the intelligence of their citizens.

Why would Syria, which has pretty close to won its war against foreign terrorists, even think of doing this at this time in this place? And for so little advantage to themselves?

If Syria still had chemical weapons, why confine their use to this little patch?

At this moment when a whole renewed public controversy had been raised in Britain with the questionable Skripal affair?

It makes no sense. Syria could have used such weapons in multiple areas, saving some hard street fighting in many instances, but it did not.

Further, even were the attack genuine, using real chemical weapon, why would the cutthroats trying to destroy Syria not be the likely candidates?

Why is Assad automatically accused? And without a bit of evidence?

Absolutely none of our corporate press, despite running story after story with glaring accusatory headlines, has even a single reporter on the spot. They’ve questioned no real authorities either. There is zero journalism behind those headlines, such as we’ve seen in The Guardian for days.

In all such matters, whose word do you give more weight to? Russia, which has destroyed its stocks under the international chemical weapons treaty or the United States, which still has not done so?

Remember, the greatest independent investigative reporter on the planet, Sy Hersh, told us clearly a while back that the United States ran an operation out of Gadhafi’s smashed Libya, an operation supervised by Hillary Clinton, transferring quantities of the murdered Gadhafi’s stocks of nerve agent to the mercenaries in Syria so that a “red-line” event could occur, allowing Obama to freely and self-righteously bomb Syria and reduce it to the chaos that had been made of Libya?

And remember, only a major Russian diplomatic effort prevented the fraud at that time. Syria surrendered, under international supervision, its existing stocks of chemicals for destruction by Russian experts. Syria, like Libya, had maintained such weapons as a counter to Israel’s unacknowledged and totally illegal nuclear arsenal.

Remember also, in the run-up to America’s illegal invasion of Iraq, America and Britain lied day after day about Saddam having such weapons? We had foolish scenes at the UN and foolish dossiers published, all created as part of a stage play to tell the world that Saddam had what he did not have at the time, chemical weapons.

Remember further, in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a terribly bloody war secretly encouraged by the United States to weaken revolutionary Iran, chemical weapons were used heavily by Iraq to slaughter many thousands of Iranians who seemed about to prevail.

Where did those weapons suddenly come from? And did you hear any great outcry over that genuine atrocity at the time?

No, in these matters, people who follow events understand that the unsubstantiated word of the United States or Britain is proven worthless by recent history.