Bashar Al Assad

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-uses-gas.html


Assad Apparently ‘Gasses’ Civilians Days After Tillerson Hints He Can Stay in Power

Evidence of a sophisticated chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime suggests the dictator in Damascus thinks he’s now got Trump’s carte blanche to kill as he likes.

MICHAEL WEISS

KIMBERLY DOZIER

ROY GUTMAN

04.04.17 8:59 AM ET

ISTANBUL, Turkey—Days ago, in Ankara, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled that the U.S. had no quarrel with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a man Tillerson’s predecessor compared to Adolf Hitler after he slaughtered more than 1,000 people with poison gas in 2013.

The “longer-term status of President Assad,” Tillerson said, “will be decided by the Syrian people,” a euphemism used by Damascus, Moscow, and Tehran to indicate that he isn’t going anywhere.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer used almost identical language the next day, saying, “Well, I think with respect to Assad, there is a political reality that we have to accept in terms of where we are right now.”

But the gas, it appears, is raining down once again on civilians.

In a video made Tuesday, Dr. Shajul Islam showed the camera a young man lying on a gurney with a catatonic expression on his face. His pupils were shrunk to the size of pinheads. “This is not chlorine,” he said. “We do not smell chlorine on this patient.” The industrial chemical has often been used as crude weapon on the Syrian battlefield.

Perhaps this time it was organic phosphate, another easily acquired chemical.

+ YouTube Video

But other Syrians—and outside observers—say that it’s more likely the Assad regime dropped sarin gas on civilians—a much more sophisticated odorless and colorless nerve agent that Damascus was supposed to have gotten rid of as part of a U.S.-Russian-brokered deal in 2013.

“If it’s what it looks like, it’s clearly a war crime,” said a senior State Department official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity.

As ever in the six-year civil war, the death toll depends on whom you consult. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts it at 58. The White Helmets, on-the-ground first responders, at first said the figure was closer to 50. Other estimates are upward of 100 dead, with probably about 300 more injured.

The “poisonous gas,” as one Syrian activist put it, was dropped by helicopters in a series of airstrikes in the city of Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib province, one of the last enclaves of rebel control in the area, mainly administered by al Qaeda and other Islamist groups.

But videos on social media do not show jihadis lying as waxy corpses in makeshift hospitals. They show children. In one image, published by Al Jazeera, a half dozen are laid out in a row under a blanket in the back of a pickup truck. Boys on the left, girls on the right, their ages probably as young as 3.

Dr. Firas Jundi, health minister for the opposition interim government, told The Daily Beast he had the names of 60 people killed in the gas attack. He said the death toll was bound to rise as there are 300 wounded, many in critical care hospitals and clinics throughout the province.

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The number of victims was an indication that this is not chlorine gas, he added in a Whatsapp conversation from Idlib, where the interim government is located. "Usually chlorine doesn't kill such big number.”

He said the signs of trauma suggested a nerve agent like sarin was used in the attack, but testing was needed to say for sure. He said local authorities have recovered parts of the rocket that carried the gas canisters and are ready to turn them over to international investigators.

“What I noticed about the victims was they had difficulty breathing, many had lost consciousness and the pupils of their eyes had narrowed,” he said.

“If there are pinpoint pupils and convulsions, it’s likely nerve gas. The number of deaths is too high for chlorine for an outdoor attack,” said Andy Weber, former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs under the Obama administration.

Syria Attack


SHUTTERSTOCK

“Pinpoint pupils is diagnostic for sarin,” said Ambassador Laura Holgate, who was the Obama White House’s senior director for weapons of mass destruction. “Sarin kills you with a drop on your skin,” though its lethality depends on how its delivered, and the weather conditions when its dispersed.

“There was never any indication that we didn’t get all the sarin in the 2014 elimination project,” said Holgate, who was part of the team that negotiated the disarming Syria of its chemical arms in 2014, together with Moscow. “If he has sarin, it wasn’t declared or destroyed as it should have been,” as part of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-monitored operation.

“We may have gotten all of it, but they may have made more,” said Weber, who was part of the same Obama administration disarmament mission. “It’s a chemical synthesis process they obviously know how to do. Their entire [chemical warfare] program was indigenous.”

“You don’t have to have tons of it to deliver a few small bombs,” he added.

The only way to know definitively what was used is for the OPCW to gather its own tissue samples from survivors, which is difficult to do in hot zones that are still under fire. Otherwise, both former officials said, you have “chain of custody” issues in that you are trusting a human-rights group or other a local militia group’s account on exactly where and when a sample was taken.

“You’re taking their word for where they got it,” she said. “That’s why the U.S. government was always leery to lend its credence to the claims.”

Nevertheless, there are early and strong indicators of the Idlib attack’s perpetrator. “The fact that it was air delivered means it was definitely the regime that did it,” said Weber, who is now senior fellow at the Belfer Center.

The airstrikes started at around 6:30 Tuesday morning.

A hospital treating patients of the alleged chemical attack was also bombed, according to AFP, which was reporting from the location.

Syria Attack


SHUTTERSTOCK

This was not the only attack on civilians Tuesday. “The people in Idlib are terrified,” Jundi said. A hospital was bombed in Salqin, killing 15 people, he said. “Everyone here is waiting for death.”

Othman Al Khani, a Khan Sheikhoun resident who lives about one mile from the area targeted, said it was residential, and there were no military installations or personnel stationed there. At least half the residents were internally displaced families from Hama province.

“Last night was very long and tiring for the people of Khan Sheikhoun,” he told The Daily Beast. “We were under bombardment until late at night, and then when people slept they slept very deeply. That is why when the gas started to leak into the houses people didn't notice it. They were deep in sleep.”

But Khani was awake and listening to rebel radio warning there was a Sukhoi combat plane flying in the vicinity.

“I heard the sort of small explosion of the type that occurs when a missile doesn’t blow up,” he said. The plane flew another 15 minutes and carried out three more strikes, he said.

The first strike turned out to be the most lethal. The local first responders from the Civil Defense had come ill-equipped and were all affected by the gas, he said.

Later in the day, he witnessed the Khan Sheikhoun hospital and the Civil Defense center coming under attack. “I was there, inside the Civil Defense center,” he said. The Center, like the hospital, is located in a cave area out of the city. “The warplane kept maneuvering above us for half an hour and hit the two places with more than ten strikes,” he said. But they were well protected by big boulders, and only the equipment and cars outside the two locations were destroyed.

Idlib province has become a frequent drop zone for chemical agents. A year-long study conducted jointly by the United Nations and the OPCW found last year that regime helicopters dropped chlorine-filled bombs on the towns of Talmenes and Sarmin, the former in late April 2014, the latter in mid-March 2015.

Sryia Chem attack


AP

Chlorine is also a common industrial chemical. Its most familiar use is to keep water clean in swimming pools. But it was also one of the first chemical weapons used in World War I more than a century ago, and it is banned as an agent of warfare by the Chemical Weapons Convention. Syria signed on to that treaty in 2013 as part of a deal to acknowledge and relinquish its stocks of sarin, VX, and mustard gas. The alternative was to be U.S. intervention in the conflict.

The regime had used sarin that year in East Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, against opposition forces. Around 1,400 people were killed in that attack, according to the U.S. government, in the deadliest chemical weapons use since Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

Even after the OPCW judged that 99.6 percent of all declared chemicals in Syria had been removed from the country, it still found victims who had been exposed to sarin, a substance that is neither easily handled nor easily weaponized.

Last December, the regime reportedly used sarin again in eastern Hama, a day after Islamic State terror group fighters recaptured the ancient city of Palmyra. More than 90 were killed and 300 were hospitalized.

"I'm appalled by the reports that there's been a chemical weapons attack on a town south of Idlib allegedly by the Syrian regime," British prime minister Theresa May said in a statement.

"If proven, this will be further evidence of the barbarism of the Syrian regime... I'm very clear that there can be no future for Assad in a stable Syria which is representative of all the Syrian people and I call on all the third parties involved to ensure that we have a transition away from Assad," she added, using language that could not have been more different from the Trump administration's earlier statements.

But by Wednesday afternoon, the Trump administration had begun to shift that accommodationist tone, blaming the Assad regime—and President Obama—for the attacks. "These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration's weakness and irresolution." Spicer said.

The senior State Department official took a different tack, placing part of the blame for the attack on Moscow and Tehran.

“Russia and Iran signed up and they claim themselves to be the guarantors” of the Syrian regime, but are “unwilling or unable” to deliver on it, the official added.

The official added that the Trump regime would be “unlikely” to work with the Assad regime against ISIS, but did not insist Assad must go—saying that Syria’s future must be determined by its people via the Geneva negotiation process, led by UN Special Envoy Staffan De Mistura.

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017.../syri-a05.html


US seizes on dubious gas attack to push for expanded Syrian war

By Jordan Shilton

5 April 2017

The Trump administration has seized on allegations Tuesday that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad carried out a gas attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in the rebel-controlled province of Idlib to push for a further escalation of military conflict in the Middle East.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring body linked to the Syrian opposition, 58 people, among them 11 children aged eight or younger, were killed in the early morning attack.

Rebel forces, which control the area, accused the government of using chemical weapons in an air strike. Pro-government sources argued that the blast had been caused by an explosion at a weapons factory run by the Islamist al-Nusra Front, which has a strong presence in the region and has previously conducted chemical weapons attacks.

The Syrian government released a statement denying all responsibility, while Russia confirmed it had not launched any air strikes in the area.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov stated that the Syrian air force struck a munitions factory east of the town, where rebels were producing shells filled with toxic gas to be sent to Iraq. He added that Islamist militants had used similar chemical weapons last year during the fighting in the city of Aleppo.

While it remains unclear who bears responsibility for the reported attack, the circumstances surrounding it are highly dubious. Late last week, high-ranking Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, stated publicly that Washington’s main priority in Syria was not the removal of Assad but the waging of the conflict against Islamic State.

This prompted a sharp rebuke from leading Republicans and Democrats. Senator John McCain denounced any shift away from “regime-change” as a “recipe for more war, more terror, more refugees, and more instability.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s alleged attack, the tone was quite different. The Trump administration and the corporate-controlled media wasted no time in declaring the guilt of the Assad regime to be beyond doubt.

“Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world,” a statement from the White House declared. “These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a ‘red line’ against the use of chemical weapons, and then did nothing.”

This was an explicit criticism of the Obama administration, which incited the Syrian civil war in 2011, for its failure to launch an all-out US-led intervention in 2013 to topple Assad. At the time, Obama was on the verge of throwing the full force of the US military into battle against the Assad regime, following a weeks-long lying propaganda campaign about an alleged August 21, 2013 sarin gas attack on Gouta, east of Damascus. He was forced to pull back due to divisions within the military-intelligence establishment over the tactical advisability of a war in Syria, as well as deep-seated popular opposition to yet another act of US imperialist aggression.

The Western powers, led by the United States, have repeatedly seized on unverified allegations of chemical weapons’ use in Syria to ratchet up pressure on the Assad regime. The attack on Gouta, which claimed the lives of up to 1,000, was the most infamous. No concrete evidence was ever presented by the Obama administration linking Assad’s forces to the atrocity.

It was later revealed, in an article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, that the US deliberately ignored intelligence that al-Nusra was capable of manufacturing poison gas, including sarin, in bulk.

Trump and Tillerson have made no secret of their intentions to vastly escalate Washington’s wars in the Middle East. Last week’s remarks by Tillerson and Haley were in no sense a retreat from the US plan to assert hegemony over the energy-rich region, but a recognition that the US-backed rebel forces are in disarray after being driven out of Aleppo in December by Assad’s military and Russian airpower.

Two weeks ago, Tillerson told a meeting of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition that Washington was preparing for long-term occupations of Iraq and Syria. He proposed the creation of “interim zones of stability” to be overseen by US-installed politicians and protected by the US military—in other words, safe zones for the proxy US militias opposed to the Assad government.

The prospect of a direct US-led assault on the Syrian regime cannot be underestimated. The alleged gas attack has provided the pretext.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer stated ominously Tuesday: “I think the president has made it clear in the past and will reiterate that today, that he is not here to telegraph what we’re going to do. But rest assured that I think he has been speaking with his national security team this morning, and we will continue to have that discussion.”

That such an attack would be directed not only at Assad, but at Washington’s chief regional rivals in the Middle East, was made clear by Tillerson’s response to Tuesday’s events. The secretary of state denounced Assad for his “brutal, unabashed barbarism,” before adding that Russia and Iran bore “moral responsibility” for the attack.

Tillerson’s provocative remarks come on the heels of last week’s comments from General Joseph Votel, chief of the US Central Command, who told a House Armed Services Committee hearing that Iran “poses the greatest long-term threat to security in this part of the world.”

Since Trump took office, the war initiated by Obama in Syria and Iraq has been drastically intensified. Trump has given a free hand to commanders on the ground to launch air strikes and other attacks, while increasing the number of troops deployed on the ground and expanding their mandates to act closer to the front lines of fighting. The result has been a devastating rise in civilian casualties in both countries, with the death of hundreds of civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul and hundreds more in air strikes in northern Syria.

Trump has also moved to limit information released by the Pentagon on US military operations in the Middle East. “In order to maintain tactical surprise, ensure operational security and force protection, the coalition will not routinely announce or confirm information about the capabilities, force numbers, locations, or movement of forces in or out of Iraq and Syria,” Eric Pahon, a Pentagon spokesman, stated recently.

The Syrian conflict is becoming even more explosive as Washington’s imperialist rivals seek to assert their own interests with ever-more aggressiveness. A day prior to the gas attack, the European Union (EU) Council adopted a new Syrian strategy which demanded Assad’s removal and the implementation of a “political transition” in the country. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s High Representative, was one of the first to denounce Assad for the “awful” attack.

French President François Hollande and British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson have urged that Assad be held accountable for the gas attack. Both countries have military personnel operating in the country, as does Germany, which has been seeking to advance its own imperialist ambitions in the Middle East and Africa over recent years and has openly spoken of the need to stand up to the US in the wake of Trump’s assumption of the presidency.

An emergency session of the UN Security Council will take place on Wednesday, where an outpouring of anti-Assad, anti-Iranian and anti-Russian rhetoric can be expected from the US and European powers.

Working people in the United States and internationally must reject with contempt the feigned outrage of Trump, Hollande and other imperialist politicians over the slaughter of civilians. As demonstrated most recently by the bloodbath in Mosul, US imperialism has no qualms about indiscriminately massacring innocent civilians if it suits its own imperialist goals. Over the past quarter century, the unending series of wars waged by Washington have cost millions of people their lives and forced millions more to flee their homes.

The only way to put an end to the horrific conflict in Syria and Iraq is through the construction of an international anti-war movement dedicated to the struggle against war and the social system from which it arises: capitalism.

Copyright © 1998-2017 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017.../pers-a06.html


Syria’s alleged gas attack: An imperialist provocation

6 April 2017

The Trump administration publicly responded to unsubstantiated allegations that forces loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad bore responsibility for a chemical attack in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province with the threat of a new escalation of the American intervention in the war-ravaged Middle Eastern country.

Speaking alongside one of Washington’s favorite Arab puppet rulers, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, during a joint news conference at the White House, Trump declared that the “heinous actions by the Assad regime cannot be tolerated” and had “crossed a lot of lines for me.” While condemning his predecessor, Barack Obama, for failing to carry through on a threat to intervene militarily in Syria over alleged chemical weapons attacks in 2013, Trump declared “I now have the responsibility,” adding that his “attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”

Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, meanwhile, issued an even more direct threat of unilateral US military action in the run-up to an anticipated Russian veto of a provocative Western-backed resolution that could serve as a fig leaf for aggression against Syria. “When the United Nations consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action,” she said.

Fourteen years after the US invaded Iraq, turning that country and much of the Middle East into a charnel house, Washington is at it again, employing a strikingly similar pretext for imperialist aggression.

Once again, the US and world public is being bombarded with unsubstantiated claims about “weapons of mass destruction” allegedly employed by an oppressed former colonial country, mixed with crocodile tears and feigned moral outrage from a government responsible for more civilian deaths and war crimes than any regime since the fall of the Nazi Third Reich.

The pretext for this orchestrated campaign has all the earmarks of an imperialist provocation planned and executed by the Central Intelligence Agency and allied Western secret services with the aim of shifting US policy in relation to Syria.

First, there is the question of motive. Who benefits from such a crime? Clearly, it is not the Assad regime, which, with the aid of Russia and Iran, has largely vanquished the Islamist “rebels” that were armed, financed and trained by the CIA and Washington’s regional allies in the bloody six-year-long war for regime change. The government now rules over 80 percent of the country, including all of its major cities, with the Islamists’ hold reduced to largely rural areas of Idlib province. Under conditions in which the Trump administration had been signaling a shift in focus from toppling Assad to fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), why would Damascus carry out such a provocative attack?

The CIA-backed “rebels” themselves, however—along with their patrons in the US military and intelligence apparatus—have every interest in staging such a provocation as a means of thwarting the government’s consolidation of its rule throughout Syria. Moreover, numerous investigations, including by the UN’s own chemical disarmament agency, have made it clear that these forces, dominated by the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, the Al Nusra Front, have carried out similar attacks using both chlorine and sarin gas, which they have received from their regional backers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey and which they themselves have proven capable of manufacturing.

Then there is the issue of timing. The alleged gas attack was launched Tuesday morning, coinciding with the opening in Brussels of a European Union-sponsored “Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region,” which was to review proposals for “political transition” in Syria as well as Europe’s intervention in the potentially lucrative reconstruction of the ravaged country. The alleged chemical attack set the stage for renewed demands for regime change and criticism of the Trump administration for suggesting that the ouster of Assad was no longer a priority.

There is a definite pattern here. The last time that Washington and its allies accused the Assad regime of a major chemical weapons attack and nearly launched a full-scale war on that pretext was in August 2013. That alleged attack, which subsequent revelations exposed as a “rebel” provocation carried out with the help of Turkish intelligence, was launched on the very day that UN weapons inspectors arrived in Damascus.

The most telling aspect of the entire affair, however, is the extraordinary coordination of the entire corporate media in the launching of a full-throated campaign for military action before the basic facts of the incident were even known, much less a serious investigation conducted. It seemed that even before the alleged incident in Syria was reported, all of the major newspaper editors and columnists as well as the television news commentators had received the same talking points.

None of them, of course, bothered to inform their readers and viewers that the sole sources of the information they retailed as good coin consisted of Al Qaeda-connected “activists” in Syria along with US intelligence and military officials pushing for war.

Leading the pack, as usual, was the New York Times, which carried the headline “Chemical Attack on Syrians Ignites World’s Outrage.” What evidence there is of such “outrage,” outside of the world of intelligence agencies, state officials and their media hacks was not clear. Nor, for that matter, was there any explanation for the selective character of this “outrage.”

It is noteworthy that this moral outpouring came just a day after Trump gave the red carpet treatment to Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the butcher of Cairo, who slaughtered 1,000 unarmed demonstrators in a single day. Nor, for that matter, did the Times evince any such “outrage” over the 200 Iraqi civilians killed in a single US bombing raid in Mosul last month, or the hundreds if not thousands more buried alive by US bombs and missiles dropped on schools, mosques and homes in Syria itself, not to mention in Yemen.

There are certain bylines that appear on such articles that brand them as the product of direct collaboration with US intelligence. In this case, it was that of Anne Barnard, who has provided such services over the entire course of the US-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria. Her work was supplemented by that of Thomas Friedman, who has backed every US imperialist intervention over the course of over a quarter century. He offers a modest proposal for the “partition of Syria” and the creation of “protected” zones enforced by the US military. “It won’t be pretty or easy,” he allows, noting reassuringly that the US maintained 400,000 troops in Europe during the Cold War.

What is also strikingly uniform in the media propaganda campaign over the events in Syria is the across-the-board indictment of Iran and Russia as equally culpable in the alleged chemical attack. The Times editorial charged that the attack speaks to Assad’s “depravity and that of his enablers, especially Russia and Iran.”

A Washington Post editorial insisted: “Now it is Mr. Trump’s turn to decide whether to stand up to Mr. Assad and his Iranian and Russian sponsors.”

The aim is clear. The murky events in Syria are to be exploited in order to shift the bitter internal debate on foreign policy within the US ruling establishment. The intention is to bring the Trump administration into line with the predominant tendency within the US military and intelligence apparatus which is pushing for an uninterrupted buildup to military confrontation with both Iran and Russia.

That these efforts are having their desired effect found concrete expression Wednesday not only in Trump’s remarks on Syria, but also in the removal of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s fascistic chief strategist, from the principals committee of the National Security Council. The ouster of the ideological architect of Trump’s “America first” right-wing nationalist demagogy was reportedly dictated by Gen. H.R. McMaster, the president’s new national security adviser, an active duty officer who speaks for the Pentagon. Faced with intractable social and political crises at home, Trump, like his predecessors, appears to be turning toward war abroad.

The working class in both the US and internationally must take these developments, along with the CIA provocation in Syria and its accompanying media propaganda campaign, as a deadly serious warning. It faces the threat of being dragged not only into a renewed bloodbath in the Middle East, but a far more dangerous conflagration involving the world’s two major nuclear powers.

Bill Van Auken

Copyright © 1998-2017 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

[ckaihatsu]

Call to Urgent Action to Prevent US Attack on Syria!


US PEACE COUNCIL
Member of the World Peace Council
P. O. Box 3105, New Haven, Connecticut 06515
Telephone: 203-387-0370; Fax: 203-397-2539; Email: [email protected]

April 6, 2017

EMERGENCY!

Act Now to Prevent a Trump Attack on Syria!
Phone the White House and Congress Now!

Yesterday President Trump — who during the campaign expressed a desire for a new, more restrained approach to the war in Syria — publicly accepted the claim that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons against its own people, including children. He declared: “Lines have been crossed.” He threatened to take some sort of action. The photos are horrific. The media has for several days gone into full hysteria mode, repeating unproven allegations, attributing blame, and relying on biased sources. Is this another Gulf of Tonkin?

This is more than a dangerous moment. It is a full-blown war crisis. It is no secret that President Trump is an impulsive and often ill-informed individual. His Administration in its first months has been buffeted by missteps, defeats, and embarrassments. He may think he “needs a win.” We must make sure his Administration does not think an attack on Syria would be "a win." We have hours, at most a few days to do so.

We have been down this road before. Sophisticated observers have already noted this alleged attack has all the earmarks of a false flag operation. The Syrian government has absolutely no motive for mounting such an attack. (see: Gerry Condon; Patrick Henningsen; and Phyllis Bennis)

As a leader of Veterans for Peace, Gerry Condon, has wisely observed, the sources for the gas attack reports are the rebel forces themselves, their own media, and the "White Helmets" and other Western-funded NGOs who are notorious for creating "regime change" propaganda against the Assad government. Famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has documented that the last large Sarin attack blamed on the Syrian government was carried out by terrorist groups with the support of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Hersh also documented that chemical weapons were transported from Libya to U.S.-backed rebel groups in Syria by the CIA and Hillary Clinton's State Department.

Yet the mainstream media do not mention any of this. They ask no tough questions. They entertain no doubts. They repeat previous lies that have already been debunked. They unashamedly interview sources which have long been cheerleaders for military intervention in Syria.

We can stop an attack. In 2013, an immense surge of phone calls to the White House and Congress stayed the hand of President Obama under similar pressure to “do something.” We successfully prevented Obama from attacking Syria in 2013.

We can do it again. Pick up that phone!
Call the White House at 202-456-1414;
Call your Congress members House and Senate at 202- 224-3121
Yours in peace,

Alfred L. Marder, President
U.S. Peace Council

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[VoiceOfReason]

Most of the usa has become a warrior culture. Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters." There will be American blood, soon.

[ckaihatsu]

Protests in Cities Across the Country To Say NO To War On Syria


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Chris,

Protests in Cities Across the Country – Find one near you or organize one. Bring Refuse Fascism’s NO!

Donald Trump told us all along he would “bomb the shit out of” the Middle East.

Thursday he sent 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles into a Syrian government airbase, in what he said was retaliation against the Assad regime’s reported poison gas attack which killed 200 Syrian civilians.

Trump, who said he was responding to the deaths of “innocent children, innocent babies,” had ordered an airstrike on a mosque in Al-Jineh Syria March 16, killing 46 civilians. He has twice attempted to ban civilians from that same country, Syria, from entering the U. S. as refugees.

Join Refuse Fascism and other organizations to condemn the thuggish aggression of the Trump/Pence regime. They are illegitimate and a danger to humanity.

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[TomLeftist]

I think that the real objective of US government of saying and claiming that Bashar Al-Assad is an evil killer is really, to steal the oil and wealth of Syria. Even Ron Paul wrote an article about how the goals of the neocons warhawks is to own the whole world. The philosophers Voltaire and Schopenhauer claimed that the objective of countries with powerful armed forces invading countries with weaker armed forces is really the countries with stronger armed forces to steal wealth from the countries of weaker armed forces

The Ghouta attack rockets came from the hills, and Assad is correct when having stated that the chemicals can be homemade. In fact, the stabilzer for sarin occurs in the Crataegus (Syrian Hawthorn) that grows in those hills, and as Zizek has already stated, a third entity (the rabble, Jews, etc.) for class struggle is required. Indeed, not only was Joseph's walking stick made from the same wood, the compound that (stabilizes [italics]) sarin is found in Crataegus. The reader may have even more problems when linking Ukraine to Italian Crataegus (the White Hills), because Ukraine was founded as a Viking kingship / Eastern Rite Catholic. Unlike Knowledge Envy's burning of library at Alexandria, the recipe for sarin stabilizer is likely contained somewhere in the Vatican library.

[TomLeftist]

But a state using weapons and repression against its own people is normal like brushing your teeths. I don't see any thing wrong with that. All states since the ancient greeks and ancient states are really violent dictatorships. Even in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels claim that the goal of the workers-dictatorship right after the overthrow of capitalist states, is a repressive machine violating the rights of the overthrown enemy class (capitalist class). USA state doesn't use gas against its own people, but it has used other weapons and mass mass-murdered its own people (Waco, Texas) and individually murdered its own citizens (Oscar Grant, Michael Brown etc)

Felipe Calderon (former Mexican president killed 130,000 people in his governance. The thing is that US government didn't invade Felipe Calderon because Mexico is a free market capitalist neoliberal client state that is a slave state of USA, and lets US economic imperialists bomb Mexico with Mcdonalds, Wal marts, Taco Bells etc. What US economic imperialists really want as well on top of the oil is to fill Syria with Mcdonalds, Walmarts etc. (To Mcdonalize Syria)


.

Assad used weapons of mass destruction against his own people..

[TomLeftist]

I think that one of the main reasons of why there is not a powerful anti-war movement composed of about 100 million people or more, is that most US citizens are trained and educated with the mentality of "What's in it for me" thinking. And since there is not any automatic profit for each US anti-war activist if most americans would become a pro-active anti-war activist, most people in the USA are just not motivated to spend physical and mental energies to protest against the present threat of US Imperialism against the state of Syria.

Heck man, most US citizens are not even physically motivated to exercise and to follow a diet, because being in an ideal shape, in good physical shape won't automatically increase the personal incomes of people. That's the way people in USA think, with an evil Ayn Rand Wall Streets investor mentality

The Ghouta attack rockets came from the hills, and Assad is correct when having stated that the chemicals can be homemade. In fact, the stabilzer for sarin occurs in the Crataegus (Syrian Hawthorn) that grows in those hills, and as Zizek has already stated, a third entity (the rabble, Jews, etc.) for class struggle is required. Indeed, not only was Joseph's walking stick made from the same wood, the compound that (stabilizes [italics]) sarin is found in Crataegus. The reader may have even more problems when linking Ukraine to Italian Crataegus (the White Hills), because Ukraine was founded as a Viking kingship / Eastern Rite Catholic. Unlike Knowledge Envy's burning of library at Alexandria, the recipe for sarin stabilizer is likely contained somewhere in the Vatican library.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The real general reason for most US wars is kind of what they say at some point... you just have to parse through their euphemisms and over-generalizations. (The arguments they make to "sell" a war to the domestic and international public are usually BS).

The US wants "stability" by which they really mean the continued US dominance in most regions and to prevent regional (Russia, in this case) and international (china in most cases) competitors from gaining their own ground. This is how they can be "frenimies" with Assad during the "war on terror" and an enemy when the regime is no longer able to maintain that status-quo stability.

The US, Russia, Assad regime all have their own interests and none will make workers more powerful.

Most People in the US are confused because the news confuses things and the de-facto opposition Democrats have been cheerleading for Trump to "stand up to Russia" using warmongering xenophobic arguments.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[VoiceOfReason]

the usa can't afford universal health care, so they say. However, they can afford endless wars of oppression.

Why?

Because wars make profits for banks and the warrior cliques.

[ckaihatsu]

I think that the real objective of US government of saying and claiming that Bashar Al-Assad is an evil killer is really, to steal the oil and wealth of Syria. Even Ron Paul wrote an article about how the goals of the neocons warhawks is to own the whole world. The philosophers Voltaire and Schopenhauer claimed that the objective of countries with powerful armed forces invading countries with weaker armed forces is really the countries with stronger armed forces to steal wealth from the countries of weaker armed forces

News Updates from CLG
08 April 2017
http://www.legitgov.org/
All links are here:
http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news

Ah, then came the dawn. Oil prices soar after U.S. launches missile strike in Syria | 07 April 2017 | Oil prices surged more than 2 percent to a one-month high on Friday after the United States launched dozens of cruise missiles at an airbase in Syria, later dropping back as there seemed no immediate threat to supplies. U.S. President Donald Trump said he had ordered missile strikes against a Syrian airfield from which a deadly chemical weapons attack was launched earlier this week, declaring he acted in America's "national security interest" against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

[cruxcommunista]

LOL. "Assad used weapons of mass destruction against his own people", you watch too much Western TV. What is your evidence? Where are you getting it? The rebels who mobilize with IS have been the aggressors doing so. This is the same song and dance that has been used to justify Imperialist interventionist policies since time immemorial. The Syrian Arab Army have been doing very well against the extremists, and it has been the West's task to under-mind this achievement. Of course we should support the Kurds, why wouldn't we? This is already a virtual consensus in the Left.

[TomLeftist]

You know I don't know a lot and haven't read about how the US government uses psychology specialists, mind-manipulators and scientists of the brain to control people and to prevent a communist-revolution. But I think (like you just said), that the US mind-controllers, use a sort of de-construction of the meaning of words, euphemisms (like the ancient greeks and ancient evil Roman Imperialist gov did to sell their wars). And the mind-manipulators also know that most US citizens, even the 50 million or more immigrants who live in USA, love the USA a lot, and Napoleon Bonaparte as well as other thinkers (Slavoj Zizek) claimed that love destroys rational thinking.



For example (if a rich man falls in love with a beautiful woman, that rich guy would spend a lot of money in order to make that girl love him back). Even in the book "The Holy Family" there is a part that says that love has a sort of drug magical effect on people. And that's one of the reasons of why there is not a revolutionary situation in USA yet, even in a country where almost 100 million people will not be able to go to a dentist if they have a tooth ache. And where millions of people have to take like 20 sleeping pills before sleeping at night, because (In the present 100% neoliberal economic pure capitalist free market phase of capitalism), there is no security measures for workers who are fired, and for those workers to get the necessary money that they need every month (more than 600 dollars per month) in order not to sleep in a tent outside or in a parking lot)

Even Jefferson predicted that the USA will turn into a country of people sleeping the streets, I think he had Nostradamus powers or something like that.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -Thomas Jefferson

But that's what will happen in USA if americans keep loving their country so much, that they think a revolution against the ruling class is really a war against their own country. And the mind-controllers are able to sort of create the idea that a communist-revolution is really a terrorist ISIS, Al Qaeda hatred evil war against USA

the usa can't afford universal health care, so they say. However, they can afford endless wars of oppression.

Why?

Because wars make profits for banks and the warrior cliques.

[The Sentinel]

The British PM saying how "appalled" she is about what another regime did; kinda ironic I must say. I guess the British govt has just forgotten about the hundreds of years colonialism eh! Glass houses people!

[willowtooth]

The British PM saying how "appalled" she is about what another regime did; kinda ironic I must say. I guess the British govt has just forgotten about the hundreds of years colonialism eh! Glass houses people!

Who do you think sold Assad his sarin in the first place? lol

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

Should we "support Assad"? Firstly, who is "we"?

"We" need to recognize that there is a huge discrepancy in the kind of action which can realistically be taken to "support Assad" by the average Westerner when compared with the average Syrian. Syrians have to decide whether to obey their country's military conscription law; Western leftists are faced with what to post on social media or whether or not to network with whatever folks are at the nearest #HandsOffSyria protest. Given the inequality of this situation in which one supporter is asked to potentially sacrifice their own life and the other “supporter” is asked to spare some of their free time, Assad's "supporters" in the West really need to keep their privilege in the perspective.

The anti-war movement in the belly of empire, geographically isolated from Syria, is only superficially “on the same side” as the empire’s adversary in Syria and in whatever imperialist war it is that we are talking about. Did one have to “support” the Argentinian military junta, which was committing its own mini-Holocaust with US support before it came into conflict with Britain over the Falkland Islands?

Would a successful anti-war movement in the USA strengthen the Syrian government's position? Yes, because the USA and NATO have made Syria their military adversary. But does an anti-war movement in the USA need to declare support for Assad in order to be successful in defending Syria, as a nation, from US aggression? No, because the anti-war movement must do more than passively display cheerleading-like “solidarity” with the Syrian military; it must become an active participant in the defense of Syria by shutting down the U.S. war machine.

It must also be recognized that the U.S. anti-war movement is essentially failing to defend Syria from U.S. militarist aggression. In Syria, the state can be said to play a role in blocking the full impact of U.S. aggression. However, we also know that just a few years ago, the CIA was outsourcing torture to Syria with the full cooperation of its bourgeois authorities. Any government that would allow itself to be subjugated into complicity with this crime clearly lacks significant guidance by anti-imperialist principles.

The primary task of leftists outside Syria is to show solidarity with the people of Syria by building their own outside, independent movement to defend Syria, not stand on the outside and order Syrians to sacrifice their lives for their national defense (or selectively amplify the voices of Syrians who order other Syrians to sacrifice their lives for national defense from within Syria) or implicitly argue that the combat-capable individuals who choose to leave Syria as refugees are cowards for not being like the heroic military determiners of the nation's selfhood. Diaspora is also an aspect of a nation’s self-determination. Talk about “supporting” Assad more directly (as opposed to working as an independent force against US militarism) is empty bluster when there is no material basis to do so, no organization to facilitate the international brigades to fight in Syria under his leadership.

The other problem with transmuting an anti-war stance in the U.S. -- or any other country outside Syria for that matter -- into a pro-Assad, pro-Syrian Arab Army, pro-war stance is that it ignores the inter-imperialist character of the Syrian conflict. If highlighting the notion of "inter-imperialist conflict" causes you to groan or roll your eyes, you're probably a vulgar anti-imperialist.

Vulgar "anti-imperialists" are allergic to the phrase "inter-imperialist conflict" because they do not accept a Leninist theory of imperialism (which defines global monopoly capitalism as inherently multi-polar, never fully eliminating competition between various national centers of the world system). Instead they have adopted the Kautskyian notion of ultra-imperialism/super-imperialism (the theory that Empire would eventually unite, and now supposedly has united, all the world's imperialist forces into one camp for joint exploitation of the planet). This leads them to pretend that the “other” great powers, namely China and Russia, are not imperialist states, ignoring the fact that they use finance capital to dominate the economies of smaller nations which they had previously annexed via military conquest (e.g. Moldova, Crimea) or that China-based multinationals are invading the territories of indigenous peoples in Bolivia or the Niger Delta. Thus the pro-war Western "supporter" of Assad, while attempting to co-opt the Western anti-war movement, must simultaneously oppose any efforts to build movements which weaken the appetite for imperial conquest and/or defense of gains made by imperial conquest in the other capitalist great powers (i.e. China and -- especially -- Russia), because the Russian war effort in favor of maintaining the status quo of Syria as a host of Russian militarism is painted as anti-imperialist, despite the aforementioned reality of Russian imperialism.

Vulgar anti-imperialism's demand is for the defeat of one empire at the hands of another. Vulgar anti-imperialism is the naive belief that when one empire conflicts with another and acts in its own interests, it is implementing anti-imperialist policy against that other empire.

Those whose anti-war praxis consists of betting on military outcomes offered by conflicting imperialist forces do not propose socialism, but progressive capitalism. Because the vulgar “anti-imperialist” left does not propose the construction of any alternative outcome to those offered by the conflicting imperialist powers, it is the ultimate reduction of political engagement to spectacle and consumption.

[willowtooth]

I dont think we should be against US involvement in Syria because that presupposes that another country wont take their place. Everyone on the left got all up in arms over the Iraq war, and what difference did it make? It's the 15 year anniversary of the iraq war and American troops aren't leaving anytime soon. If you add to that the fact that Trump is increasing the military budget by 10% or $50 billion it shows that American military interventionism, imperialism, whatever you want to call it, is not stopping anytime soon. This means any efforts against the Syrian war are both futile and short sighted.

[ckaihatsu]

I dont think we should be against US involvement in Syria because that presupposes that another country wont take their place. Everyone on the left got all up in arms over the Iraq war, and what difference did it make? It's the 15 year anniversary of the iraq war and American troops aren't leaving anytime soon. If you add to that the fact that Trump is increasing the military budget by 10% or $50 billion it shows that American military interventionism, imperialism, whatever you want to call it, is not stopping anytime soon. This means any efforts against the Syrian war are both futile and short sighted.

This, unfortunately, is a *utilitarian* argument.

My own position is on the grounds of U.S. *performance* against ISIS, which has been fair, but certainly not laudable. (One would think that a country like the U.S. would be far more aggressive in getting rid of ISIS since it has suffered multiple attacks on its own soil from that organization.)

From post #36:

Yes, there's a clear parallel between Iraq then and Syria now -- in both cases we as socialists should be anti-imperialist, meaning that we oppose new U.S. / NATO / Western initiatives and interventions as acts of 'betterment' (my terming).

I'm currently seeing a lot of foot-dragging regarding the U.S.'s efforts as part of the SDF, so I'd certainly default to siding with the regional major powers there, as a hoped-for return to the ante-imperialist status quo, as a start. Syria, Russia, and Iran would do better than the U.S. with all of its flip-flopping and rock-bottom credibility.

Regarding the latter part of LC's content at post #56, I think we need to distinguish between inter-imperialist geopolitics, and our own, class-based interests as the worldwide working class. We have no *inherent* material interest in *any* country, of course, and would prefer to see a total *collapse* of *all* great-powers conflict at once -- that not being realistic, though, we have to look at what would be most disruptive to nation-state *hegemony* there, as from the U.S., NATO, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Unless we ourselves have a solid countervailing force to summarily *neutralize* the entire situation -- a worldwide workers strike -- we should look to how inter-imperialist conflicts can play out in the least overall damaging way.

We might call this the *good-flipside* of world war -- that conflicts among the major powers at least forestall hegemony and continued mono-imperialist takeovers of the world's various regions. This isn't to call for grassroots involvement behind the various contending nations -- Syria, Russia, North Korea, and China -- but rather to say that world war can have a *class-polarizing* effect on people's consciousness due to the potential popular rejection of *all* bourgeois forces, shown plainly to be barbaric.

[The Sentinel]

I have to agree, the issue here isn't US involvement in Syria. I think it's US military involvement anywhere. Cz that's not helping other countries or the US itself, in the long run that is. There's a reason why large empires don't last forever. And the current US foreign policy just seems awfully similar to the Roman one. I guess someone needs to find more sustainable way to run the empire.. I mean country.