Authored by
Robert Parry via ConsortiumNews.com,
President Trump
earned neocon applause for his hasty decision to attack Syria and kill about a
dozen Syrians, but his rash act has all the earmarks of a “wag the dog” moment.
Just two days
after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President
Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the
Syrian regime’s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against
a Syrian airfield.
The
guided-missile destroyer USS Porter conducts strike operations while in the
Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ford
Williams)
Trump
immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from
neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy
away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his
surprise victory on Nov. 8.
There is also
an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a “high
degree of confidence” that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb
on civilians in Idlib province.
But a number of
intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the
preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at
fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a
provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a
conventional bombing raid.
One
intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by
the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days
earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek “regime change” in Syria
and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that
represent the core of the rebel forces.
The source said
the Trump national security team split between the President’s close personal
advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared
Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a protégé of neocon
favorite Gen. David Petraeus.
White House
Infighting
In this
telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as national security
adviser and this week’s removal of Bannon from the National Security Council
were key steps in the reassertion of neocon influence inside the Trump
presidency. The strange personalities and ideological extremism of Flynn and
Bannon made their ousters easier, but they were obstacles that the neocons
wanted removed.
Though Bannon
and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the
belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama
administration’s CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a
“false-flag” operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining
the Syrian war on the side of the rebels — and the intelligence analysts’
similar beliefs about Tuesday’s incident.
Instead, Trump
went along with the idea of embracing the initial rush to judgment blaming
Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added that Trump saw Thursday
night’s missile assault as a way to change the conversation in Washington,
where his administration has been under fierce attack from Democrats claiming
that his election resulted from a Russian covert operation.
If changing the
narrative was Trump’s goal, it achieved some initial success with several of Trump’s
fiercest neocon critics, such as neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey
Graham, praising the missile strike, as did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. The neocons and Israel have long sought “regime change” in Damascus
even if the ouster of Assad might lead to a victory by Islamic extremists
associated with Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State.
Wagging the Dog
Trump employing
a “wag the dog” strategy, in which he highlights his leadership on an
international crisis to divert attention from domestic political problems, is
reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s decision to attack Serbia in 1999 as
impeachment clouds were building around his sexual relationship with intern
Monica Lewinsky.
President
Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at joint press
conference on Feb. 15. 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
Trump’s
advisers, in briefing the press on Thursday night, went to great lengths to
highlight Trump’s compassion toward the victims of the poison gas and his
decisiveness in bombing Assad’s military in contrast to Obama’s willingness to
allow the intelligence community to conduct a serious review of the evidence
surrounding the 2013 sarin-gas case.
Ultimately,
Obama listened to his intelligence advisers who told him there was no
“slam-dunk” evidence implicating Assad’s regime and he pulled back from a
military strike at the last minute – while publicly maintaining the fiction
that the U.S. government was certain of Assad’s guilt.
In both cases –
2013 and 2017 – there were strong reasons to doubt Assad’s responsibility. In
2013, he had just invited United Nations inspectors into Syria to investigate
cases of alleged rebel use of chemical weapons and thus it made no sense that
he would launch a sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, guaranteeing that the
U.N. inspectors would be diverted to that case.
Similarly, now,
Assad’s military has gained a decisive advantage over the rebels and he had
just scored a major diplomatic victory with the Trump administration’s
announcement that the U.S. was no longer seeking “regime change” in Syria. The
savvy Assad would know that a chemical weapon attack now would likely result in
U.S. retaliation and jeopardize the gains that his military has achieved with
Russian and Iranian help.
The
counter-argument to this logic – made by The New York Times and other
neocon-oriented news outlets – essentially maintains that Assad is a crazed
barbarian who was testing out his newfound position of strength by baiting
President Trump. Of course, if that were the case, it would have made sense
that Assad would have boasted of his act, rather than deny it.
But logic and
respect for facts no longer prevail inside Official Washington, nor inside the
mainstream U.S. news media.
Intelligence
Uprising
Alarm within
the U.S. intelligence community about Trump’s hasty decision to attack Syria
reverberated from the Middle East back to Washington, where former CIA officer
Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence contacts in the field
that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story was being distorted by
Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media.
Former CIA officer
Philip Giradi. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
Giraldi told
Scott Horton’s Webcast: “I’m hearing from sources on the ground in the Middle
East, people who are intimately familiar with the intelligence that is
available who are saying that the essential narrative that we’re all hearing
about the Syrian government or the Russians using chemical weapons on innocent
civilians is a sham.”
Giraldi said
his sources were more in line with an analysis postulating an accidental
release of the poison gas after an Al Qaeda arms depot was hit by a Russian
airstrike.
“The
intelligence confirms pretty much the account that the Russians have been
giving … which is that they hit a warehouse where the rebels – now these are
rebels that are, of course, connected with Al Qaeda – where the rebels were
storing chemicals of their own and it basically caused an explosion that
resulted in the casualties. Apparently the intelligence on this is very clear.”
Giraldi said
the anger within the intelligence community over the distortion of intelligence
to justify Trump’s military retaliation was so great that some covert officers
were considering going public.
“People in both
the agency [the CIA] and in the military who are aware of the intelligence are
freaking out about this because essentially Trump completely misrepresented
what he already should have known – but maybe he didn’t – and they’re afraid
that this is moving toward a situation that could easily turn into an armed
conflict,” Giraldi said before Thursday night’s missile strike. “They are
astonished by how this is being played by the administration and by the U.S.
media.”
One-Sided
Coverage
The mainstream
U.S. media has presented the current crisis with the same profound neocon bias
that has infected the coverage of Syria and the larger Middle East for decades.
For instance, The New York Times on Friday published a lead story by Michael R.
Gordon and Michael D. Shear that treated the Syrian government’s responsibility
for the poison-gas incident as flat-fact. The lengthy story did not even deign
to include the denials from Syria and Russia that they were responsible for any
intentional deployment of poison gas.
The Arleigh
Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross fires a tomahawk land attack
missile from the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer
3rd Class Robert S. Price)
The article
also fit with Trump’s desire that he be portrayed as a decisive and forceful
leader. He is depicted as presiding over intense deliberations of war or peace
and displaying a deep humanitarianism regarding the poison-gas victims, one of
the rare moments when the Times, which has become a reliable neocon propaganda
sheet, has written anything favorable about Trump at all.
According to
Syrian reports on Friday, the U.S. attack killed 13 people, including five
soldiers at the airbase.
Gordon, whose
service to the neocon cause is notorious, was the lead author with Judith
Miller of the Times’ bogus “aluminum tube” story in 2002 which falsely claimed
that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program,
an article that was then cited by President George W. Bush’s aides as a key
argument for invading Iraq in 2003.
Regarding this
week’s events, Trump’s desperation to reverse his negative media coverage and
the dubious evidence blaming Assad for the Idlib incident could fit with the
“Wag the Dog” movie from 1997 in which an embattled president creates a phony
foreign crisis in Albania.
A fake war
scene in the dark 1997 comedy “Wag the Dog,” which showed a girl and her cat
fleeing a bombardment in Albania.
In the movie,
the White House operation is a cynical psychological operation to convince the
American people that innocent Albanian children, including an attractive girl
carrying a cat, are in danger when, In reality, the girl was an actor posing
before a green screen that allowed scenes of fiery ruins to be inserted as
background.
Today, because
Trump and his administration are now committed to convincing Americans that
Assad really was responsible for Tuesday’s poison-gas tragedy, the prospects
for a full and open investigation are effectively ended. We may never know if
there is truth to those allegations or whether we are being manipulated by
another “wag the dog” psyop.