BEIRUT, Lebanon — Days after President Trump said he wanted to pull the
United States out of Syria, Syrian forces hit a suburb of Damascus with bombs
that rescue workers said unleashed toxic gas.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, the old saying
goes. So, tread carefully through the minefields of propaganda laid for the
credulous in such low organs as The New York Times. There are
excellent reasons to suppose that the American Deep State wishes strenuously to
keep meddling all around the Middle East. The record so far
shows that the blunt instruments of US strategic policy produce a consistent
result: failed states.
Syria was well on its way to that sorry condition — prompted by an inflow
of Jihadi maniacs fleeing our previous nation un-building experiment in Iraq —
when the Russians stepped in with an arrantly contrary idea: to support the
Syrian government. Of course, the Russians had ulterior motives: a naval base
on the Mediterranean, expanded influence in the region, and a Gazprom
concession to develop and manage large natural gas fields near the Syrian city
of Homs, for export to Europe. The latter would have competed with America’s
client state, Qatar, a leading gas exporter to Europe.
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But the US objected to supporting the government of Bashar al-Assad, as it
had previously with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, as well as Russia’s
presence there in the first place. So, the US cultivated anti-government forces
in the Syrian civil war, a hodgepodge of Islamic psychopaths variously known as
ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), Daesh, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, Ansar
al-Din, Jaysh al-Sunna, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, and what-have-you.
As it happened, US policy in Syria after 2013 became an exercise in
waffling. It was clear that our support for the forces of Jihad against Assad
was turning major Syrian cities into rubble-fields, with masses of civilians
caught in the middle and ground up like so much dog food. President Barack
Obama famously drew a line-in-the-sand on the use of chemical
weapons. It was well-known that the Syrian army had stockpiles of chemical
poisons. But the US also knew that our Jihadi consorts had plenty of their own.
Incidents of chemical atrocities were carried out by… somebody… it was never
altogether clear or proven… and Mr. Obama’s line-in-the-sand disappeared under
dust-storms of equivocation.
Finally, a joint mission of the United Nations Human Rights Commission
(UNHRC) and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was
called in to supervise the destruction of the Syrian government’s chemical
weapons, and certified it as accomplished in late 2014. Yet, poison gas
incidents continued — most notoriously in 2017 when President Donald Trump
responded to one with a sortie of cruise missiles against a vacant Syrian
government airfield. And now another incident in the Damascus suburb of Douma
has provoked Mr. Trump to tweetstormed threats of retaliatory violence, just
days after he proposed a swift withdrawal from that vexing corner of the world.
Surely by now the American public has developed some immunity to claims of
nefarious doings in foreign lands (“weapons of mass destruction,” and all). The
operative sentence in that New York Times report is “…Syrian
forces hit a suburb of Damascus with bombs that rescue workers said unleashed
toxic gas.” Yeah, well, how clear is it that the toxic gas was contained in the
bombs, or rather that the bombs dropped by the Syrian military blew up a
chemical weapon depot controlled by anti-government Jihadis? Does that
hodgepodge of maniacs show any respect for the UN, or the Geneva Convention, or
any other agency of international law? As in many previous such incidents, we
don’t know who was responsible — though there is plenty of reason to believe
that parties within the US establishment are against Mr. Trump’s idea of
getting the hell out of that place, and might cook up a convenient reason to
prevent it.
Lastly, how is it in Bashar al-Assad’s interests to provoke a fresh
international uproar against him and his regime? I’d say it is not the least in
his interest, since he is on the verge of putting an end to the awful conflict.
He may not be a model of rectitude by Western standards, but he’s not a mental
defective. And he has very able Russian support advising him in what has been
so far a long and difficult effort to prevent his state from failing — or being
failed for him.