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The Forum > Article Comments > Ghouta gassing: waving a red rag to a bull > Comments

Ghouta gassing: waving a red rag to a bull : Comments

By Joseph Wakim, published 27/8/2013

We should withhold judgement on the Ghouta gassing until after the UN chemical weapons inspectors report.

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"Australia can clear the smoke by asking the right questions."

Which could be to ask the UNSC to mandate the League of Arab States to sort out and resolve your "...push for unarmed dialogue among Syrian citizens, free from [other] foreign intervention."?
Posted by WmTrevor, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 8:39:12 AM
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Rouhani's statement, "We completely and strongly condemn the use of chemical weapons because the Islamic Republic of Iran is itself a victim of chemical weapons." is worth considering. When Iran was gassed by Iraq during their long war, Iraq's main enabler in that war was the US. Ditto for when Iraq gassed its own Kurdish citizens.
According to reports in the Turkish press, a group of Syrian jihadists were apparently caught with chemical weapons in Ankara in June. It would have been a circuitous route, but it would be interesting to discover where they got those weapons, if in fact they did have them.
This latest incident smells strongly of a false-flag operation.
Who benefits? Who wants to unleash the dogs of European and American war into Syria? Those are the questions that need pursuing. Answer them and whoever used gas in Ghouta will be outed.
Assad had just allowed UN inspectors into Syria. Then came the gas attack. Call him many things, but Assad is neither suicidal nor stupid.
And Obama? He had just been done like a dinner by events in Egypt. Nothing like a bit of distraction while he wipes the egg off his face.
Posted by halduell, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 8:54:39 AM
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Where would the rebels get their chemical weapons? Perhaps the Assad regime, who we know have been manufacturing them for decades, gave them some!
If the Assad regime had nothing to hide, why did they prevaricate so long over allowing UN inspectors to examine the critical time sensitive evidence in a timely manner?
It's time for the endless Assad obfuscation to simply be ignored, and a few cruise missiles dispatched through the dictator and his even more criminal mass murdering brother's front door.
Or if necessary, drop a few bunker busters on that regimes last refuge!
Good Intel will see the FINAL delivery made while they are at home!
The end of the Assad regime will see the end to hostilities, and it will demonstrate to all and sundry, that the West has enough resolve to contemplate a worst case scenario, yet proceed with plans to eliminate the mass murdering Assad regime, in any event.
It will also demonstrate to the obstructionist excuse making, recalcitrant Russian, virtual dictator Putin, that there is a line beyond which we will not go, nor allow any others to cross, with impunity, regardless of his objections/bully boy bluff and bluster!
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 12:16:17 PM
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On ATV news 10 minutes ago it was reported that chemical weapons inspectors after first being prevented from access to the Hospitals treating the victims from gas attacks. The inpectors took an alternative back route to the hospitals and talked to the doctors, took tissue samples and examined some the dead and emediately reported back their governments. It was reported that PM Rudd, and US, British Governments leaders want miiltiary action action action to put and end to genocide.
Posted by PEST, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 12:29:24 PM
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Rhrosty says "Where would the rebels get their chemical weapons? Perhaps the Assad regime, who we know have been manufacturing them for decades, gave them some!"
The rebels have been rampaging all over the country for the past two years. They have taken over various military bases and then have been driven out of those bases at other times. There have been mass defections from the Syrian army to the rebels side as well.The opportunity must have arisen on numerous occasions for the rebels to get hold of chemical weapons.
Like the author also points out, the rebels have a very strong motivation to make it appear that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons. In contrast there does not appear to be any reasonable reason for the Assad regime to do so though, particularly with the US having declared it would intervene in such circumstances. Why would the regime want to provoke such intervention, particularly when it appears to be winning the war with the use of its conventional weapons?
Posted by Rhys Jones, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 1:32:48 PM
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Perhaps Assad's lick-spittles could find a reason why - if if were the terrorists who used chemical weapons - Assad wouldn't let inspectors in for five days, and used snipers to keep them out of critical areas.

No names ;)

Ultimately, AND ironically, you may be on the side which wins this conflict: it's a three-way war after all, between the dictatorship, the Islamists and the secular-democrats, the last being by far the weakest force, but the one which the West would like to back.

So, to have any role at all, the West will be forced to choose between supporting the dictatorship or the Islamists. They will never support the Islamists. So they may have to hold their noses and support Assad, at least for a time, until they can overthrow him and get him brought to trial for war-crimes. Or strung up, whichever comes first.

But to paraphrase Wil Anderson, 'what will Iran do ?'

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 4:00:24 PM
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Rhys Jones and Halduell pose the obvious point: Assad is neither stupid nor suicidal. Are our memories so short that we do not remember the tremendous propaganda campaign that preceded the invasion of Iraq; entirely, as Rudd noted, based on a lie - in fact multiple lies. As was the invasion of Libya; the current campaign against Iran's so-called nuclear weapons program and multiple other occasions in the past. The Gulf of Tonkin is another lie that lead to Australia's disastrous involvement in an illegal war. How often must the mistakes be repeated before the obvious is realised? These are wars of choice that the Americans engage in, mostly on behalf of their elites and in the face of opposition from the mass of the people.

I invite people to read Seymour Hersh's article in 2007 in the New Yorker. He talked then about US policies designed to achieve "regime change" in the Middle East. This included, inter alia, arming sectarian groups to encourage sectarian warfare. Lo and behold, this is exactly what is happening with the US, France, UK and Gulf States arming and financing a disparate bunch of terrorists, including groups (pause for a scoffing laugh) that the US is officially opposed to.

Yet again however, our supine media repeat the propaganda and do their best to condition the people for yet another disastrous war on behalf of others. Time to wake up Australia. The election of an Abbott government won't make a blind bit of difference to our fundamentally stupid foreign policy.
Posted by James O'Neill, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 4:08:19 PM
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The US should know better. It is showing its apparent ineptitude by refusing to acknowledge that there is a civil war going on.

The anti-Assad forces are quite adept at making the gassing appear the work of the Assad regime, so that the pig-headed Obama would charge in. It remains to be seen whether the US allies including Australia will exercise prudence and talk Obama into first ascertaining who was responsible for the gassing.
Posted by Raycom, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 4:32:45 PM
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I was appalled seeing the performance of our foreign minister Bob Carr on late line last night. He was being asked what Australia intended to do regarding Syria. It appears that we have absolutely no foreign policy of our own in this regard. The only answers that he came up with was to wait and see what Barack Obama decided. I don't ever recall voting for Mr Obama. I really think we have lost our way in this regard.
Of course, we should probably do nothing. It is none of our business. There are plenty of middle power nations in the region who can intervene if they wish. Our role should not extend to getting involved in internal disputes on the other side of the globe where we have few if any interests, human rights abuses or not. The Iranians, Turks, Russians, Saudi Arabians, Israeli's, Jordanians and Lebanese can intervene if they think it appropriate. Australia getting involved would be like the Turks getting involved in the conflict in West Papua or like the Indonesians intervening in some Russian war. I don't know where the arrogance comes from that makes us think we have responsibility to fix all the worlds problems.
Posted by Rhys Jones, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 4:38:54 PM
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If you really want to know what is going on in Syria, please read:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/08/26/syria-another-western-war-crime-in-the-making-paul-craig-roberts/

US Hegemony is just so on the nose and in the pig trough in cahoots with Israel it just makes one feel sick!
Posted by Geoff of Perth, Tuesday, 27 August 2013 5:12:53 PM
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The attack force of the US and UK navies is are now approaching Syria and soon will be in range. You can rest assured that from space with photo scans they they can identify targets as small as an army truck on the ground. The inspectors on the ground identified a genocidal attack by examining the victims in hospitals at 12 am yesterday. Later in the day Obama and UK PM warned of what was likely to happen on the world media.

God help the survivors of the chemical gas attack the long term effects are horrible. If its same chemicals used in World War 1 they may await a long slow death
Posted by PEST, Wednesday, 28 August 2013 10:28:22 AM
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The belligerence and hypocrisy continue unabated. The UN inspectors were specifically forbidden (according to Ban Ke Moon) from establishing who was responsible for the chemical attacks, only whether or not they had occurred. That latter fact is not in doubt; the identity of the perpetrators most certainly is in doubt.

The hypocrisy is manifest in the silence of the western media when the Americans used chemical weapons to attack Fallujah; when the Israelis used chemical weapons in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza; and when the Americans supplied Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons during Iraq's war with Iran. That is very far from a complete list.

Neither Labor nor theCoalition are likely to condemn the forthcoming US missile attack despite there being absolutely no foundation in international law for such an attack.

As with so many US military interventions the consequences of this forthcoming folly of monumental proportions are likely to be considerable. There is a very real risk that the first consequence, apart from the inevitable mass death and destruction, is a widening of the war outside the boundaries of Syria. Does the US seriously think that their actions are not going to have consequences for the US itself? Is the hubris so great that they cannot see, for example, how the Russians and the Chinese are going to react to this latest outrage?

Or are we so inured to American lawlessness that this latest (in a long line) of international criminality will pass Australia by?
Posted by James O'Neill, Wednesday, 28 August 2013 10:50:38 AM
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God help the survivors of the chemical gas attack because their could long term effects and slow horrible deaths.
.
Posted by PEST, Thursday, 29 August 2013 5:13:03 PM
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