Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Despite haranguing then-President Obama for his rudderless military approach to Syria via Twitter over the years, now-President Donald Trump has promptly reversed course upon his tweeted disdain for getting the US more deeply involved in Syria’s civil war by firing some $94 million worth of cruise missiles into a Syrian airfield last night – killing seven and wounding nine others according to Syrian military officials.
The missile strike came as a response to the release of the nerve agent Sarin in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province earlier this week, which US officials blame on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is on the brink of winning the long civil war that has plagued his country and torn it asunder for six years now. Indeed, with the aid of Russian airpower – and who knows what else – Assad’s fighters have just about eliminated the various forces aligned against it, most of them fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Roughly a week ago, Western leaders who’d long called for Assad to step down indicated they would be comfortable brokering a peace deal that left him in power.
The Internet is full of stories parroting the official narrative – that Assad gassed his own people because he’s crazy and a monster and that’s probably what Putin likes about him – so, I decided to check out what Disobedient Media had to say via a story linked by ZeroHedge, after first looking into Disobedient Media’s reputation. Media Bias Fact Check reports that the organization has a “strong rightward lean” but also a “high” degree of factual reporting. Indeed, this story was full of links to publications, tweets and other sources that bolster the claims made in the article and to my own journalist’s eye, it seems at least as trustworthy as the mainstream news outlets they cited throughout the story.
Disobedient Media’s piece points out several problems in the official narrative of the chemical attack on April 4.
First, again, given that Assad was about to close the book on this long civil war, why would he use a weapon that isn’t actually terribly effective at anything other than horrifying the international community and bringing swift condemnation upon any who use such things? Particularly just a week after Western leaders had signaled their willingness to abandon regime change and leave Assad in power? World leaders aren’t often legitimately unhinged or stupid, yet, we’re to believe Assad is both for the official story to make any sense at all.
Second, supposedly, the Syrian military doesn’t even have chemical weapons. On June 23, 2014 the Wall Street Journal reported that Syria’s chemical weapon stockpile had been turned over for destruction, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversaw the process. At that time, OPCW was concerned about the reports of chlorine gas or another irritants being used in battle, but was satisfied the regime no longer had Sarin gas, a deadly nerve agent, at its disposal. Yet, not three years later, Assad is to have used Sarin gas against his own people.
So, where did the gas come from? Disobedient Media points out that The Guardian reported on July 9, 2014 that ISIS had captured a chemical weapons facility in Muthanna, Iraq. The subhead of The Guardian piece reads: “US plays down threat as Iraq says Muthanna loss means it will be unable to fulfil obligations to destroy chemical weapons.”
“The Islamic State extremist group (Isis) has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility north-west of Baghdad, where 2,500 degraded chemical rockets filled decades ago with deadly nerve agent sarin or their remnants were stored along with other chemical warfare agents, Iraq has said in a letter circulated at the United Nations,” reads the first graph of The Guardian piece.
Super-pure, high-quality Sarin has a maximum shelf-life of five years. When not mixed properly, or when agents to neutralize Sarin’s high acidity aren’t added, the shelf-life of Sarin can be as little as a few weeks before it breaks down into non-toxic compounds. If ISIS captured recently-filled Sarin rockets nearly three years ago, the Sarin would have to have been of very high-quality to still have been deadly this week, and that is again assuming the rockets were filled with Sarin soon before they were captured – a fairly substantial assumption not supported by the Guardian piece which cites UN weapons of mass destruction inspectors who said the rockets were filled before 1991.
Those same inspectors said the raided sites also contained various toxic precursor agents for making Tabun gas, another nerve agent that is less-deadly than Sarin and based upon sodium cyanide. The bunkers also contained containers of Tabun that had been treated with decontamination solutions but, as Tabun breaks down into cyanides, can still be very toxic.
The Guardian piece quoted Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson as saying of the chemical remnants ISIS captured “(They) don’t include intact chemical weapons … and would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely use this for military purposes or, frankly, to move it.”
Yet, Syrian civilians are dying and doctors and international observers are finding evidence of Sarin gas poisoning. Where did it come from?
There was a lot of reporting in the international press during the chaotic fall of Libya’s long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the ensuing chaos that surrounded it while Americans were more concerned about who to blame over the failure to do anything to save the consulate office personnel at Benghazi. Turns out, the US was coordinating the shipment of Libyan arms to Syrian “rebels” from the port city of Misrata, where reports suggest the chemical precursors for Sarin that had been removed from a facility by OPCW had been taken and then left unguarded. In November of last year the New York Times reported the findings of an independent group, IHS Conflict Monitor, which stated that ISIS had used chemical agents at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria since 2014.
So, we know ISIS has used chemical weapons before, and we know they’ve gotten access to precursor agents and various other toxic chemicals from Iraq and quite possibly from Libya as well. While there isn’t a smoking gun linking Libya’s Sarin precursors, which were eventually shipped to Europe for destruction according to the official story, to this week’s deadly attack in Syria, the idea that the attack was a “false flag” actually carried out by Islamist rebels with the intent of blaming it on Assad’s regime at least makes more sense than the official line.
Again, whereas Assad had nothing to gain by gassing his own people, ISIS and anti-Assad rebel groups had everything to gain by doing so if it meant drawing the USA deeper into the conflict with a renewed demand for Assad’s ouster. And, it appears President Trump is going to give them exactly what they want.
The last bit of the Disobedient Media piece delves into trying to sort out why some U.S. politicians, like Sen. John McCain, are so hot to see regime change in Syria, and what the West’s endgame might be. That the chemical attack and US response is exactly what anti-Assad rebels needed to offset Assad’s recent gains in the civil war, including the recapturing of Aleppo, is the only certainty that can be gleaned from the available facts.
“It may be some time before the full picture about the Khan Sheikhoun tragedy becomes apparent, but is more than clear that Syrian rebel groups hope to use the incident as a means of provoking increased Western support in their fight against the Russian-backed government,” the authors concluded.
And there’s the real problem, by pitting the US against Assad, the Islamist rebels are also pitting the US against Russia. In response to Trump’s fusillade against Syria, Russia has already signaled that it will stop coordinating with the US in Syria’s crowded airspace as both countries conduct air operations there. This might be why Trump chose to use unmanned cruise missiles rather than manned attack planes or bombers that may have come up against Syrian, or worse yet, Russian interceptors.
It would be rather darkly ironic if ISIS, which the US all but created by invading Iraq in 2003, managed to ultimately defeat the US by goading it into a war with Russia.
Leave a Reply