Syria watch...

[woodburner]

There's lots which shed doubt on who did what.

[UndercoverElephant]

So Why is Call Me Dave so keen to get us involved?

Because he's Tory Arse. Because he knows that being a War Prime Minister gets you re-elected...probably.

[UndercoverElephant]

More strong stuff, this time from Craig Murray cautioning against becoming too euphoric about last night's No vote in the Commons:

Last night’s vote in the Commons is welcome, but a blip. It owes more to political tribalism than to principle. Miliband and New Labour did not oppose military action, they merely wanted to be seen to be dictating the terms. As neither Tories nor Labour were prepared to accept the other’s terms for military action, the anti war minority could combine with the tribalists of each to make sure everything got defeated. Good but fortuitous.

The media are still in full war cry. Ashdown has never been so ashamed, apparently. He is not ashamed by extraordinary rendition and our torturing people. He is not ashamed of our responsibility for the death of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, with 2,000 people a day still meeting terrible deaths. He is ashamed that we don’t respond to the deaths of children by chemical weapons, we don’t really know at whose hands, by blasting to pieces a lot more children. Well, Paddy, you are a merciless fool who thinks a spiral of death is the answer, and I have never been more ashamed that I was for most of my adult life a member of the Liberal Democrats.

Ashdown did say bitterly that there was now no point in having such large armed forces. Hallelujah! The danger to the establishment that people might realise that spending more on weapons systems than on hospitals is a poor choice, is one reason this is not over. Much is at stake for the security state. Expect a mounting barrage of propaganda on the need for action in Syria. This is just the start.

Don't Celebrate yet

Wise words indeed.

And as for Paddy f******g Ashdown...I'm lost for words. I liked him until this happened. Now I think he's a war-mongering fool.

[UndercoverElephant]

New Yorker weighs in...

Superb.

[UndercoverElephant]

But..YAY, we aren't Amerika's poodle any more!!!!

[JohnB]

Apparently the Americans have evidence to show where the missiles were launched, and where they landed, and they came from a rebel held area.

I haven't heard anything on Radio 4 about the Saudis supplying them to the rebels, who didn't know how to use them and had an accident, that I posted earlier.

Who knows who did what, and if we'll find out the truth before or after WWIII, if we ever do.

[Little John]

I've read the Russians are moving warships into the area. This could all get a bit silly.

[Billhook]

JohnB - re the article you linked claiming the rebels did it by accident -

if you review it with a reasonably skeptical outlook, I wonder what you'd make of the holes and inconsistencies.

We can agree that the reporter in question has good credentials, but that says nothing of those of the people he reportedly interviewed.

We can also perhaps agree that the head of Saudi intelligence Prince Bandar bin Sultan (who allegedly supplied the weapons)
has to be one utterly ruthless but extremely sharp minded person, with a comprehensive understanding of the international dynamics,
not least as regards the use of chemical weapons. Without these capacities he simply would not have the job.

Yet according to the story, his behaviour is quite absurd.

He supplies a large cache of chemical weapons to a low grade rebel courier to take to Damascus.
The courier is not from the Al Nusra organization, but the weapons are intended for Al Nusra.
Saudi agents were not sent to ensure the weapons' safe delivery, neither are Al Nusra agents asked to do that job.
The courier is actually given the name of the head of Saudi intelligence as the provider of the weapons.
The courier doesn't know they are chemical weapons.
They are delivered to Damascus SFA forces who also know nothing of them.
These people are so incautious as to mishandle them and cause them to explode.
Somebody was near enough, in a tunnel, to see this event , which allegedly killed 12 rebels, and yet miraculously survived to tell the tale.
SFA fighters then decide they want to admit SFA responsibility to a US journalist,
not only utterly discrediting the SFA, but also inviting Saudi Intelligence to have the courier and all those he talked to killed ASAP.

For an extremely senior Saudi official to behave in a way that is asking for Saudi Arabia to be implicated in the gassing - is patently implausible.
Ditto sending the weapons across the border without a reliable escort.
Ditto giving them to the SFA to pass to Al Nusra.
Ditto the chance of someone watching their mishandling and surviving the release of the gas.
Ditto the chance of the gas moving not as a plume across the city but hitting discrete individual parts of several rebel held areas,
that just happened to have just been shelled with HE to break the windows and doors
to allow the gas full access to the sleeping population.

From a Govt perspective this propaganda tale neatly paints its targets in the desired terms, including -
- Saudi as the scheming vicious foreign power trying to smear the patriotic regime's conduct and give a pretext for a US attack -
- SFA as a bunch of incompetents with the deaths of over 1,400 victims on their hands -
- Al Nusra as a terrorist organisation serving Saudi in its goal of mounting a chemical attack to be blamed on the govt.

From this skeptical outlook the report seems more of a basket case than a watertight one -
on grounds that it evidently has more holes than framework.

But it does point to one of two explanations for the report -
that the journalist has broken all professional standards and fabricated the tale -
or that substantial effort has gone into coaching multiple agents to feed him their lines of the tale, which,
since it doesn't stand up even to cursory scrutiny,
would mean it was aimed not at govts but at credulous sections of the western public
whose blinkered fixation with "America the tyranny" feeds on anything which, at face value, affirms their partisan assumptions.

If, as seems the far more likely, the second explanation is accurate, it is one more evidence of the regime's intention
to disrupt and discredit western powers by harnessing the controversy over the chemical attacks.

Regards,

Lewis

[Billhook]

A note on numbers killed, locations and timeline.

MSF reported that the three hospitals it assists, out of the six that received casualties immediately after the attacks, tended over 3,600 people, of whom 355 died.

The total treated - on a pro rata basis - would be 7,200, of whom 710 would have died. We don't yet have info on whether those other three hospitals tended more or fewer victims than the MSF assisted ones.

Given that many of those killed died in their beds, and many more within minutes of the attacks, the total who did not reach hospital may thus be well over 2,000.

According to Frank Gardner of BBC, the attacks came in 4 districts, 3 to the NE of the city and one to the SW, in a succession of strikes over a couple of hours, the last being at around 3 a.m. They followed a 90 minute artillery attack which broke windows and doors to maximize ingress of the gas. All were in rebel held areas.

A British ex-army specialist on these weapons' use told Gardner that such an attack would need to use 10 to 20 rockets to deliver the gas. Kerry meanwhile declares US intell of 12 specific strikes, which is within that range. His account of the number of victims is "at least 1,429".

Those in the habit of thinking within a binary box of goody and baddy may see the above as implying some kind of support for US policy and its intention to launch a limited missile strike. Given that this is a three cornered conflict, that limitation may be a disadvantage in trying to contribute to coherent discussion.

.

[biffvernon]

Winter precipitation trends in the Mediterranean region for the period 1902 - 2010.

This is the graph
That shows the drought
That drove the farmers
Away from their fields
And into the cities
Where they looked for scapegoats
And found religion
Took up their weapons
And were killed in number.

We watched in horror
We wrung our hands
We talked of bombs
But not of rain
Nor climate change
Nor carbon emissions
Nor greenhouse gases
Symptoms not causes
Our own complicity
In dreadful slaughter.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories201 ... ought.html

[Billhook]

Biff - the graph and linked article are a great find - and ought to be posted across the web.

I like the poem very much too, apart from three lines which grate somewhat, that assume their looking for scapegoats, findimg religion and taking up arms.

As I understand the sequence of events, it was oppression and injustice that triggered peaceful protests, that official brutality then forced into armed resistance.

Just a suggestion, but see how it reads with the lines:
. . . . .
Where they looked for work
And found only oppression
Took to protest
And were killed in numbers

Regards, Lewis

[biffvernon]

As I understand the sequence of events, it was oppression and injustice that triggered peaceful protests, that official brutality then forced into armed resistance.

Thanks, Lewis, that's constructive criticism. I think my point is that first there was a drought. This drove an extraordinary number of people to abandon their farms, land that had been farmed for countless generations since the neolithic and the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent. They fled to the cities looking for help and, perhaps, someone to blame. They found only oppression and the rest is very recent history.

I'm not seeking to excuse the Government's appalling behaviour, just set out the order of events and point to climate change, which is the responsibility of every person that burns a fossil fuel, as at the root of the present conflict. Atrocious governance is what turns a climate disaster into a human disaster. More at http://biffvernon.blogspot.co.uk/

[dudley]

PO seems to be involved, too.

Syria's dash for gas has been spurred by its rapidly declining oil revenues, driven by the peak of its conventional oil production in 1996. Even before the war, the country's rate of oil production had plummeted by nearly half, from a peak of just under 610,000 barrels per day (bpd) to approximately 385,000 bpd in 2010.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... 3/may/13/1

[biffvernon]

Maybe that's why they took to growing cotton instead - without remembering how thirsty a crop it is.

[Totally_Baffled]

Obama is now seeking a congress vote, is he quietly hoping he 'loses' the vote to avoid action? Is he thinking this is the way to lose the least amount of credibility? (Given the lack of support for military action)