From John Kerry’s opening remarks at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria yesterday:
KERRY: Now, some people here and there, amazingly, have questioned the evidence of this assault on conscience. I repeat here again today that only the most willful desire to avoid reality can assert that this did not occur as described or that the regime did not do it. It did happen, and the Assad regime did it.
From an interview today:
Mr. Putin expressed doubt about the evidence presented so far by Secretary of State John Kerry and said that more “convincing” results from United Nations inspectors were needed before considering the use of force. “We do not have exact details of what happened,” he said of the situation in Syria. “Is it a chemical weapon or just some chemical pollutants?”
He insisted, however, that it made no sense for Mr. Assad’s government to use chemical weapons given the likelihood it would provoke an international response.
“In our view, it seems completely ridiculous that the regular armed forces, who are actually on the attack and in some places have the so-called rebels surrounded and are finishing them off, that in these conditions” would use prohibited chemical weapons, Mr. Putin said, “understanding quite well that this could be a reason for sanctions on them, including the use of force. It’s just ridiculous. It does not fit into any logic.”
Asked if Russia might support a military strike, Mr. Putin replied, “I do not exclude it.” But he quickly warned against any action without United Nations Security Council authorization.
There we have two differing rhetorical strategies. One asserts a case and insists that it is amazing that anyone doubts it, and the other relies on logic without really addressing the evidence.
Neither approach is convincing.
Let’s look at the rest of Kerry’s opening statement. He said he knew that people are skeptical about government assertions after the Iraq fiasco, which is why the Intelligence Community “scrubbed and rescrubbed the evidence” and released an “unprecedented amount of classified material.” But, do you feel like they’ve released a lot of classified material? I don’t.
They have merely made assertions, like the following:
We can tell you beyond any reasonable doubt that our evidence proves the Assad regime prepared for this attack, issued instructions to prepare for this attack, warned its own forces to use gas masks; that we have physical evidence of where the rockets came from and when.
Not one rocket landed in regime-controlled territory — not one. All of them landed in opposition-controlled or contested territory. We have a map — physical evidence — showing every geographical point of impact. And that is concrete.
Anyone trying to determine the strength and veracity of these claims should start out by reading Gareth Porter’s piece: How Intelligence Was Twisted to Support an Attack on Syria.
Ask yourself, honestly, if John Kerry addressed any of those concerns. He did not. Did he release any classified information to buttress his claims? He did not.
Instead, like Putin, he made an appeal to logic and common sense.
We are certain that none of the opposition has the weapons or capacity to effect a strike of this scale, particularly from the heart of regime territory. Just think about it in logical terms, common sense. With high confidence, our intelligence community tells us that after the strike the regime issued orders to stop and then fretted openly, we know, about the possibility of U.N. inspectors discovering evidence.
So then they began to systematically try to destroy it, contrary to my discussion with their foreign minister who said we have nothing to hide. I said, if you have nothing to hide then let the inspectors in today and let it be unrestricted. It wasn’t. They didn’t. It took four days of shelling before they finally allowed them in under a constrained pre-arranged structure. And we now have learned that the hair and blood samples from first responders in east Damascus has tested positive for signatures of sarin.
So my colleagues, we know what happened. For all the lawyers, for all the former prosecutors, for all those who have sat on a jury, I can tell you that we know these things beyond the reasonable doubt that is the standard by which we send people to jail for the rest of their lives.
There is so much wrong with this that it is daunting to even try to document. Let’s start with the fact that Assad regime had asked U.N. inspectors into the country to investigate their claims that the rebels had used chemical weapons. Follow that up with the fact the U.N. did not formally request that the inspectors be able to investigate the site of the August 21st attacks for four days and that the regime consented to that the next day. Add to this that the inspectors had entered the country to investigate suspected attacks that had occurred months before, but Kerry argued that a five day delay would render any investigation useless. Never mind that inspectors found evidence of the 1988 chemical attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992. Then Kerry asserts that subsequent artillery barrages in the area were meant to destroy evidence, when the evidence couldn’t be destroyed that way. Also consider that there is no chain of custody of the hair and blood samples that show “signatures of sarin” and that evidence of sarin is not evidence of culpability.
Other evidence is paltry, too. An order to use gas masks could be the result of suspicions that the rebels were preparing a chemical attack. An order to stop shelling could be a matter of confusion. How clearly incriminating the intercepts are cannot be judged unless we are allowed to listen to them.
Kerry makes the extraordinary claim that, amidst a more general artillery barrage, our intelligence agencies have been able to identify the launch-point of each and every chemical rocket. That we know where they landed is not surprising, but that we know which rockets carried the warheads? And, obviously, they can’t tell us how they know that or show us their detailed maps.
There are many, many unanswered questions. Among them, the pattern of fatalities.
Experts noticed yet another anomaly: The number of those treated who survived far outnumbered the dead, contrary to what would be expected in a nerve gas attack. Dr. Ghazwan Bwidany told CBS news August 24 that his mobile medical unit had treated 900 people after the attack and that 70 had died. Medecins Sans Frontieres reported that 3,600 patients had been treated at hospitals in the area of the attack and that 355 had died. Such ratios of survivors to dead were the opposite of what chemical weapons specialists would have expected from a nerve gas attack. Kaszeta told Truthout that the “most nagging doubt” he had about the assumption that a nerve gas attack had taken place is the roughly 10-to-1 ratio of total number treated to the dead. “The proportions are all wrong,” he said. “There should be more dead people.” Johnson agreed. In an actual nerve gas attack, he said, “You’d get some survivors, but it would be very low. This [is] a very low level of lethality.”
This helps explain why Vladimir Putin asked this morning, “Is it a chemical weapon or just some chemical pollutants?” You might consider that a callous question that doesn’t make a difference when faced with hundreds if not thousands of victims. But it matters in terms of capability. When Kerry says that it is our assessment that the rebels did not have access to the chemicals or delivery systems needed to carry out the attacks, he is making certain assumptions about the chemical agent that was used. Those assumptions may be wrong.
I’m going to conclude here, even though I could go on at great length. My point here is not that the Assad regime is innocent. My point is that you can’t win an argument this way. You can’t just say that no one of good faith can disagree with your conclusions, or even doubt them, without showing your evidence. Much of what Kerry has been saying has been simply false, as with the durability of the evidence or the willingness of the Syrian regime to comply with inspections or the reason they were using artillery in the area in the days after the attack.
When you lie about small details, you lose the trust of the people on large details. Assuming that the Intelligence Community is right about Assad’s culpability, John Kerry’s actions amount to geopolitical malpractice. And that’s not even getting into comparing Assad to Hitler, this vote to Munich, and pretending that the U.S. didn’t help Saddam Hussein target his poison gas during the Iraq-Iran War.
But the Senate seemed to like it.
