I’ve written two Syria pieces, one last night and one this morning, that seek to debunk the idea that we’re in a proxy war against Russia on the side of the Sunnis in a regional war against the Shiites, and that the president has ever thought that we were, and that the president’s Syrian policy is in disarray. I think my argument is substantially bolstered by the president’s own words today on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
As for the public perception of his own management of the U.S. response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, Obama said, “Folks here in Washington like to grade on style.”
“And so had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear – they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy,” he continued. “We know that, ’cause that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq War – until it ended up… blowing up in our face.”
Talking about his relationship with Putin, Obama said he doesn’t think his Russian counterpart “has the same values that we do” and that Putin has a “different attitude about the Assad regime.” But, he said, both countries “have an interest in preventing chaos” and “preventing terrorism.”
“This is not a contest between the United States and Russia. I mean, the fact of the matter is that if Russia wants to have some influence in Syria post-Assad, that doesn’t hurt our interests,” he said.“And I think there’s a way for Mr. Putin, despite me and him having a whole lot of differences, to play an important role in that,” he continued. “And so I welcome him being involved. I welcome him saying, ‘I will take responsibility for pushing my client, the Assad regime, to deal with these chemical weapons.'”
For the neo-cons, our Syria policy was rather explicitly about preventing Russia (and also Iran) from having any influence in Syria. The same can be said for our Sunni allies in the region. The same can be said for Israel. The president doesn’t think that and never has thought that.
And, as long as you think that he does think that, you won’t have a clue why he’s doing what he’s doing.
I saw you posted these in the last thread. glad u posted as sep post. that first one should leave a mark if the beltway weren’t already so oblivious.
Myself, I can’t presume what Obama is thinking. But I do believe his intentions have been to avoid war in Syria.
What he is thinking and what his intentions are, however, are in conflict with the permanent government (big oil, the military, the CIA). As I’ve commented before, there are generally dire consequences for Presidents who deviate from the path of the permanent government. He fully understands this, so he also understands the consequences.
He’s up on a tightrope.
Yeah, and there’s a pretty large element around who wouldn’t mind turning that tightrope that he’s walking, into a noose.
Definitely.
On the CW front, questions won’t go away.
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/15/do-syrian-rebels-have-sarin/
At the very least, it was not Assad,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/08/syria-chemical-weapons-not-assad-bild
As for the stories that the source was Saudi Arabia, there is this interesting wrinkle. According to the official wisdom, the Saudis do not have chemical weapons.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/300895_There_Is_No_Confirmed_Evidence
But then again, there have been questions about this ever since the Gulf War …
NPR 6.3: DOES SAUDI ARABIA HAVE OR SEEK CHEMICAL … – CNS
cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/shoham63.pdf
Interesting, though, that if any of the rebels had it, it would have been the Saudi-backed al-Nusra.
The world has a new Zombie Conspiracy Theory. We’ll be hearing this one until the day we die, along with the “9/11 was an inside job”, and “Obama is a Kenyan” ZCTs. Whaddya gonna do?
You know, Mr. Quicklund, I have been reading and commenting on this blog for six years now, and I am not accustomed to gratuitous insults from self-appointed thought police, no matter how often repeated. By the way, I have yet to see a single actual argument from you on this subject.
I’ve posted several times as to the vanishingly small probability that rebel forces gassed their own parents and children, concurrently with a conventional artillery barrage which no one disputes was conducted by Assad’s forces, at the same exact same 11-12 areas targeted by Assad, with chew weapons the rebels do not possess, which they did not get from a Saudi Arabia which has never had a CW program, which they did not steal from Assad’s CW stocks that have been moved to loyalist strongpoints, with rockets they do not possess nor are trained to use, which were jury-rigged from Soviet/Russian rocket mortar munition the rebels do not possess, in such a massive fashion that would risk drive their own forces out of the areas Assad sought to capture, all just to make Assad “look bad” or to spark the inevitable American strike which has to date not occurred.
Or we can believe the side with the CW stocks, with the artillery, with the rockets, with teh training, with the foreknowledge of the areas to be bombarded, with the history of slaughtering thousands of citizens in massive artillery barrages, which was observed preparing CW, which issued gas masks to troops which assaulted the targeted areas after the bombardment, whose commanders were overheard discussing the efficacy of the CW attack, which has for two years tried and failed to overpower these enclaves, which would not be killing their own family members and neighborhood friends, was the side which did the deed.
The “false flag” nonsense got more credence than it deserved early on but it has been quietly abandoned by virtually everyone as emotions calmed down. But as everyone who has lived for awhile knows, it will never go away. So I am sorry if you feel offended but I really and honestly feel no sympathy towards birthers, truthers, or their newest comarades in self-deception false flaggers.
I have to agree , Q. Let it never be said that the RW nutjobs are the only ones who twist reality to fit their frame. We will be living with this new conspiracy theory forever. It will never go away even if a picture is released of Assad in a CW suit pushing the launch button.
This article proves my point, unfortunately:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/most-depressing-brain-fin_b_3932273.html
Yeah, we human beings are pretty darn stupid considering how smart we are. And it is hard to think of an area that comes into play more than in politics. 😉
You know, the flip side of this coin is why so conspiracy theories are so often bunk. People are too stupid to pull them off. You go through life watching moderate to large sized projects run over budget, get delayed, or add a number instead of subtracting it.
But in the Zombie Conspiracy Theories, everything works like a Swiss watch. Hundreds of participants all coordinate w/o a hitch, the parts mesh together without a single delay, and with no one detecting their clandestine activity. No one ever comes forth to cash in by writing an expose book.
the only place such large projects function without a hitch is in literature. And that’s what these CT’s are, literature. Any objection raised in science is easy to explain away with yet another leap of assumption. So that effort is spent to disprove that leap only to see yet another one created to “explain” away the latest evidence.
(Look at our current zombie. My eye caught the phrase “kitchen sarin” or something like that. Oops! The UN report classifies the Sarin used as being of high quality. Further rationalizations will follow.)
It is a never-ending fool’s errand. Eventually the most patient person concludes the only defense lies in mocking and ignoring the zombies.
Yes, well all YOU have to do is read MY existing comments — and the difference is, they are comments you claim to have read.
Case in point, in my previous post I linked to four sources: the first (from Consortium News, by no means a “conspiracy” site) presented a statement that the rebels have sarin, made by Carla Del Ponte “a senior United Nations official responsible for Syrian investigations.” Far from being a “conspiracy nut”, Carla Del Ponte is a former Swiss attorney general who also served as chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR.
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/IICISyria/Pages/CarlaDelPonte.aspx
Also a statement by former U.S. Defense Department official F. Michael Maloof, who wrote on Sept. 11 for the right-wing World Net Daily’s web site that WND had obtained a classified U.S. document in which “the U.S. military confirms that sarin was confiscated earlier this year from members of the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the most influential of the rebel Islamists fighting in Syria.”
Although Consortium admits that Maloof’s impartiality has at times been questioned, the fact is that he is referring to the same circumstances reported by the Turkish government last May, and also referred to two days ago in reports that the federal prosecutor in Adana, Turkey has charged six Syrian rebels with ordering a very large quantity of sarin gas. It is quite plausible that there would exist a classified document from U.S military intelligence (National Ground Intelligence Center) when the same incident was reported publicly by the governments of Russia, Turkey, and the United Nations.
http://thekurdishcause.blogspot.com/2013/09/turkish-prosecutor-indicts-six.html
None of these sources can be remotely described as “conspiracy nuts”.
The second item was a report from The Guardian (also not known as a hotbed of conspiracy nuts) that, according to the popular German weekly Bild am Sonntag, surveillance of Syrian telephone calls by the BND (German intelligence) suggested that Assad “was not himself involved in last month’s attack or in other instances when government forces have allegedly used chemical weapons.”
The third item I linked to was a detailed report stating that THERE IS NO CONFIRMED EVIDENCE THAT SAUDI ARABIA HAS CHEMICAL WEAPONS. Now Little Green Footballs is a right-wing site which (in the past at least) has made many dubious allegations, but that the Saudis do not have chemical weapons is YOUR OWN POINT.
My fourth and last link was to a detailed analysis by Danny Shoham published in the Nonproliferation Review back in 1999. This acknowledges the official view that the Saudis do not have CWs, but then looks closely at evidence that may suggest otherwise. It concludes, “This analysis suggests that Saudi Arabia is likely to pursue a CBW capability, if such a program is not already under way.”
Admittedly, it’s an old report, and it does not assert that the Saudis had CW even at that time, it merely examines evidence that they might, or might intend to. The author is not a conspiracy nut, he is a military analyst. At the present time Dr. Shoham is a former senior analyst in Israel’s IDF military intelligence and the Ministry of Defense with special expertise in chemical and biological warfare.
Incidentally, the Russian report referred to above reportedly alleges that the sarin used in an attack on an Aleppo suburb last March was manufactured in a Sunni-controlled region of Iraq — not Saudi Arabia – and then transported to Turkey for use in Syria.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/05/201268/russia-releases-100-page-report.html#.UjfDi7w73Fc
None of the above is conclusive, nor have I ever claimed that it was. I have not presented any theory of my own. Nor do the reports I linked to amount to any theory, they present a variety of information and judgments from various sources, pro and con. The information I have been posting simply reveals an ongoing debate, with new evidence continually being put forth by actual investigators, not “conspiracy nuts”. I have also pointed out in the past that the U.S. made strong allegations but has not released any convincing evidence to back them up. If and when they do, I will certainly take account of it.
You on the other hand categorically insist there is nothing to discuss, while ignoring new information constantly coming out, ignoring unresolved contradictions, and you label all of this as “conspiracy theory” pure and simple.
I find this dismissive labeling narrow-minded and insulting, to me personally and to the readers here, who are quite capable of evaluating information for themselves. I am simply trying to keep the community informed of information they may not be aware of.
Finally, I have not responded to your oft-repeated statement that the rebels supposedly would have “gassed their own parents and children”, because it is a complete mystery to me how you could possibly know that any of the victims were their own parents and children, or even which rebels you are referring to.
First thought, a reincarnation of joe. No room for discussion, place your opponent in a box and label it. Done.
Thanks for this, Oui. You describe the gimmick perfectly: “No room for discussion, place your opponent in a box and label it. Done.”
Looking at Joe’s allegations, such evidence as there is, along with interpretations put forth by those who do not accept the official US line, do not implicate the US-recognized “National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces”, but rather the al-Nusra front, an al-Qaeda affiliate that the US lists as a terrorist organization, as well as an allied group, Liwaa al-Islam, led by Zahran Alloush, a man closely linked to Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
Rebel forces mainly from these two groups were deployed in and around Ghouta at the time of the chemical attack. It is alleged that this “kitchen sarin” was smuggled from al-Qaeda in Iraq. For details see the link.
A Syrian military analyst Ali Maqsoud believes these weapons were launched on Washington’s orders. I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT. The linked report specifies that there is no hard evidence that it was ordered even by Saudi intelligence. Nevertheless, it is pretty clear that it was used as a pretext for a US invasion, something that the Saudis, and their allies within the US government, fervently wished for.
Reading between the lines I think it is clear that Pres. Obama does not want war, that he headed off an attempt to stampede us, but that he remains fully aware of the dangers of the situation and the “true believers” within his own camp.
I hope now it will become clear to those who are sincerely trying to figure out what is going on, that the United States and Russia do indeed share a mutual interest in preventing the Syrian situation from getting worse, and in heading off another major war in the Middle East, one potentially far more dangerous than the last two.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-chemical-attack-more-evidence-only-leads-to-more-questions/53496
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When did I say I read your stuff? I don’t. I din’t read this long reply. I have my own life experiences to draw upon.
Believe whatever you want to. Just watch as fewer and fewer people subscribe to your Zombie Conspiracy Theory. As I have said time and time again, this tripe will never go away. So join with the birthers and the truthers if that’s what floats your boat.
Right — you didn’t say you read my stuff, and I’m quite sure you didn’t. But since you commented on it, then what exactly were you commenting on?
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I always thought that when a person replies to a comment, they ought to have actually read it. And maybe even thought about it. And maybe even checked the points out further with that new invention called the Internet.
As for not reading my latest, which really was was a detailed reply to yours, I should have realized your mind was too perfect for you to risk perturbing it with these mad ramblings of mine. But all you really prove is your own obstinacy and willful ignorance. You remind me of the philosopher Cesare Cremonini, who (as quoted in a letter to Galileo from a mutual friend), wrote of the telescope: “I do not wish to approve of claims about which I do not have any knowledge, and about things which I have not seen … and then to observe through those glasses gives me a headache. Enough! I do not want to hear anything more about this.”
On Sep 15th you published this:
Definitely.
On the CW front, questions won’t go away.
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/15/do-syrian-rebels-have-sarin/
At the very least, it was not Assad,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/08/syria-chemical-weapons-not-assad-bild
As for the stories that the source was Saudi Arabia, there is this interesting wrinkle. According to the official wisdom, the Saudis do not have chemical weapons.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/300895_There_Is_No_Confirmed_Evidence
But then again, there have been questions about this ever since the Gulf War …
NPR 6.3: DOES SAUDI ARABIA HAVE OR SEEK CHEMICAL … – CNS
cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/shoham63.pdf
Interesting, though, that if any of the rebels had it, it would have been the Saudi-backed al-Nusra.
by priscianus jr on Sun Sep 15th, 2013 at 06:30:51 PM EST
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I bolded a sentence up there which caught my eye. On Sep 15th you were still pushing the nonsense that Assad's forces were not behind the attack. By this date most of the world beside Vladmir Putin had given up pushing this nonsense. But here you were still pushing it. So I replied, also on Sep 15h
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The world has a new Zombie Conspiracy Theory. We'll be hearing this one until the day we die, along with the "9/11 was an inside job", and "Obama is a Kenyan" ZCTs. Whaddya gonna do?
by Quicklund on Sun Sep 15th, 2013 at 09:46:09 PM EST
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You see, I don’t have to read every nutty bolt of your ZCT to know you are still pushing a ZCT. I read all the nutty bolts back when this originally came up. Reading them again does not change the surreality of the nonsense. Your ZCT is based on unrealistic leaps of faith. I essentially see an emotional need for the US intel services to be lying. And also lying have to be the UK, French, Israeli, German, and UN officials. But hey! It’s a ZCT. The more the merrier.
When this all started and it looked like a US strike would happen anyday, normally reasonable people grsaped for the chance Assad’s guilt had not been proven. But now that a spectacular diplomatic victory is in the offing, emotions have cooled down and those reasonable people have quietly tacitly accepted Assad’s guilt. Those reasonable people do not deserve mockery. This leaves the nonsense to only the ZCT pushers. The Zombies do deserve it.
Like I have said and said and say again now. Believe whatever you want to believe. Keep pushing this nonsense until the day you die. I son’t care. If it is not you it will be someone else. ZCTs never die.
I personally don’t want to be fellow travelers with the truther and birther ZGT whackos, but if that floats your boats have at it. But as with birthers and truthers, false flaggers such as yourself are not above being mocked. You built the kitchen so don’t gripe about the heat.
I friggin’ love that the President called out the Beltway Media for their shallowness. Great call, Booman.
Where’s the shock and awe? That was impressive last time.
Where are our Frog Ponders who constantly call Obama a willing enabler and warmongering leader of the PermaGov?
Way OT, but saw this series of tweets and had to share. Today marks 50 years ago since the Birminghman church bombing those 4 little girls.
If you have ever seen the Spike Lee doc “Four Little Girls”, they show the autopsy photos, and it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Thanks for sharing this.
“We know that, ’cause that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq War – until it ended up… blowing up in our face.”
Bamz FTW with that one. And thank you for those last two pieces. I have not been watching Syria closely and they provided a good timeline and a lot of coherence regarding what’s been happening.
The Neocon appears not to learn. Imagine if the Neocon had not interfered with 80’s Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Osama may have been denied a base of operation for 911.
now we just need to kill chained CPI
… ugh
Wow. You are obsessed. And not in a good way.
Good news for the economy
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/larry-summers-senate-confirmation-96789.html
Sign the petition,
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/dont-let-larry-summers
Sorry, I was just worrying about this this morning. I guess it isn’t necessary to sign the petition after all. Good news indeed. So good I almost can’t believe it.
Where are you reading this?
Nice posts. Thank you. Glad to see at least one person in DC realizes the cold war is over and we are not and don’t have to be in a protracted global conflict with Russia. Or China, I suppose. Or anybody, really. Not even global Jihad.
Wow, amazing topic you have made! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokoolapps.asiachinapuzzles
The Iraq thing was smooth, disciplined, and linear? Sure didn’t look that way from where I was watching it! Looked like an ill-conceived, fantasy-based catastrophe right from the beginning.
His point, as I’m sure you realize, is that the marketing and messaging around Iraq was smooth, disciplined, and linear. The actual policy was a disaster, but the Bush Administration effort to sell it ran like clockwork. And Obama is saying the media cares too much about the latter.
I guess for those who either really, really wanted to “go kick some Eye-rackian ass”, or who were naive enough to believe the outrageous BS they were being sold it might have seemed smooth, disciplined, and linear. For those of us who either knew something about Iraq, or who were not quite as eager to believe it did not seem so.
In the meantime, there seems to be a lot of after-the-fact excuse-making going on here.