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I recommend Gareth Porter’s June 22 article on The American Conservative, How America Armed Terrorists in Syria. It tells a story that I already knew (at a high level) – supported by a wealth of details that I didn’t.
In the rest of this post, I’ll share my notes on that and some other articles, re-telling the story with many fewer details. But it will still be a long post. First, a couple of things to keep in mind:
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At this meeting, they reached a Syria cease-fire agreement.
HAMBURG — A cease-fire agreement reached Friday between the United States and Russia is intended to quell fighting in southwest Syria and allow anti-government rebels there to focus on the Islamic State, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said…
The fighting has caused an estimated 500,000 deaths and displaced nearly half of Syria’s pre-war population of 22 million people.
In case it needs spelling out: The cease-fire is a good thing, and this post’s title is parody.
Raise your hand if you are old enough to remember when Democrats liked peace, said things like “Politics stops at the water’s edge”, and thought that it would be good if the world’s top two nuclear powers (Russia and the U.S.) could find ways to get along.
I’m old enough to remember when the Soviet Union existed and the U.S. needed to fight their aggressive communism. And I remember that the Soviet Union ended, and that Islam became a threat – to gays especially.
Photo & title hat tip, Jack Posobiec’s twitter.
UPDATE: Photo session where France’s Macron shoves his way through, to stand next to President Trump. Macron starts at the viewer’s upper right; Trump lower left.
It made me laugh. I’m not sure why. I did get an impression of a puppy scrambling to be next to the alpha dog. Merkel tracks Macron anxiously; almost like he was supposed to stand next to her? Anyway, it’s a contrast to that famous photo where Obama stood alone with The Wives.
U.S. Shoots Down Syrian Aircraft for First Time.
The U.S. military on Sunday shot down a Syrian Air Force fighter jet that bombed local forces aligned with the Americans in the fight against Islamic State militants…
According to a statement from the Pentagon, pro-Syrian regime forces attacked the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces-held town of Ja’Din, south of Tabqah in northern Syria, wounding a number of SDF fighters and driving the SDF from the town.
Coalition aircraft conducted a show of force and stopped the initial pro-regime advance toward the town, the Pentagon said…
A few hours later, the Syrian SU-22 dropped bombs near SDF fighters and, “in collective self-defense of coalition-partnered forces,” was immediately shot down by a U.S. F/A-18E Super Hornet, the Pentagon said.
“The coalition’s mission is to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria,” the Pentagon said, using an abbreviation for the Islamic State group. “The coalition does not seek to fight Syrian regime, Russian or pro-regime forces partnered with them…”
And that’s what doesn’t make sense. ISIS and the so-called “moderate, democratic” opposition to the Syrian government are much the same people. There is a flow of people, weapons and training between them.
Just as no one can “have their cake and eat it, too”, the U.S. must choose between defeating Syria’s Assad regime and defeating ISIS. To attempt both, is to stick with a losing position.
UPDATE: Krauthammer tries to explain it. According to him:
It still sounds hokey to me, with too much danger of an accidental war with Russia. But I wanted to acknowledge that the side favoring U.S. involvement in Syria might have a strategy in mind.
We’ve been hearing a long time that energy pipelines (especially liquid natural gas) might be involved in all this. Pipelines to Europe, that need to run through Syria. The Russia-Iran version would tend to make Europe more dependent on them, while the U.S.-Saudi version would do the reverse (or preserve Europe’s dependence on the U.S. and Saudi Arabia).
That’s the title of an article by Caitlin Johnstone which I came across. She seems more lefty/Democrat than me and I don’t endorse her every notion. Still, she seems populist and has some interesting notions. To start:
…the single best way to take down the oligarchy is by aggressively and relentlessly attacking its propaganda engine.
Johnstone sees “the oligarchy” as more about corporations than about Big Government’s politicians and bureaucrats; while I’m the reverse. But at least we agree there is an oligarchy.
The elites who manipulate your government are more vulnerable now than ever before and they know it — the solution just isn’t in politics, it’s in media…old propaganda systems which have been used to lull Americans into accepting the establishment narrative are wielding less and less influence…
So what can we do? We make them fight our fight. If they’re a shark and we’re a tiger, we make them fight us in the jungle…
1. Increase public distrust of the mainstream media.
…Imagine if [people] knew that CNN has been trotting out a seven year-old Syrian girl with an extremely popular fake Twitter account and making her recite scripted lines in order to manufacture consent for another regime change invasion…The Bana Alabed psy-op is the single most transparent piece of war propaganda that I have ever seen in my life, and we should be talking about it constantly, because they really left themselves exposed with that one.
I think Johnstone is talking about changing the frame. “Bana” was indeed Syria war propaganda. I mentioned it awhile back, but didn’t go far enough. The Resistance Chicks (2 populist-moderate, Christian sisters from Ohio) show Bana literally reading a script while the CNNwhore plays along and pretends it’s real.
When you expose Bana, putting her into a new (and 100% truthful) frame as a propaganda pawn, CNN’s power dissipates.
To continue – I won’t quote it all, but this gives you an idea of the rest of Johnstone’s eight points:
2. Shatter the illusion of normalcy.
…These [media, CNN-type] predators use their trusted, ubiquitous presence in the lives of the public to convince them that everything [bad] that’s happening is normal…It’s normal for your country to be bombing sovereign nations every single day and have hundreds of military bases all over the world…It’s normal that all these politicians seem to do pretty much the same things once elected despite campaigning on very different platforms. It’s normal for elected officials to lie. It’s normal for your government to have the ability to spy on you….We need to snap mainstream America out of this lullaby of normalcy. We need to be the caring friend who tells them that it’s not normal for their boyfriend to be violent and controlling…without the spell of normalcy, the whole thing falls apart.3. Shatter the illusion of unanimity.
4. Stay loudly politically active.
5. Hold a grudge. [i.e., keep bringing up stuff / reminding people]
6. Always be attacking. [the oligarchy’s / media’s “normal” consensus]
7. Find the others. [telling people “Nah, you’re not crazy — I see it too.”]
8. Have fun. “We have the opportunity to be basically wizards, fighting the word-spells these bastards are casting on the sleeping mainstream and screaming ‘You shall not pass!'”
As always, I’d encourage you to Read The Whole Thing, and/or to share your thoughts.
A lot has happened in the last few weeks, to let us know what kind of president Trump is going to be.
He isn’t the new Hitler. And he isn’t the new Ronald Reagan. He’s Obama-Lite, or roughly what President Obama would have been if were saner and more authentically masculine and pro-American. (Like Obama, President Trump often talks about his own good intentions/hopes as if they were accomplishments.
They aren’t.) “The Swamp” and/or Deep State will stay in business for quite awhile yet. I suspect that Trump has cut some sort of deal with several of its important factions.
That still makes him 100 times better than Hillary.
Hillary would have done none of the above. On his own, Trump is not all that hot. But when compared to Hillary, he still is.
On April 8, Cernovich Media claimed that National Security Advisor “H. R. McMaster [is] Manipulating Intelligence Reports to Trump, Wants 150,000 Ground Soldiers in Syria”.
Today, Eli Lake at Bloomberg confirms that McMaster wants to send up to 50,000 ground troops to Syria. And “has been quietly pressing his colleagues to question the underlying assumptions of a draft war plan against the Islamic State that would maintain only a light U.S. ground troop presence in Syria…to facilitate a better interagency process to develop Trump’s new strategy to defeat [ISIS].”
The real news is that Trump has said no to McMaster – at least for the time being. Kudos to those GP commenters who advised me, more or less, that Trump is his own man and wouldn’ t automatically go with McMaster.
As to the rest: it sounds like Cernovich dropped the nuances and exaggerated what was left, but still got much of the essence. And ahead of Bloomberg. Here’s a similar example, this one with Judge Napolitano.
In March, Napolitano claimed that, in spying on Trump, Obama went around U.S. laws that would restrict such spying by having a British intelligence agency access the U.S. NSA surveillance databases, then pass along findings. Obama and the British denied it vehemently.
Today, CNN confirms that “British intelligence passed Trump associates’ communications with Russians on to US counterparts.” CNN suggests that the British did the surveilling themselves, a difference from Napolitano’s story. Still, the British did it under intelligence-sharing agreements and to me, it sounds like Napolitano was in the ballpark.
The real news is that CNN still has no substantive Russian collusion to report against Trump.
I never thought I’d live in a world where Democrats – having been “peace loving” shills for the old Soviet Union, for so many decades – are eager for bellicose confrontation with Russia. But, here we are.
When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D – HI), an Iraq war veteran, cautioned her fellow Democrats to slow down and remember the Iraq-WMD situation (such as the Left remembers it), Howard Dean called her a “disgrace” who “should not be in Congress”. So much for the Democrats’ brrrrave fight against misogyny.
Or, as Tucker Carlson put it last night:
Democrats are now the reflexive party of war — all wars, except those with an obvious benefit to us here in the United States. If there is a humanitarian quagmire on the other side of the globe, they are all for committing troops. And you better be for it, too, or they will denounce you.
One of Tucker’s guests was a Democrat strategist, Alfred Mottur. Video, some here and some here. After Mottur claims to be “heartened” by the rising tensions and that Russia “undoubtedly” or “aggressively” “interfered with our elections”, this exchange:
[Carlson] In what sense does this confrontation with Russia now ongoing make our country safer or more prosperous?
[Mottur] With respect to our elections, it makes us safer in our democratic processes to make sure that their integrity is preserved.
Got it? We must destroy American democracy in a potentially-nuclear conflict with Russia, in order to save it.
But note that when China, Saudi Arabia, or our own Deep State “interfere with our elections”, we don’t need to be confrontational with them. Or even talk about them. Oh no, don’t talk about their interference! Only Russia.
Some Democrats’ desire for war with Russia is as bad as some Republicans’ desire for war in Syria (that would likely lead to war with Russia).
The sad irony is that, as I posted a few days ago, Russia didn’t interfere with anything.
It seems that today’s Democrats are such psychotic babies that they would rather take us into confrontation with Russia than admit that they lost the 2016 election fairly, after they ran an awful candidate.
And IMO, it appears also as though Deep State’s “intelligence” leaks – all those NothingBurgers meant to make people think that Russia attacked our election, Russia colluded with President Trump who is Putin’s agent, etc. – could have been intentional War propaganda.
NB: I just corrected the spelling of Mottur’s name and improved the video links & transcript.
As former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter has put it:
…chemical attacks had been occurring inside Syria on a regular basis… International investigations of these attacks produced mixed results, with…the majority being attributed to anti-regime fighters, in particular those affiliated with Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate.
Some sort of chemical event took place in Khan Sheikhoun; what is very much in question is who is responsible…
A critical piece of information that has largely escaped the reporting in the mainstream media is that Khan Sheikhoun is ground zero for the Islamic jihadists who have been at the center of the anti-Assad movement…
The Russian Ministry of Defense has claimed that Liwa al-Aqsa [anti-Assad jihadists] was using facilities in and around Khan Sheikhoun to manufacture crude chemical shells and landmines…
Al Nusra has a long history of manufacturing and employing crude chemical weapons; the 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta made use of low-grade Sarin nerve agent locally synthesized, while attacks in and around Aleppo in 2016 made use of a chlorine/white phosphorous blend.
If…the building bombed in Khan Sheikhoun on the morning of April 4, 2017 was producing and/or storing chemical weapons, the probability that viable agent and other toxic contaminants were dispersed into the surrounding neighborhood, and further disseminated by the prevailing wind, is high.
Emphasis added. Although the article is at PuffHo and written by a sex offender (teenage girls), it’s a detailed article and worth reading in full.
So, there’s that. The whole thing could have been an accident, when a Syrian government jet did a conventional attack on a facility where the rebels were storing their own, illegal, home-grown(?) chemical weapons.
On the other hand, we have Defense Secretary Mattis stating, “The Syrian regime attacked its own people with chemical weapons. I have personally reviewed the intelligence and there is no doubt the Syrian regime is responsible for the decision to attack and for the attack itself.”
Fifteen years ago, deciding whether to believe the U.S. defense secretary would have been easy: Just believe him! But, disturbingly, Mattis’ briefing gave almost no supporting details – for a story which makes little sense on its surface.
And a lot has changed, in the last 15 years. We now know to a certainty that the U.S. intelligence agencies get things wrong or even mislead on purpose.
As such, I’m not comforted to know that Mattis “personally reviewed the intelligence” (a fancy way of saying just that he read the agency reports). I remain a skeptic of the official story. As always, feel free to disagree or to tell me what I missed, in the comments.
As to the larger picture: Trump says, “We’re not going into Syria.” But… Spicer is comparing Assad to Hitler and Nikki Haley is still talking Syria regime change. As is McCain. Yuck.
UPDATE: Zero Hedge lists more reasons to question the official story, including:
I was advised to google “Syria hoax footage” and see what comes up. A lot comes up. For one thing, here’s video from November 2016 of Syrian “White Helmets” (a pro-rebel group; thus pro-Islamist) carefully STAGING a scene of man whose legs were supposedly crushed in a government attack.
They all scream on cue, at about 0:22. Afterward, the man – that is, the actor – looks cheerful and takes a photo with his fellow actors. Click here and scroll down to see.
CNN lately has been hitting the “Won’t somebody PLEEEZ think of the children??!” button extra hard, with its clips of Bana, an adorable, wide-eyed Syrian 7-year old who pleads for the freedom to play and go to school.
Here, CNN throws Bana into the face of a rather sensible Congressperson, starting around 1:50.
It turns out, of course, that each of Bana’s performances and Tweets are scripted and staged by her politically-motivated mother.
Note to CNN: A seven-year old isn’t a U.S. foreign policy expert. Her opinion, even if unscripted, would still be Fake News in the sense that it simply isn’t news. And oh yeah, if we did invade Syria (or bomb it further), it would become even harder for Bana to play or go to school. Tell her that.
The U.S. Intelligence and foreign policy bureaucrats (Deep State) wanted Hillary because, for some reason or other, they want a war in Syria at the least; if not a full-on war with Russia. Along with a few billionaires – like Carlos Slim (New York Times) and Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) and Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild (Economist magazine) and some others (Time-Warner / CNN) – the Deep State controls the proverbial Controlled Media, which spews War propaganda on command.
That’s reality. That is the world we live in: A tyranny in which relatively non-accountable, secretive bureaucrats manipulate the media – and have the media, in turn, manipulate us with FAKE NEWS.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that the recent Syria chemical attack was a hoax or a false flag. But it means that we’re right to wonder. We’re right to ask our leaders for caution. We’re right to question “the narrative.”
Guess what else? We just got a little more information on how it could have been the murdered DNC-insider Seth Rich, and not the Russians, who hacked/leaked the DNC emails in the 2016 election.
“The consensus of 17 intelligence agencies is that the Russians did it!!1!” was always a shaky story. For one thing, the DNC didn’t even allow the FBI in to look at the alleged crime scene for a couple of weeks after it happened.
Its investigation hampered, the FBI then relied mostly on a report of Russian hacking from CrowdStrike, a Democrat-funded company. And CrowdStrike’s report/story has been more or less debunked. The other 16 agencies then relied on the FBI. I say, phooey. This isn’t the first time the proverbial “17 intelligence agencies!” have gotten it wrong – or even tried to deceive us.
UPDATE: On further reflection, the GatewayPundit link above (after “Guess what else?”) is a NothingBurger. As such, I apologize for having brought up that link.
Nonetheless, Julian Assange of Wikileaks has strongly denied Russian involvement in the DNC leaks (try here) and implied that Seth Rich was his source (try here). That continues to be my hypothesis.
UPDATE: On the other side of the spectrum, Cernovich goes on a limb, claims that McMaster has been lying to Trump in an effort to get 150,000 boots on the ground in Syria. If true: it’s a bad moment for America. And if false: it’s a bad moment for Cernovich – who has been shaky on some things, and astoundingly right on some other things.
In the clip above: Senator Lindsey Graham (R – SC) takes the position that we should now fight ISIS plus every major faction in Syria at the same time plus the Russians if they should dare to oppose us, with ground troops and “advisers” to do nation-building in Syria, which somehow isn’t nation-building because it’s letting the “Syrians take care of Assad”, and all of which is directly needed to protect “the homeland” because it would have prevented 9-11 (a strike over here by Saudi terrorists) if only we had done it 16 years ago in Afghanistan. Also, it will save us money.
Even the intelligent Tucker Carlson can’t make sense of it.
Graham’s tone is so deadpan – so authentically uncaring about the lives involved, whether U.S. troops or Syrian locals or even U.S. taxpayers – that it gave me the creeps, once my head stopped spinning.
At the end of the clip, Carlson notes that articles in the Democrat-leaning New York Times and Washington Post have declared that anyone who would OPPOSE the U.S. bombing the brown people of Syria is somehow a “white nationalist”. Anyone who would oppose the Establishment’s new war plans is somehow – did you see this coming? – “racist, anti-Semitic and sexist”.
Do you need more evidence that, by now in 2017, America is in the grip of a war-mongering, out-of-control Deep State? Which opposed Trump fiercely – until a few days ago, when apparently he caved? And that what we have been calling “the mainstream/liberal media” and “the party Establishments” all this time are really the Deep State’s servants?