The fog…
…of chemical war, in Syria.
Ascertaining the truth is often difficult. Ascertaining the truth in that region of the world is even more difficult, as the article points out:
Syrian state media confirms that chemical weapons were used in the attack ”” but says it was the rebels that used them…
On one side, we have a hereditary dictatorship that has a track record of genocidal attacks on its own people. On the other side, we have an aggregation of impotent secularists and radical Sunni Islamists with a track record of mass-murder attack on civilians. The question isn’t which would use chemical weapons to further their cause, it’s which wouldn’t, and the answer is neither.
The fact that he’s emphasizing UN approval as an obstacle shows you how reluctant he is even now to intervene. The UN’s not going to do anything about Syria; Russia will veto any nascent international coalition into oblivion. In fact, not only is the Security Council paralyzed, but the UN has ordered its chemical weapons team in Syria not to go to the Damascus suburb where the new attack occurred because it’s simply too dangerous for them. O’s stuck in a moronic cycle of his own making where he clearly doesn’t want to get involve in Syria but is compelled to respond to each new Assad provocation with ever finer gradations of heightened “concern.” That’s what Josh Earnest’s blather about a threat to U.S. national security is about.
[ADDENDUM: More here, from Caroline Glick via Powerline.]
Aren’t these the chemical weapons they shipped in from Iraq?
Napoleon identified Obama’s weakness:
‘Hesitation and half measures lose all in war.’
Early on he could have prevailed. Now there are no good options other than let the crazies whack away at each other.
None of this, to best of my knowledge, is based on facts. We haven’t learned anything about photos as propaganda, have we? Nor do we even try to distinguish allegations from facts. I doubt the whole effing thing.
Who ya gonna trust in this story? Alewites? Sunnis? Shia? Dictatorial ophthalmologists? Jihadists? Nobody is who. Furthermore, why care?
What’s the big deal about more dead, when (apparently) more than 100,000 have died? I am sorry to seem Hillaryesque about this, but to be killed is to be dead, and choice of cause matters not, whether by gas or by gun. Perhaps we will have the “innocence” theme re-emerge to justify this highly selective propaganda-driven hand-wringing.
Quick, call the UN. Oh wait; it is “too dangerous” to send UN detectives in. The UN, leader of forensic science in the kill zones.
Stoopid.
The UN is too busy raping little girls in Africa at their peace keeping HQs, funded by American dollars.
And people wonder why the World Hates America…
Don Carlos, you are so right.
The withering angst from the West, most recently France, is pretext in the service of demonstrating a self-serving moral solicitude from which the Left and useful idiots cannot refrain. The return to conventional mass slaughter would be copasetic, it seems, as it is not the slow tedious mass destruction that is objected to, just the ‘weapon’ of mass destruction. The moral morons are in a dudgeon — isn’t that precious.
The Left deploys WMDs in America all the time. Why are they saying they forbid it now?
Deception has always been one of the Leftist alliance’s primary weapons against humanity.
Many of the photos of the dead are inconsistent with nerve agents.
At the top of the list: just how can unprotected parties even pick up the dead in a zone so recently bombarded with Sarin?
As employed, Sarin — an oil rendered into an aerosol — persists for days — at toxic levels.
It does not blow away. Anyone attempting to render aid — particularly prompt aid — is at dire risk of Sarin poisoning, too.
Lethal concentrations of Sarin commonly infuse the clothing of the dead, as the agent is typically encountered at over kill concentrations.
Yet the photos show fresh, un-decomposed corpses lined up regular way for islamic burial rituals — which demand burial within one-day.
The dead also do not show the profound contortions of death so typical of nerve agents. (Muscles locked up all over the body — torn tendons — voided orifices — etc.)
If not killed by Sarin, then what? (Phosgene?)
We’d need CSI Damascus to figure it out.
On their records, none of the parties of interest can be trusted one iota.
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The Bhopal disaster involved a gas leak from an industrial plant/ tank that flowed across the set-back zone to reach sleeping Indians.
One can but wonder if something like that occurred in Syria. Rockets are very sloppy. Like India, Syria can be expected to have chemical works all too close to residential tracts.
Look what happened just the other day in Texas.
An emotional rush to judgment is most unwise.
Channeling HRC: What difference does it make? Why should I care about thousands or even millions of dead in Syria when my grandchildren are born under the debt thumb of DC? Our current regime will lie, cheat, steal, subvert, murder, and disparage all who disagree. &^ck’em sideways with a 2×4 and any which way but loose. (Same goes for you serf punks at NSA.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHAFmFsb9XM
Fighting side of me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4s0nzsU1Wg
Me and mine will survive. Come and find us, I have hundreds of kin, so your kevlar can cover everything but your eyes and we will shoot you in the eye at 400 yards. You won’t know we are there before you die. We have figured out how to remain undetected from the sensors of your drones, infrared or otherwise. We are not stupid and we will not go quietly. Stay comfortable in your air conditioned rooms with banks of computers NSA, but you don’t have the cojones to stand in front of my nephews and nieces hand to hand. We don’t give a damn and we are in counties and little towns all across this land. We cling and we never let go.
End rant with a final &^ck’em.
The weather in DC was gorgeous today and The Lightbringer had to meet with his Nat Sec Council.
He may not have been able to go golfing today.
The Obama Doctrine:
Any questions?
Didn’t we wait for the UN in Rwanda when the other clinton was the president?
I like Palin’s recommendation: Let Allah sort it out.
Rumor has it the latest decision regarding Syria, by the world’s most insightful foreign policy intellect, was hatched on the golf course yesterday.
So little escapes his razor sharp mind, it’s hard to contain ones excitement as his master plan for the MIddle East unfolds before us.
It boggles the mind trying to keep up with the chess game he’s playing with Syria, Iran, and Egypt. One day, the brilliance will be revealed; for now we are left to guess; having only video of him experimenting with various golf clubs and victory dances, providing us with fleeting clues into the deep concentration and focus he brings to bear on crisis resolution.
Imagine the fear these images convey to the hearts of Asad and his henchmen!
Just watching this display, one can only shake his head and wonder at the decisive, swift, and ghastly horrors He might unleash, were an enemy to strike the USA.
southpaw:
Once again, it depends what Obama’s goals are.
Neo, once again, you’ve assumed he has them, without giving any positive evidence, other than to say “because we don’t know them doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them”.
You’re insisting that because I can’t see ghosts, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. But one thing you could do is provide evidence of their existence that doesn’t require explicit proof — you could predict something that ghosts affect, then show me the effect, and make the case that there’s a correlation between theory of ghosts’ existence, and effect. But you’re not.
I’m still asking what is one outcome that we should be observing from the unseen policy that Barack has kept secret from everyone?
What is the Obama doctrine? The answer that keeps coming back is nobody can prove there isn’t one, therefore it exists.
Is it working? Or is it that nobody knows because we don’t know the goal, and it’s impossible to understand without knowing the goal. Either I’m crazy, or your argument is impossible to refute.
For what it’s worth, I can’t find anyone conservative or liberal, who shares your view that he’s got a goal, known or unknown, and that he hasn’t made a mess of things.
I know, if you intended destroy the stability of the Middle East all along, you would be a success. Given your premise that universally accepted failure is the thing Obama was hoping for, there is nothing he does that falls short of genius. That argument is completely without integrity, especially for a person whose ego has no limit and who obsesses over public appearance.
southpaw:
I’ve written plenty about evidence in previous posts. I’m not going to belabor it once again here. Suffice to say that of course there will be no smoking gun, but that Obama’s foreign policy decisions and seeming errors are hardly random ones. Although he has certainly made some errors in his foreign policy decisions, and I have made it clear I do not consider him a foreign policy genius, I do see plenty of evidence from the pattern of his foreign policy decisions that they reflect a very conscious and purposeful decision-making process and a philosophical outlook of his rather than being random cases of incompetence. The man has a vision, and he is following it, and it is not going badly at all according to his goals. And I also see him as politically (domestic politics, that is) very very very smart.
Neo, I guess we will disagree, but it’s clear to me the vision you see is invisible to the political universe on both the the left and the right. There is no one including yourself able to say what the vision is, and nearly everyone agrees that there is nothing but incoherence and confusion coming out of the state department.
And Claiming that the vision he’s been following is going pretty well, when nobody can so much as give it a general description, makes no sense whatsoever.
Quite honestly I think no matter what he does or doesn’t do, no matter how bad he flubs a situation, you will find some reason to believe he that he was anticipating it all, and regardless of the outcome you’ll insist it was a victory. I have yet to see a post by you that unequivocally states he made a mistake, without serious speculation that perhaps it was a cleverly crafted illusion, or that it was not a mistake at all. Nobody is as good as you’ve made him out to be. Sometimes things are what they seem, but when it comes to Obama, you aren’t willing to make that leap. I don’t know if it’s because he’s a committed lefty that you hold this opinion that he’s virtually infallible, and that we (or me) just don’t understand what we’re dealing with.
But as you say, a mind is a difficult thing to change.
For my part, I promise to keep an open mind and admit I’m wrong when this hidden policy and vision are fiinally revealed, and you write about here.
And Claiming that the vision he’s been following is going pretty well, when nobody can so much as give it a general description, makes no sense whatsoever.
What part of permanently transforming America and acquiring totalitarian utopian power has not been described? What part of the Leftist + Islamic alliance hasn’t been mentioned before?