Tag: Assad government

Military experts (and corporatists) rule – at least since the end of WWII. They have pressured every U.S. president to lead with the military option and have usually gotten their way. It hardly matters that they have pushed over the years for the use of nuclear weapons, or that they have lost every war they’ve fought since 1945, inflicting or at least expanding global chaos and suffering in the process.

A 1983 document signed by former CIA officer Graham Fuller titled, “Bringing Real Muscle to Bear Against Syria” (PDF), states (their emphasis): Syria at present has a hammerlock on US interests both in Lebanon and in the Gulf — through closure of Iraq’s pipeline thereby threatening Iraqi internationalization of the [Iran-Iraq] war. The US should consider sharply escalating the pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey.

In August 2012, then-President Barack Obama publicly warned the Assad government that the red line for his administration was “a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” which would prompt a U.S. intervention. Since Obama drew his red line, the official narrative went something along these lines: Assad decided to give Obama the political middle finger and routinely massacre civilians with banned nerve agents such as sarin gas, even in the face of warnings and hawkish calls for intervention. The latest alleged attack took place over this past weekend in a Damascus suburb in Eastern Ghouta known as Douma, just days after Trump called for the withdrawal of U.S. forced from Syria.