Not having had a war for a couple of years, David Cameron and Barack Obama have had a 40 minute phone-call about starting another one in the Middle East.
David Cameron and Barack Obama have both agreed that last week's chemical weapon attacks merits a 'serious response' after concluding that Bashar al-Assad was almost certainly responsible for the assault that killed as many as 1,400 people in Damascus last week.
'The Prime Minister and President Obama are both gravely concerned by the attack that took place in Damascus on Wednesday' said the Prime Ministers spokesman, 'and the increasing signs that this was a significant chemical weapons attack carried out by the Syrian regime against its own people. The UN security council has called for immediate access for UN investigators on the ground in Damascus. The fact that President Assad has failed to co-operate with the UN suggests that the regime has something to hide'.
The justification for us killing lots of innocent Syrians will be that the Syrian regime will not cooperate with the UN Inspectors which has a very familiar ring to it, especially as we have no evidence the al-Assad regime were actually behind the attack except the UK and US suspecting it and we know how good that intelligence has been recently.
Ramping up the rhetoric on the Syria defying the UN angle, US secretary of state, John Kerry, has told the Damascus government that they should let UN inspectors have access to the site of the alleged gas attack and 'if the Syrian regime has nothing to hide, it should allow immediate and unimpeded access to the site rather than continuing to attack the affected area to block access and destroy evidence'.
So another war seems imminent with Americans and Brits bravely bombing from thousands of feet up in the air or sending missiles from the sea hundreds of miles away in the name of a humanitarian intervention.
The general consensus of people i have spoken to seems to be we shouldn't be involved as it is nothing to do with us but as the momentum builds and the march to war has been set in motion by the invaders agreeing on the Chemical weapons and defying the UN angle, we can expect anyone that doesn't swallow the UK and US Government line will be branded an Assad-loving, lefty, paranoid, conspiracy theorist and any evidence that contradicts it will be summarily ignored and we know this because this is the way all our horrific wars since 9/11 have been conducted.
14 comments:
Maybe you should be Russian or Chinese... you tend to side with their diplomacy.
seems like a lose lose situation to me.
if we do nothing lots of people die and people we dont like are in charge.
if we do something lots of people die and people we dont like are in charge - but it gives fuel to lots of bloggers
q
I would be on the side of whoever didn't want to start a war, the French & Germans in Iraq, the Russians in Libya and the Russians and Chinese in Syria. I agree, it is a lose lose but as we have been looking for an angle to get involved and have now found one, the whole thing will be ramped up and yet again we have removed a Middle East Government on flimsy evidence and further destabalised the whole region like we have in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.
seems to me the Pres doesn't want to get involved unless the voters get engage. i don't see anybody (in person or in blogs) that want to get engage other than pols...
q
I haven't had chance to mooch around the blogs but i am not hearing much support for it apart from William Hague here and John Kerry there. I am sure they will both be volunteering their services to go there personally.
I'm still relatively young.
Does war and peace always go in this dumb cycle of: 1. politicians start unjust wars purely for political advantage, 2. people develop war fatigue, 3. the people are so fatigued by wars that they do not even fight limited just wars, 4. politicians eventually dip their toes back into war, 5. the cycle starts again when the toe-dipping becomes adventure-seeking...
I am also too young to really remember Somalia and Rwanda. Wasn't the whole reason why we let all those people get murdered in Rwanda when we could have helped them (justly perhaps) with a few bombers because of war fatigue from Somalia?
Now we have war fatigue from Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps Iraq is the new Somalia and Syria is the new Rwanda. Having fought what was at best an imprudent war and at worst an unjust one does not mean that one should not fight clearly just ones where people are doing clearly bad things.
Syria is not Iraq. We were making that crap up in Iraq. Assad has actually said that he has chemical weapons.
-Nog
@Nog: Young or not, I think there's a lot of truth & wisdom in that post!
I haven't decided whether I'm for or against military involvement... It doesn't yet strike me as being an 'obviously right' situation like Bosnia in 95 or an 'obviously wrong' one like Iraq '03... therefore I certainly don't envy our leaders right now. Whatever they choose, whether it's action or inaction, innocent people are going to die. Quantifying the 'least bad' option in a case like this must be such a grim task.
Nog - if you look into the Kosovon, the Libyan and now the Syrian conflicts and you will see huge similarities into how they began, how the West got involved and why.
Iraq and Afghanistan were another matter but none of them were done for humanitarian reasons except Kosovo possibly but the West was duped into attacking Serbia then.
The MO is always the same, target, demonise, find an angle, spin it, attack and install a 'friendly' face.
The fact that the same 2 (UK, US) have been involved in the removal of 3 and soon to be 4 leaders in the same oil soaked region speaks volumes and the big prize, Iran, will come within reach when Syria falls.
To answer your question, i expect you would get 3 different answers from Cheesy, q and i.
After Iraq, any UK/US military action in Syria has to be based on facts, not assumptions or guesses or hunches. The UK and US are beating the drums of war BEFORE the UN inspectors have had a chance to investigate. Hague and Kerry look like warmongers and overly keen to drag us into another unwinnable, counter-productive war.
noah,
• the US did not start ww1 and ww2
• korea and vietnam were a reaction to the fear of communism spreading as the UK and France could no longer manage the region and rebuild, it wasn’t for Ike, LBJ or JFK to get elected
• first gulf war was to stop Iraq before they spread in to Saudi Arabia
• kosovo may have been to distract american voters, maybe
• second gulf war was required because americans wanted "payback" that is why 424 in the house and 100 in the senate voted for it...
i don't think O would attack syria for internal political gain - who the hell wants anything to do with it? I think it would kill the dems in the upcoming house and senate elections…
now, being a cynic, is O satisfying some super-rich unknown dude? no, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories.
q
Prince Bandar bin Sultan perhaps q?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-the-saudi-connection-the-prince-with-close-ties-to-washington-at-the-heart-of-the-push-for-war-8785049.html
Q - I'm trying to square your statement that you "don’t believe in conspiracy theories" with also appearing to entertain the idea that Clinton may have decided to spearhead the NATO intervention in Kosovo in order to distract people's attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.... if that's what you're suggesting may have happened?
Now, it may indeed be the case that the intervention would have not have happened had Clinton not been fighting this domestic scandal (certainly Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore both believe so); however, whether you like to believe it's true or not, much harder to dispute is its status as a conspiracy theory.
I think it's naive to believe that every 'official (i.e. government) version' currently in the public arena is an accurate depiction of reality. Lots of things that we now know to be true (from the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to our governments lying to us about Iraqi links to 9-11, to scientists combining animal and human genes to create bizarre hybrids, to the NSA spying on peoples' phone calls and internet activity) started life as conspiracy theories.
That said, for each conspiracy theory, there will be scores of stories that people just dream up out of the ether, often for political reasons, but sometimes just for shits & giggles. Finding out which is which is the challenge/fun.
I don't consider a pol misdirecting to cover his lying ass to protect his personal image to be a conspiracy. And I said maybe. Maybe
Conspiracy theory to me includes the likes of:
- Armstrong didnt really go to the moon
- JFKs assassination was put together by LBJ, the mafia, and Castro
- there is a secret world government that control all the visible world leaders (masons)
- Area 51 had living space aliens
Q
Conspiracy theories come in all shapes & sizes, some more outlandish than others. And occasionally you find one that turns out to be not outlandish at all.
One man's trash is another's treasure...
Q
Post a Comment