This is not conspiracy mongering but simply the way policy in Washington is made. Hawks and doves are constantly jockeying for advantage with Obama standing haplessly in the middle. Moreover, the hawks seem to be winning since U.S. foreign policy has turned distinctly more robust since the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in late July.
Around the time that retired four-star Marine General John Allen was warning America's enemies, "You will fear us," and Gold Star parent Khizr Khan was telling Trump to go home and read the Constitution, Obama gave Ashton Carter, his interventionist Secretary of Defense the go-ahead to bomb ISIS positions in Libya.
On July 31 -- three days after Clinton gave her acceptance speech -- Syrian rebels led by Al Nusra, the local Al Qaeda affiliate, launched its powerful offensive in Aleppo.
Whether or not Washington OK'd the offensive -- citing reports of massive arms shipments to the rebels, the well-informed Moon of Alabama website argues persuasively that it did -- there is no doubt that it encouraged and helped coordinate a powerful propaganda campaign that has followed in its wake.
Omran Daqneesh, the dazed and dirt-encrusted five-year-old boy who has become "a symbol of Aleppo's suffering," according to The New York Times, is one example of how the campaign has borne fruit. Lina Sergie Attar's powerful Aug. 13 Times opinion piece, "Watching My Beloved Aleppo Rip Itself Apart," was another, while the rabidly anti-Assad Guardian has hardly let a day go by without running a heart-rending tale about this or that horror that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin have visited on Syria's civilian population. (Examples here, here, and here.)
U.S. Media on the Bandwagon
Context, balance, and plain accuracy have fallen by the wayside as various media outlets hop on the pro-war bandwagon. Why, for example, focus on the fate of one child in rebel-held eastern Aleppo when the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the mainstream media's favorite go-to source for Syrian casualty figures, reports that virtually the same number of civilians have died from random rebel shelling of government-held western Aleppo as from Syrian or Russian aerial bombardment in the east, i.e., 163 versus 162?
U.S.-backed Syrian 'moderate' rebels smile as they prepare to behead a 12-year-old boy (left), whose severed head is held aloft triumphantly in a later part of the video.
(Image by [Screenshot from the YouTube video]) Details DMCA
While trumpeting the fate of Omran Daqneesh, who was shaken but apparently not seriously hurt, why has The New York Times failed to report the plight of 12-year-old Abdullah Issa, whose throat was slit last month by members of a U.S.-backed rebel force known as Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zinki because he had allegedly fought on the government side?
"We are even worse than ISIS," the fighters bragged before finishing the boy off. Yet even though the entire gruesome image was caught on video, the "paper of record" has refused to report a single word.
The same goes for Lina Sergie Attar's stirring Times op-ed. Although it invokes the infamous 2013 Queiq River massacre to describe the suffering that Assad has heaped upon the people of Aleppo, it fails to mention that the slaughter was most likely the work of Al Nusra. Why spoil a good story with the facts?
Much the same can be said for Hasakah where The Wall Street Journal blandly reported that "Syrian government bombers had been striking Kurdish positions near the city of Hasakah, where the U.S. has been backing Kurdish forces in the fight against Islamic State," also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh.
Since the U.S. is battling the Islamic State, the quintessence of evil, its role must be above reproach while the Syrian government is plainly up to no good.
Nonetheless, the questions continue to multiply. If U.S. military personnel are helping the Kurds battle ISIS, why are the Kurds fighting with pro-government forces instead? Since the Syrian Observatory says they started the fight, did the Americans do anything to restrain them or call them off? Or did they encourage them to attack in order to provoke a wider conflict? What, moreover, happens if the U.S. ends up downing a Syrian plane? Clinton will cheer. But what happens if Russia decides to join in the fray?
Making Clinton Happy
A happy romp in the skies over Hasakah would serve the Clinton campaign well. It would show that toughness pays, as Clinton has repeatedly argued. But the trouble with war is that it is rarely goes according to plan.
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