By Dave Lindorff
Obama resurrects the discredited Vietnam domino theory (
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In what NPR called "perhaps President Obama's last best chance" to make his case for launching a war against Syria, the president tellingly didn't make a single effort to present hard, compelling evidence to prove that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had been behind the alleged Sarin Aug. 21 attack on residents of a suburb of Damascus.
Not one piece of evidence.
Instead, he continued the talking point of the past week, focussing on the admitted horror of seeing young children "writhing in pain and going still on a cold hospital floor."
Given that two thirds of Americans, according to polls, do not want the US to unilaterally attack Syria, and really do not want yet another war in the Middle East, it is truly amazing that the president didn't try to make the case, at least, that Assad was the guilty party. He simply stated, as was done in the two-page propaganda article posted on the White House website, that "We know the Assad regime was responsible" for the gas attack.
Except that we don't. As I have written (but as the corporate media have blacked out throughout this latest crisis), a group of 12 veteran intelligence officers has written to the president telling him that the intelligence does not point to Assad, but to the rebel forces as the source of the gas attack.
What Obama did instead was try to make a case that attacking Syria to punish the government for its unproven use of gas against its own people was a matter of US national security.
Here he pulled out an even more far-fetched version of the old "domino theory" than even Lyndon Johnson's and John F. Kennedy's crew came up with to justify the Vietnam War.
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