Neocons Seek New Ultimatum on Syria

Source: Consortium News

You have to hand it to the neocons; they never give up on their single-minded agenda of promoting wars against Israel's Muslim "enemies," even after the disastrous war in Iraq. The big difference now is that the neocon strategy is to endlessly insist that the U.S. government issue ultimatums of war unless a target country acquiesces to some demand.

The apparent neocon hope is that at some point the target won't or can't do something, thus requiring a U.S. military assault to maintain American "credibility." The Washington Post's neocon editors are the bellwether for this approach as they mix outraged propaganda against the targets with outrage over any perceived "failure" of the targets to comply -- and then over President Barack Obama's hesitancy to act.

As you may recall, the Syrian government got high marks for implementing the initial phase of its promise to destroy equipment that could be used to prepare chemical weapons for deployment. But it was well known that the next phase -- collecting the chemicals and taking them to a Mediterranean port and then to sea for destruction -- would be much trickery because some of the CW depots were in areas controlled or contested by Syrian rebels and the routes to the sea also were insecure.

Even the Post's editors acknowledge this reality, writing:

"No one should be surprised that the international effort is behind schedule. The original deadline to remove all so-called Priority One chemicals, the most dangerous, by Dec. 31, and all Priority Two chemicals by Feb. 5, was terribly ambitious for an operation that is complex even in peacetime and doubly difficult in the midst of a civil war. The chemicals must be transported to the coast, then by sea to a destruction facility on board a U.S. vessel, the MV Cape Ray, and neutralized safely."

Nevertheless, the Post's neocon editors have decided that Bashar al-Assad's government is intentionally foot-dragging and must be prodded with a renewed threat of a U.S. military bombardment. Or as the Post wrote, "If the effort cannot be put back on track, it will raise anew the question of whether Mr. Obama is still serious about his 'threat of force.'"

The Post then reprised the now-discredited propaganda case, blaming the Assad regime for the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of civilians east of Damascus. Though the case against the Assad regime has essentially collapsed -- and the Obama administration still refuses to release any evidence supposedly fingering the Assad regime -- the Post editors simply pretend that the case is ironclad.

The editorial states:

"The chemical weapons removal was the direct outgrowth of the use of poison gas to kill more than 1,400 people last year, including women and children. The evidence pointed directly at Mr. Assad's forces for use of the chemical weapons. Further delay by Syria in the movement of these deadly substances to the coast will only compound Mr. Assad's complicity in the grave crime of the original attack."

Virtually everything about that paragraph has either been debunked or is in serious doubt. But the Post's editors don't care, much as they behaved in promoting false claims about Iraq's WMD in the 2002-03 run-up to that invasion. The editors seem to understand that the key to propaganda is simply to repeat questionable claims as flat fact with unyielding confidence. Most readers won't know or remember the details, so the propaganda will win out.

Exaggerating Numbers

In the Syria case, the U.S. government's claim that "1,429" people were killed in the Aug. 21 incident was never substantiated and conflicted with on-the-ground estimates by doctors who put the number of victims at a few hundred.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the strangely precise "1,429" number resulted from the CIA applying facial recognition software to videos of corpses posted on YouTube and then subtracting duplications and victims with bloody shrouds. The problem with this "methodology" should be obvious, since there was no way to confirm the dates or the locations of the YouTube videos and people can die of many causes other than a gas attack and not have bloody shrouds.

To determine the cause of the deaths requires much more than scanning YouTube videos. Still, the Post accepts these dubious -- and surely exaggerated -- numbers as flat fact.

More significantly, the Aug. 21 evidence does not point directly at Assad's forces, as the Post asserts. The only evidence against Assad's forces that has been publicly presented -- the "vector analysis" retracing the trajectories of two rockets back to an intersection point 9.5 kilometers away at a Syrian military base -- has been thoroughly discredited, since the one rocket carrying Sarin had a range of only about two kilometers. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mistaken Guns of Last August."]

That limited range suggested that the rocket, which landed in Zamalka, east of Damascus, was launched from territory controlled by the rebels, not by the government. The other rocket, which landed in Moadamiya, south of Damascus, was found by UN inspectors to have no Sarin or other chemical weapons agents, and it clipped a building in its descent, making a precise determination on its trajectory impossible.

Even the New York Times, which had promoted the "vector analysis" in a front-page article, was forced to grudgingly admit that its big scoop was bogus. [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Backs Off Its Syria-Sarin Analysis."]

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