[D66] Obama and media manufacture pretext for attack on Syria

[Nord]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/30/pers-a30.html

Obama and media manufacture pretext for attack on Syria
30 August 2013

The Obama administration indicated Thursday that it was moving ahead 
with preparations to attack Syria, despite the absence of any legal 
sanction from the United Nations, and even without the participation of 
its closest allies. It is doing so in the face of overwhelming hostility 
not only from the masses of the Middle East, but also the American people.

President Barack Obama’s drive to war against Syria compares unfavorably 
even to the criminal operation mounted by the Bush administration 
against Iraq a decade ago. Now, even the “coalition of the willing” is 
being dispensed with, as the parliament of Washington’s closest ally, 
Britain, voted Thursday against military action. The US president is 
barely going through the motions of selling the war to the American public.

In a PBS television interview Wednesday night, Obama made his incoherent 
case for a US military attack on Syria. Both his answers and the 
interviewers’ questions underscored the fact that for the US government 
and the American media there is no lie too stupid or contradiction too 
glaring in manufacturing a pretext for war.

The alleged chemical weapons strike in the suburbs east of Damascus on 
August 21 has been seized upon as the justification for a unilateral and 
illegal US attack without the administration or the media presenting a 
shred of proof that it was carried out by the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The implausibility of this government carrying out such an action on the 
very day that United Nations weapons inspectors began their work in 
Damascus—at the invitation of Assad—is passed over in silence. So too is 
the extensive evidence that the so-called “rebels,” murderous US-backed 
militias in which Al Qaeda-linked Islamist formations play the leading 
role, have access to and have repeatedly used chemical weapons.

In the PBS interview, Obama painted Washington as merely a horrified 
bystander to the violent struggle that has wracked Syria for the past 
two years, supposedly limiting itself to diplomatic appeals and 
humanitarian assistance. This is a bald-faced lie. The CIA has 
coordinated the massive flow of arms and Islamist foreign fighters into 
Syria, unleashing a bloody sectarian civil war with the aim of achieving 
regime change. It has armed and trained anti-government forces in Jordan 
and sent them back into Syria under effective US command to carry out 
mayhem.

Despite this massive and barely covert intervention, the war for regime 
change has turned into a debacle, in large measure because the Syrian 
people are hostile to both imperialist intervention and the attempt to 
break up a largely secular society and impose an Islamist regime by 
means of sectarian slaughter.

The rush to war, with the US dismissing as an irrelevant delaying tactic 
the investigation by UN weapons inspectors that it had formally 
demanded, is determined by the speed with which the armed insurgency 
that it has sponsored is disintegrating.

It is hardly difficult to understand the motives of the so-called 
“rebels” and their handlers within the military and intelligence 
apparatus of Washington’s deep state for launching a missile attack and 
then blaming it on the Assad regime.

Having maneuvered Obama into declaring chemical weapons a “red line,” 
these elements can now compel the administration to undertake military 
action as part of a desperate bid to save face and maintain credibility. 
This is to be achieved through the unprovoked slaughter of Syrian men, 
women and children under a rain of Tomahawk cruise missiles and other 
high explosives.

Obama in his Wednesday interview described the coming military action as 
a “limited, tailored” operation, a “shot across the bow” of the Assad 
regime. However, once such an attack—described by some sources as days 
of bombardment—begins, it will inevitably expand into a war with 
incalculable consequences.

The justifications given by Obama for this action are both hypocritical 
and absurd. He claims that Washington is standing up for “not only 
international norms, but also America’s core self-interest.” It is 
always amazing how such international norms and national interest 
coincide only in the case of the United States, which alone claims the 
right to conduct global military aggression in their pursuit.

Why the US, which slaughtered nearly a quarter of a million Japanese in 
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is the natural enforcer 
of “international norms” in the use of weaponry is never questioned by 
the media. More recently, the Pentagon used depleted uranium and white 
phosphorous in Iraq to slaughter thousands and leave a legacy of birth 
defects for generations to come.

US intelligence sources have told the media that the evidence 
implicating the Syrian regime in the August 21 attack is “no slam 
dunk”—that is, it is even less compelling than the bogus case for war 
against Iraq as it was described at the time by then-CIA Director George 
Tenet. And a State Department spokeswoman dismissed any speculation that 
the attack could have been carried out by a “rogue” element in the 
Syrian military, saying that Assad as commander-in-chief would still be 
responsible.

Curiously, such rules do not apply to Washington’s own military 
operations, where war crimes carried out by the American military—from 
Abu Ghraib to the multiple massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan—have 
resulted in the punishment of only junior enlisted personnel, leaving 
the US commander-in-chief unscathed.

Obama claimed that the US “self-interest” revolved around fears that the 
Syrian government’s “control over chemical weapons may erode,” allowing 
them “to fall into the hands of all kinds of folks” and end up being 
used against the US itself.

But Washington is in a de facto alliance with (and by bombing Syria will 
be directly protecting) precisely the “kind of folks”—Islamist forces 
linked to Al Qaeda—who, Obama declares, represent a threat to the 
American people. According to the US president, therefore, the war is 
being waged to keep chemical weapons out of the hands of the direct 
beneficiaries of the US intervention!

And by launching missile attacks against the government and armed forces 
controlling the bulk of chemical weapons alleged to exist in Syria, 
destroying their command-and-control network, the US will obviously be 
facilitating the efforts of Al Qaeda-linked forces to build up their own 
chemical weapons arsenal.

The reality is that Washington’s drive to war is laying the foundations 
for a terrorist attack on the American public that could dwarf 9/11.

This new war based on lies is being prepared in an atmosphere of 
political crisis and desperation in Washington that reflects the intense 
internal contradictions plaguing US imperialism. While the initial 
target of US cruise missiles may be Damascus, the strategic aims that 
underlie it lead to an ever-broadening conflict that threatens to engulf 
Iran, Russia and the entire planet.

Bill Van Auken