It’s always a risky business to speak for other people. “We all know” Vice-President Joe Biden declared yesterday “that there’s been a chemical weapons attack; we all know that the Syrian government are responsible for that attack”.
Well, include me out. There may have been a chemical weapons attack, it may have been carried out by the Syrian government, but I haven’t a clue whether there was or not and who was responsible. What I’ve seen has been a number of men, women and children milling around and acting more or less the way people reacted in the Bogside in 1969 when the RUC attacked them with CS gas - people dabbing at their eyes, looking distressed, some flat on the ground.
Nor has Joe Biden or any other leader convinced me that there is now justification for a military intervention. I saw a Syrian government official on TV last night and in halting English he said something very significant: “Show. Me. Evidence. Of. Chemical. Weapons. Use. By. Our. Government”. Oddly, over something as distinctive as this, the media here seem very unforthcoming. You’d expect them to lay out in detail what a chemical weapons attack looks like, how it differs from other attacks in its effect, and how Britain or the US or anyone else can know that it was the Syrian government.
If it happened, it could have been US agents. You think that’s laughable? US agents have done worse things in, for example, South America. Remember Chile and Allende? Remember the regime change in Iraq? Remember, on a massively greater scale, HIroshima and Nagasaki? We know that, if they deem it necessary, the British government of any hue will concoct any story about the dangers to Britain and will use that as justification for invasion and slaughter.
On a much more local scale, I heard an equally skewed version of events yesterday evening as I drove home. Seamus McKee had Brian Feeney and Paul Bew (Lord Bew to you) talking about the writing of recent history here. Former UUP adviser Bew believes that we have an ‘infantalized’ take on recent history here, which points the finger of blame to an excessive degree at Britain; he also insists that the NIO were the true progenitors of the Good Friday Agreement. Feeney was in fine form and noted how the British government has continually fallen over itself in its efforts to keep hidden the record of what happened here during the Troubles. I’m not a historian but I do know that the NIO were not the people who created the Good Friday Agreement. I also know that efforts to present Britain’s role here as a benevolent ring-keeper is totally bogus. If you don’t think Britain was a central player, ask the relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday or died in Ballymurphy. However hard unionists like the good Lord Bew may try to argue otherwise, they trip over their own fake narrative. And I keep coming back to the thoughts of Jeremy Paxman as he interviews yet another politician: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Britain would be the poorer without such men.
PS Did I mention that according to the Oil and Gas Journal, Syria had 2,500,000,000 barrels of petroleum reserves as of 1 January 2010? How remiss of me. Although of course it’s a concern for the well-being of Syria’s citizens, not a lust for oil, that has the US and Britain straining at the leash these days.
It is right to be suspicious about US and British motives for an intervention in Syria given their history. However it is another thing to suggest they might have been responsible for a chemical weapons attack, without any proof.
ReplyDeleteSo is there proof?
I don't have any proof - simply said it could have been US agents. Given the history of collusion here, governments are clearly capable of pretending to be outraged at a crime they themselves have been central to.
Deletethey also seem in quite a hurry to retaliate, is this before it can be disproved as Syrian government involvement? And another thing, if it were proven that it was rebel involvement in gassing what would happen then?
DeleteWell, then they'd have to send in the cruise missiles/drones and bomb the rebels, wouldn't they? Crossed the red line, after all...Hold on a minute. Something wrong there.
DeleteBombing the rebels or bombing Government targets would be equally atrocious in my view. But the fact is Assad is no angel, he has chemical weapons and Occam's razor would suggest he is for now, the most likely culprit.
DeleteAny opinion on Assad Jude?
Not a man I would like to take home to tea, Gio. But then again, he's unlikely to look at the problems of the US and decide he's going to go in with cruise missiles or drones and sort it all out. Follow the oil, I always say...
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