The United States, France and Britain have made claims that they have evidence of chemical weapon use by the Syrian government against the Al-Qaeda affiliated insurgents.
But those were just claims. None of the claimed evidence has actually been produced. There are claims of satellite pictures showing the launch of rockets, there are claims about interdicted telephone calls between parts of the Syrian military, there are claims of "signatures of sarin" in bio-samples. None of these claimed evidences has been published and opened to public and expert scrutiny. The Russian government as well as the Syrian government allege that these claims of evidence are false. That no evidence exists because the alleged strike from the Syrian government never happened.
One would expect that the media, legislators and the public would demand that real evidence be produced. There is no sound reason to hold it back. The capabilities to get such evidence, should it exist, are well known. There is no need to protect "sources and methods". Still McClatchy, who were also excellent on the false claims about Iraq's WMDs, is the only media outlet asking questions.
That none of the claimed evidence has at all actually been produced tells me that, as I have maintained all along, there is none and that the incident was a false flag one.
The Syrian opposition is today in the process of presenting a "defector", a "medical examiner" with allegedly some knowledge about the incident. His codename is curveball.
Whatever – the truth does not matter anymore:
“The debate is shifting away from ‘Did he use chemical weapons?’ to ‘What should be done about it?’ ” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in an interview after the Monday conference call.
Obama has played the reluctant warrior who would only make a "punitive" strike on Syria that would not change the powers in the battlefield. But he then requested an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that has holes big enough to drive an army through and into Tehran. Why would he do so if he really would want to limit himself to a few strikes? Why would he press Congress to pass it? Obama is now also arguing that Iran, Hezbollah and the security of Israel are the real reasons why it is necessary to bomb the Syrian people. Already 16 month ago the President of the Russian Federation Putin had expected such bombing to happen:
At the time, Mr. Obama had no plans for military involvement in the civil war raging in the heart of the Middle East, but Mr. Putin did not believe that. In Mr. Putin’s view, the United States wanted only to meddle in places where it had no business, fomenting revolutions to install governments friendly to Washington.
Well, the plans to attack Syria are indeed quite old and Putin surely knew about them.
The AUMF will be rewritten by the House and the Senate and will then be a bit more restricted than the Obama draft. It will likely still be wide and vague enough for the Obama administration and its successor to justify any and all bombing in the Middle East they would ever like to do. It will likely, like Obama's draft, allow for a war on Iran. From the perspective of the Israel lobby and many in Congress that would not be a bug in the AUMF, but a feature.
It is still difficult to estimate how the votes in Congress will go. There will silent but full force pressure from AIPAC, “the 800-pound gorilla in the room," to vote for war on Syria. One might expect the Senate to vote yes and the House to vote no. Unless the result is a very loud "No!" from both houses Obama will be ready, just as Kerry has announced, to ignore it. I for now expect that strikes will happen and that the situation will escalate from there.
Like the Syrian President Assad I see no way that any outright military strike by the United States against Syria would not escalate into some bigger and probably huge conflagration. While many would get killed and maimed there is one aspect to this that might be positive. President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski thinks that such a widening war would be the end of Israel as the Zionist entity:
It will simply do to Israel what some of the wars have done to us on a smaller scale. Attrite it, tire it, fatigue it, demoralize it, cause emigration of the best and the first, and then some sort of cataclysm at the end which cannot be predicted at this stage because we don’t know who will have what by when. And after all, Iran is next door. It might have some nuclear capability. Suppose the Israelis knock it off. What about Pakistan and others? The notion that one can control a region from a very strong and motivated country, but of only six million people, is simply a wild dream.