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Did the West Gas Thousands to Rescue Failed Syrian War?

August 25, 2013 – (Tony Cartalucci) As far back as 2007, it was a documented fact that the West, including the United States and its allies Saudi Arabia and Israel, conspired to use terrorists drawn from the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda in an attempt to overthrow the governments of Iran and Syria.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” stated (emphasis added):

“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Starting in 2011, this conspiracy was catapulted into all out war – albeit behind the tenuous smokescreen of “pro-democracy activists” and the so-called “Free Syrian Army” fighting for “freedom” within and along Syria’s borders.

Not only has this conspiracy been exposed, but it has categorically failed. The Syrian government has routed even the most dug-in terrorist proxies, making irreversible gains against a clearly depleted enemy. While the US continuously threatens to “arm the opposition,” it is a fact that any and all weapons, cash, and support the US had, it has already sent over the last 3 years. This includes untold millions in cash, and literally thousands of tons of weaponry airlifted by the US and UK. The US and its regional allies have also scoured the global extremist networks they have built up over decades for every last fighter they could possible find – all to no avail.

There is nothing left  except direct military intervention, which cannot be sold as helping an opposition now clearly exposed as being Al Qaeda. That means, the humanitarian intervention, “right to protect” (R2P) must be wiped clean of NATO’s lies and crimes in Libya, and prepared for Syria. Only what exactly could the West use to justify an intervention against the Syrian government that is worse than what it and its proxies have already done to tens of thousands of Syrian civilians?

With a victorious Syrian government mopping up NATO’s terrorist proxies and currently hosting UN chemical weapons inspectors in Damascus, the use of chemical weapons now would defy all logic – from a tactical level, to a strategic and political level. Chemical weapons, according to the US military’s own reviews of their extensive use in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980’s, reveal the true nature of chemical warfare – a truth the Western media has all but avoided in their speculative and purposefully manipulative coverage of the alleged incident.

A document produced by the US Marine Corps, titled, “Lessons Learned: The Iran-Iraq War” under “Appendix B: Chemical Weapons,” provides a comprehensive look at the all-out chemical warfare that took place during the devastating 8 year Iranian-Iraqi conflict. Several engagements are studied in detail, revealing large amounts of chemical agents deployed mainly to create areas of denial, not mass casualties. In the end, it is determined that conventional weapons are by far more effective and more preferable.

The effectiveness and lethality of chemical weapons is summarized in the document as follows (emphasis added):

Chemical weapons require quite particular weather and geographic conditions for optimum effectiveness. Given the relative nonpersistence of all agents employed during this war, including mustard, there was only a brief window of employment opportunity both daily and seasonally, when the agents could be used. Even though the Iraqis employed mustard agent in the rainy season and also in the marshes, its effectiveness was significantly reduced under those conditions. As the Iraqis learned to their chagrin, mustard is not a good agent to employ in the mountains, unless you own the high ground and your enemy is in the valleys.

We are uncertain as to the relative effectiveness of nerve agents since those which were employed are by nature much less persistent than mustard. In order to gain killing concentrations of these agents, predawn attacks are best, conducted in areas where the morning breezes are likely to blow away from friendly positions.

Chemical weapons have a low kill ratio. Just as in WWl, during which the ratio of deaths to injured from chemicals was 2-3 percent, that figure appears to be borne out again in this war although reliable data on casualties are very difficult to obtain. We deem it remarkable that the death rate should hold at such a low level even with the introduction of nerve agents. If those rates are correct, as they well may be, this further reinforces the position that we must not think of chemical weapons as “a poor man’s nuclear weapon.” While such weapons have great psychological potential, they are not killers or destroyers on a scale with nuclear or biological weapons.

Therefore, had the Syrian government used chemical weapons and somehow was able to create the perfect circumstances to create mass casualties, they did so solely to produce an abhorrent civilian death toll and the perfect pretext for Western intervention, knowing full well such weapons would be otherwise useless in battling armed formations. Since Syria’s chemical weapons would most likely be under the lock and key of its most elite forces, as they are in Iran, revealed in a RAND Corporation document, that would mean that their use was approved by the highest ranking members of the Syrian government and military – this would be the same government and military that exhibited unlimited restraint against intentional and coordinated provocations carried out by NATO-member Turkey and their regional partner, Israel – restraint exhibited solely to avoid providing the West with the pretext for direct military intervention.

Why then would the Syrian government choose now, of all times, to give the West exactly what it was looking for, right as the window was closing on the West to accomplish its goals versus Syria and neighboring Iran?

The answer is, the Syrian government did not use chemical weapons in Damascus, or elsewhere. And while the strawman currently being knocked down by the Western media is whether the attacks were faked or real, the stark reality is that NATO and its terrorist proxies most likely did expose a large number of people to something, seeking mass casualties in a last ditch effort to salvage what is clearly the end of their “Arab Spring” blitzkrieg.

As previously reported, NATO and its proxies in Syria have both the means and the motivation to carry out chemical weapon attacks.This includes access to Libya’s stockpile of chemical weapons and a NATO-enabled pipeline feeding fighters, cash, and weapons from Libya into Syria via NATO-member Turkey.

Image: (via the Guardian) “Chemical containers in the Libyan desert. There are concerns unguarded weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist militants. Photograph: David Sperry/AP”

It was also confirmed that the US had been providing select terrorist units operating in Syria, training in the handling of chemical weapons. CNN had reported in December of 2012, in a report titled, “Sources: U.S. helping underwrite Syrian rebel training on securing chemical weapons,” that: 

The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday.

The training, which is taking place in Jordan and Turkey, involves how to monitor and secure stockpiles and handle weapons sites and materials, according to the sources. Some of the contractors are on the ground in Syria working with the rebels to monitor some of the sites, according to one of the officials.

NATO not only ensured that chemical weapons in Libya remained in the hands of a proxy regime now openly arming, aiding, and sending fighters to assist terrorists in Syria, but also appears to have ensured these terrorists possessed the know-how on handling and using these weapons.

While absolutely nothing adds up across the West’s corporate media networks, one story that does add up is the claim by Syrian troops that terrorist tunnels have been discovered containing chemical agents – as reported in Reuters’ article, “Syrian soldiers enter rebel tunnels, find chemical agents: state TV.”

What we are now witnessing is an attempt by the West’s corporate-financier establishment to push for direct intervention faster than the facts can come out over what exactly happened near Damascus. Just as was the case in Afghanistan, Iraq, and  Libya, the West hopes people can be made hysterical enough, long enough, to get a “foot in the door,” so the bombs can start dropping. Failing to do so at this juncture would spell the absolute end of the West’s current plans versus Syria and Iran – and so however tenuous and discredited this latest plot may seem, expect dangerous desperation from the West.

Now more than ever, Syria and its allies must be prepared to defend against provocations both militarily and diplomatically.