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Seymour Hersh on Syria and gas attacks

joG said:
Do I think we should remove Assad? We should have before the Russians and Iranians had moved in with force.
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Dumb move if we did because if Assad was gone then ISIS would have taken over by now. The Russians and Iranians are doing the right thing by propping him up.
 
PoS said:
Dumb move if we did because if Assad was gone then ISIS would have taken over by now. The Russians and Iranians are doing the right thing by propping him up.
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That isn't chronologically quite true. Isis got its chance by our not having removed Assad and having allowed the chaos to unfold.
 
Thoreau72 said:
That is the point.

For me, one must consider the source. When the source has a record of mendacity and deception, I am most skeptical of what that source says. When a source is nothing but a propagandist, I tend to reject what the source says as propaganda.

When the claims of a propagandist cannot be proved, I simply don't believe it. When the claims of the propagandist are countered and contradicted by others in the field, the propaganda becomes obvious.

Hersh has provided good sources as to the falsehoods presented by the US government, including several US service members. Yes, there are a few good men in the US intelligence community, and most all of them today are whistleblowers, pointing out the false statements of the US "intelligence" community.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS, have far more credibility than the CIA or other political branches.

From the military perspective, what possible military advantage could be gained by gassing 12 year old unarmed children in one's own country? Care to take a shot at an answer to that rhetorical? Shall I hold my breath?
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You are right, that it is good to know the interests of the sources one is using. What I find less convincing is that you seem to imply that that is enough. My experience has been that all information needs triple checking, that coming from a party in whose interest it isn't and that often one will find that sources often only add spin rather than fake the information. Also, this tends to be more true in English language media than German or French, where the competition in news coverage is less important.

PS:
Actually, I had had a very good impression of Hersh, but had become increasingly less convinced of the quality of later attempts at reigniting his glory. ;)
 
joG said:
That isn't chronologically quite true. Isis got its chance by our not having removed Assad and having allowed the chaos to unfold.
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Wrong. ISIS gained a foothold because we started supporting the rebels, which included them. ISIS is now in Libya because we toppled Khadaffy.
 
PoS said:
Wrong. ISIS gained a foothold because we started supporting the rebels, which included them. ISIS is now in Libya because we toppled Khadaffy.
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Nope. Because we did not support the rebels enough to out Assad. That gave the ISIS people enough time and room to grow. And in Libya the problem is similar. It was not a mistake of the French, UK and Italy to remove that thug. It was a mistake not to make sure that the UN take over thereafter.

And yes. That is one of the difficult Trump policy points. We need the UN to be far more active and not smaller. The first blush impression of Trump's policy looks like he is doing the opposite. But we shall have to wait to see. After all, Bush persuaded the UN to change its norms fundamentally in 2005 by having told the Assembly that it was irrelevant, if it did not do its job and showing them, what that meant to force countries to act unilaterally.
 
joG said:
Nope. Because we did not support the rebels enough to out Assad. That gave the ISIS people enough time and room to grow.
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Wrong again. ISIS was part of the rebel movement in Syria, and they grew when we weakened Assad.

And in Libya the problem is similar. It was not a mistake of the French, UK and Italy to remove that thug. It was a mistake not to make sure that the UN take over thereafter.
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You just contradicted yourself, you claimed that ISIS grew because we didnt throw out Assad in Syria but in Libya ISIS grew after we threw out Khadaffi.
 
PoS said:
Wrong again. ISIS was part of the rebel movement in Syria, and they grew when we weakened Assad.


You just contradicted yourself, you claimed that ISIS grew because we didnt throw out Assad in Syria but in Libya ISIS grew after we threw out Khadaffi.
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I didn't realize how simple it seems to you, the way these things happen. There is no contradiction to the latter and and in the first you are saying more or less the same as I except do don't seem to realize that isis required the time to grow stronger. Time they would not have had, had Assad been removed right after beginning to gun down his demonstrators. Possibly it would have been better even earlier, but one needs a valid casus belli. We still haven't done the work over of international law that the 2005 norm change logically require to reduce the probability of war and lend the UN the legitimacy and power we will all need it to have soon.
 
joG said:
Whose results' legitimacy the mass torturing to death before the election might be thought to have put in doubt. But the dictator and the regime lost all legitimacy, when the started shooting at their people instead of calling for an election with UN supervision or some other kind of method that protected the population. Since 2005 a dictator is not allowed to ignore R2P. It is no acceptable excuse that the population did not want you to be dictator and so you have the right to kill them till they are silent.
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joG:

If the US is really concerned with its responsibility to protect civilians and not its ability to destabilise the Middle East then why is its Chief Executive praising the Philippine Presedent Duterte for his murderous heavy handedness and supporting Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their murderous terror bombing campaign in the Yemen War? Why does the USA feed arms to the viscous Egyptian military junta of al-Sisi which has killed or disappeared thousands and imprisoned almost 50,000 political opponents from the Muslim Brotherhood and other secular opposition groups? The US is operating in service to its own interests in Syria and is not there for altruistic reasons.

This string of wars is about hobbling strong national governments in the region so that they cannot challenge American hegemony inside their own borders. Otherwise by following political and economic nationalist programmes these states could limit US global control in the region, which to America is an intolerable challenge. That's why Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime was attacked and destroyed in the Second Gulf War (attempting to break the petroleum-dollar cartel). That's why Muammar Ghadaffi's Libyain regime was attacked by France and the USA in 2013 (billions in gold and silver reserves to back a pan-African, dinar-based, development bank in North Africa). That's why Assad's Shi'a-Alawite state must be broken (to enable a militant Sunni Syrian state to emerge in order to block Iranian influence and penetration from reaching the Mediterranean and into Lebanon and the borders of Israel).

This is king-making and foe-breaking and nothing else. All other excuses or rationalisations are just pretext.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
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DaveFagan said:
That's bullcrap. You function on pete and re-pete from the MSM and it's working grand. No thinking required.
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DaveFagan:

Please pardon my ignorance, but what's a "pete" and a "repete"? These idioms are unfamiliar to me.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
joG said:
You are right, that it is good to know the interests of the sources one is using. What I find less convincing is that you seem to imply that that is enough. My experience has been that all information needs triple checking, that coming from a party in whose interest it isn't and that often one will find that sources often only add spin rather than fake the information. Also, this tends to be more true in English language media than German or French, where the competition in news coverage is less important.

PS:
Actually, I had had a very good impression of Hersh, but had become increasingly less convinced of the quality of later attempts at reigniting his glory. ;)
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Maybe because I'm a common man, I also employ common sense in analyzing contemporary events and historical events.

I'm sure glad I didn't hold my breath, because I rather thought you would dodge any sort of honest answer regarding the military advantage gained by Assad in gassing unarmed 12 year old children. Thanks
 
Evilroddy said:
DaveFagan:

Please pardon my ignorance, but what's a "pete" and a "repete"? These idioms are unfamiliar to me.

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
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a/k/a Goebbels, if you repeat anything often enough, people being to think it is the truth. More precisely repeat and repeat. The specialty of the MSM and the reason so many CIA agents are in newsrooms. Control the narrative with pete and re-pete. Metaphorical.
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DaveFagan said:
a/k/a Goebbels, if you repeat anything often enough, people being to think it is the truth. More precisely repeat and repeat. The specialty of the MSM and the reason so many CIA agents are in newsrooms. Control the narrative with pete and re-pete. Metaphorical.
/
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DaveFagan:

Thanks for the clarification.:thanks

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
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