(The Conversation) – On the morning of December 6 1917, a French cargo ship called SS Mont-Blanc collided with a Norwegian vessel in the harbour of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The SS Mont-Blanc, which was laden with 3,000 tons of high explosives destined for the battlefields of the first world war, caught fire and exploded.

The resulting blast released an amount of energy equivalent to roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT, destroying a large part of the city. Although it was far from the front lines, this explosion left a lasting imprint on Halifax in a way that many regions experience environmental change as a result of war.

The attention of the media is often drawn to the destructive explosions caused by bombs, drones or missiles. And the devastation we have witnessed in cities like Aleppo, Mosul, Mariupol and now Gaza certainly serve as stark reminders of the horrific impacts of military action.

However, research is increasingly uncovering broader and longer-term consequences of war that extend well beyond the battlefield. Armed conflicts leave a lasting trail of environmental damage, posing challenges for restoration after the hostilities have eased.

Research interest in the environmental impacts of war

Toxic legacies

Battles and even wars are over relatively quickly, at least compared to the timescales over which environments change. But soils and sediments record their effects over decades and centuries.

In 2022, a study of soil chemistry in northern France showed elevated levels of copper and lead (both toxic at concentrations above trace levels), and other changes in soil structure and composition, more than 100 years after the site was part of the Battle of the Somme.

Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash

Research on more recent conflicts has recorded the toxic legacy of intense fighting too. A study that was carried out in 2016, three decades after the Iran-Iraq war, found concentrations of toxic elements like chromium, lead and the semi-metal antimony in soils from the battlefields. These concentrations were more than ten times those found in soils behind the front lines.

The deliberate destruction of infrastructure during war can also have enduring consequences. One notable example is the first Gulf War in 1991 when Iraqi forces blew up more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. Crude oil spewed into the surrounding environment, while fallout from dispersing smoke plumes created a thick deposit known as “tarcrete” over 1,000 sq km of Kuwait’s deserts.

The impact of the oil fires on the air, soil, water and habitats captured global attention. Now, in the 21st century, wars are closely scrutinised in near real-time for environmental harm, as well as the harm inflicted on humans.

Embed from Getty Images
American Red Adair fire fighting worker sets up a permanent hose 30 May 1991 in Al-Ahmadi oil field in southern Kuwait in order to keep the fire of the damaged oil wells in the direction of the wind whilst protecting the employees who attempt to extinguish it. In 1991, Iraqi troops retreating after a seven-month occupation, smashed and torched 727 wells, badly polluting the atmosphere and creating crude oil lakes. In addition, up to eight billion barrels of oil were split into the sea by Iraqi forces damaging marine life and coastal areas up to 400 kilometres (250 miles) away. Kuwait will seek more than 16 billion dollars compensation for environment destruction wrought by Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anba said 07 December 1998. (Photo credit should read MICHEL GANGNE/AFP via Getty Images).

Conflict is a systemic catastrophe

One outcome of this scrutiny is the realisation that conflict is a catastrophe that affects entire human and ecological systems. Destruction of social and economic infrastructure like water and sanitation, industrial systems, agricultural supply chains and data networks can lead to subtle but devastating indirect environmental impacts.

Since 2011, conflict has marred the north-western regions of Syria. As part of a research project that was led by my Syrian colleagues at Sham University, we conducted soil surveys in the affected areas.

Our findings revealed widespread diffuse soil pollution in agricultural land. This land feeds a population of around 3 million people already experiencing severe food insecurity.

The pollution probably stems from a combination of factors, all arising as a consequence of the regional economic collapse that was caused by the conflict. A lack of fuel to pump wells, combined with destruction of wastewater treatment infrastructure, has led to an increased reliance on streams contaminated by untreated wastewater for irrigating croplands.

Contamination could also stem from the use of low-grade fertilisers, unregulated industrial emissions and the proliferation of makeshift oil refineries.

More recently, the current conflict in Ukraine, which prompted international sanctions on Russian grain and fertiliser exports, has disrupted agricultural economies worldwide. This has affected countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Nigeria and Iran particularly hard.

Many small farmers in these countries may have been forced into selling their livestock and abandoning their land as they struggle to buy the materials they need to feed their animals or grow crops. Land abandonment is an ecologically harmful practice as it can take decades for the vegetation densities and species richness typical of undisturbed ecosystems to recover.

Warfare can clearly become a complicated and entangled “nexus” problem, the impacts of which are felt far from the war-affected regions.

Conflict, cascades and climate

Recognising the complex, cascading environmental consequences of war is the first step towards addressing them. Following the first Gulf War, the UN set up a compensation commission and included the environment as one of six compensable harms inflicted on countries and their people.

Jordan was awarded more than US$160 million (£127 million) over a decade to restore the rangelands of its Badia desert. These rangelands had been ecologically ruined by a million refugees and their livestock from Kuwait and Iraq. The Badia is now a case study in sustainable watershed management in arid regions.

In the north-west region of Syria, work is underway to assess farmers’ understanding of soil contamination in areas that have been affected by conflict. This marks the first step in designing farming techniques aimed at minimising threats to human health and restoring the environment.

Armed conflict has also finally made it onto the climate agenda. The UN’s latest climate summit, COP28, includes the first themed day dedicated to “relief, recovery and peace”. The discussion will focus on countries and communities in which the ability to withstand climate change is being hindered by economic or political fragility and conflict.

And as COP28 got underway, the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK charity that monitors the environmental consequences of armed conflicts, called for research to account for carbon emissions in regions affected by conflict.

The carbon impact of war is still not counted in the global stocktake of carbon emissions – an essential reference for climate action. But far from the sound and fury of the explosions, warfare’s environmental impacts are persistent, pervasive and equally deadly.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 20,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

Jonathan Bridge, Reader / Associate Professor in Environmental Geoscience, Sheffield Hallam University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com) – It’s sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia’s winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin’s objectives, leaving little doubt that the West’s conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine’s defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland’s new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow). Still, tens of thousands of people have perished; whole villages, even cities, have been reduced to rubble; millions of Ukrainians have poured into Poland and elsewhere; while Russia’s brutish invasion rages on with no end in sight.

The hope, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is that the Western allies will continue to furnish money, tanks, missiles, and everything else his battered country needs to fend off Putin’s forces. The war will be won, according to Zelensky, not through backroom compromises but on the battlefield with guns and ammo.

“I appeal to you and the world with these most simple and yet important words,” he said to a joint session of Great Britain’s parliament in February. “Combat aircraft for Ukraine, wings for freedom.”

The United Kingdom, which has committed well over $2 billion in assistance to Ukraine, has so far refused to ship fighter jets there but has promised to supply more weaponry, including tank shells made with depleted uranium (DU), also known as “radioactive bullets.” A by-product of uranium enrichment, DU is a very dense and radioactive metal that, when housed in small torpedo-like munitions, can pierce thickly armored tanks and other vehicles.

Reacting to the British announcement, Putin ominously said he would “respond accordingly” if the Ukrainians begin blasting off rounds of DU.

While the UK’s decision to send depleted-uranium shells to Ukraine is unlikely to prove a turning point in the war’s outcome, it will have a lasting, potentially devastating, impact on soldiers, civilians, and the environment. The controversial deployment of DU doesn’t pose faintly the same risks as the actual nuclear weapons Putin and his associates have hinted they might use someday in Ukraine or as would a potential meltdown at the embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility in that country. Still, its use will certainly help create an even more lethal, all too literally radioactive theater of war — and Ukraine will end up paying a price for it.

The Radioactive Lions of Babylon

Stuart Dyson survived his deployment in the first Gulf War of 1991, where he served as a lance corporal with Britain’s Royal Pioneer Corps. His task in Kuwait was simple enough: he was to help clean up “dirty” tanks after they had seen battle. Many of the machines he spent hours scrubbing down had carried and fired depleted uranium shells used to penetrate and disable Iraq’s T-72 tanks, better known as the Lions of Babylon.

Dyson spent five months in that war zone, ensuring American and British tanks were cleaned, armed, and ready for battle. When the war ended, he returned home, hoping to put his time in the Gulf War behind him. He found a decent job, married, and had children. Yet his health deteriorated rapidly and he came to believe that his military service was to blame. Like so many others who had served in that conflict, Dyson suffered from a mysterious and debilitating illness that came to be known as Gulf War Syndrome.

After Dyson suffered years of peculiar ailments, ranging from headaches to dizziness and muscle tremors, doctors discovered that he had a severe case of colon cancer, which rapidly spread to his spleen and liver. The prognosis was bleak and, after a short battle, his body finally gave up. Stuart Dyson died in 2008 at the age of 39.

His saga is unique, not because he was the only veteran of the first Gulf War to die of such a cancer at a young age, but because his cancer was later recognized in a court of law as having been caused by exposure to depleted uranium. In a landmark 2009 ruling, jurors at the Smethwick Council House in the UK found that Dyson’s cancer had resulted from DU accumulating in his body, and in particular his internal organs.

“My feeling about Mr. Dyson’s colon cancer is that it was produced because he ingested some radioactive material and it became trapped in his intestine,” Professor Christopher Busby, an expert on the effects of uranium on health, said in his court testimony. “To my mind, there seems to be a causal arrow from his exposure to his final illness. It’s certainly much more probable than not that Mr. Dyson’s cancer was caused by exposure to depleted uranium.”

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The U.S. Department of Defense estimated that American forces fired more than 860,000 rounds of DU shells during that 1991 war to push Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s military out of Kuwait. The result: a poisoned battlefield laced with radioactive debris, as well as toxic nerve agents and other chemical agents.

In neighboring southern Iraq, background radiation following that war rose to 30 times normal. Tanks tested after being shelled with DU rounds had readings 50 times higher than average.

“It’s hot forever,” explains Doug Rokke, a former major in the U.S. Army Reserve’s Medical Service Corps who helped decontaminate dozens of vehicles hit by DU shells during the first Gulf War. “It doesn’t go away. It only disperses and blows around in the wind,” he adds. And of course, it wasn’t just soldiers who suffered from DU exposure. In Iraq, evidence has been building that DU, an intense carcinogenic agent, has led to increases in cancer rates for civilians, too.

“When we were moving forward and got north of a minefield, there were a bunch of blown-out tanks that were near where we would set up a command post,” says Jason Peterson, a former American Marine who served in the first Gulf War. “Marines used to climb inside and ‘play’ in them … We barely knew where Kuwait was, let alone the kind of ammunition that was used to blow shit up on that level.”

While it’s difficult to discern exactly what caused the Gulf War Syndrome from which Dyson and so many other soldiers suffered (and continue to suffer), experts like Rokke are convinced that exposure to depleted uranium played a central role in the illness. That’s an assertion Western governments have consistently downplayed. In fact, the Pentagon has repeatedly denied any link between the two.

“I’m a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission,” Rokke, who also suffers from Gulf War Syndrome, told Vanity Fair in 2007. “I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use DU safely, and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not science out of a book, but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and seeing what happens. And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed. You can’t do this safely in combat conditions. You can’t decontaminate the environment or your own troops.”

Death to Uranium

Depleted uranium can’t produce a nuclear explosion, but it’s still directly linked to the development of atomic weaponry. It’s a by-product of the uranium enrichment process used in nuclear weapons and fuel. DU is alluring to weapons makers because it’s heavier than lead, which means that, if fired at a high velocity, it can rip through the thickest of metals.

That it’s radioactive isn’t what makes it so useful on the battlefield, at least according to its proponents. “It’s so dense and it’s got so much momentum that it just keeps going through the armor — and it heats it up so much that it catches on fire,” says RAND nuclear expert and policy researcher Edward Geist.

The manufacturing of DU dates back to the 1970s in the United States. Today, the American military employs DU rounds in its M1A2 Abrams tanks. Russia has also used DU in its tank-busting shells since at least 1982 and there are plenty of accusations, though as yet no hard evidence, that Russia has already deployed such shells in Ukraine. Over the years, for its part, the U.S. has fired such rounds not just in Kuwait, but also in Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Syria, and Serbia as well.

Both Russia and the U.S. have reasons for using DU, since each has piles of the stuff sitting around with nowhere to put it. Decades of manufacturing nuclear weapons have created a mountain of radioactive waste. In the U.S., more than 500,000 tons of depleted-uranium waste has built up since the Manhattan Project first created atomic weaponry, much of it in Hanford, Washington, the country’s main plutonium production site. As I investigated in my book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, Hanford is now a cesspool of radioactive and chemical waste, representing the most expensive environmental clean-up project in history with an estimated price tag of $677 billion.

Uranium, of course, is what makes the whole enterprise viable: you can’t create atomic bombs or nuclear power without it. The trouble is that uranium itself is radioactive, as it emits alpha particles and gamma rays. That makes mining uranium one of the most dangerous operations on the planet.

Keep It in the Ground

In New Mexico, where uranium mines were primarily worked by Diné (Navajo People), the toll on their health proved gruesome indeed. According to a 2000 study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, rates of lung cancer in Navajo men who mined uranium were 28 times higher than in those who never mined uranium. The “Navajo experience with uranium mining,” it added, “is a unique example of exposure in a single occupation accounting for the majority of lung cancers in an entire population.”

Scores of studies have shown a direct correlation between exposure to uranium and kidney disease, birth defects in infants (when mothers were exposed), increased rates of thyroid disease, and several autoimmune diseases. The list is both extensive and horrifying.

“My family had a lot of cancer,” says anti-nuclear activist and Indigenous community organizer Leona Morgan. “My grandmother died of lung cancer and she never smoked. It had to be the uranium.”

One of the largest radioactive accidents, and certainly the least reported, occurred in 1979 on Diné land when a dam broke, flooding the Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico, with 94 million gallons of radioactive waste. The incident received virtually no attention at the time. “The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco and burned the feet of a little boy who went wading. Sheep keeled over and died, while crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream,” writes Judy Pasternak in her book Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajo.

Of course, we’ve known about the dangers of uranium for decades, which makes it all the more mind-boggling to see a renewed push for increased mining of that radioactive ore to generate nuclear power. The only way to ensure that uranium doesn’t poison or kill anyone is to leave it right where it’s always been: in the ground. Sadly, even if you were to do so now, there would still be tons of depleted uranium with nowhere to go. A 2016 estimate put the world’s mountain of DU waste at more than one million tons (each equal to 2,000 pounds).

So why isn’t depleted uranium banned? That’s a question antinuclear activists have been asking for years. It’s often met with government claims that DU isn’t anywhere near as bad as its peacenik critics allege. In fact, the U.S. government has had a tough time even acknowledging that Gulf War Syndrome exists. A Government Accountability Office report released in 2017 found that the Veterans Affairs Department had denied more than 80% of all Gulf War illness claims by veterans. Downplaying DU’s role, in other words, comes with the terrain.

“The use of DU in weapons should be prohibited,” maintains Ray Acheson, an organizer for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy. “While some governments argue there is no definitive proof its use in weapons causes harm, it is clear from numerous investigations that its use in munitions in Iraq and other places has caused impacts on the health of civilians as well as military personnel exposed to it, and that it has caused long-term environmental damage, including groundwater contamination. Its use in weapons is arguably in violation of international law, human rights, and environmental protection and should be banned in order to ensure it is not used again.”

If the grisly legacy of the American use of depleted uranium tells us anything, it’s that those DU shells the British are supplying to Ukraine (and the ones the Russians may also be using there) will have a radioactive impact that will linger in that country for years to come, with debilitating, potentially fatal, consequences. It will, in a sense, be part of a global atomic war that shows no sign of ending.

Copyright 2023 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com

(Informed Comment) – World War 1 was the first industrial war: poison gases, flamethrowers, aerial bombing, submarines, and machine guns intensified the scale of war wreckage and war dead, setting the norm for 20^th and 21^st century wars. By government policy, British war dead were not sent home lest the public turn against the war. Instead they were buried in vast graveyards near battle sites in France and Belgium. Even today Belgian and French farmers plowing fields in places of intense, interminable fighting and mass death on the Western Front unearth an estimated ½ million pounds of war debris and soldiers’ bones each year. (During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Pentagon policy prohibited media coverage of US war dead arriving at Dover Air Base in Delaware until the ban was lifted, with conditions, in 2015. Many regarded the ban, like the Word War 1 British policy, as hiding the human cost of war that could turn the public against the war.)

From the unyielding ugliness and butchery of World War I emerged soldier poets, notable among them Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, whose unsparing style and content separated them from the tradition of glorifying war. These soldier poets, living in a trench war fraught with dead bodies and rats that fattened on them and with rear guard commanders who sent battalions of teenage boys into the slaughter of machine gun fire, rebuked their country’s war-mongering politicians and industrial profiteers. (Likewise today, the majority of veterans of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – in stark contrast to politicians of both parties – agree that the wars they fought wasted human lives and achieved no human progress.)

World War I soldiers had only each other in the face of death – a reality incarnated in the 1914 Christmas truce spontaneously initiated by British, French and German soldiers facing each other in trenches. Soldiers on both sides lay down their weapons, crossed over barbed wire and shell holes and greeted each other with their Christmas gifts of food, beer, champagne and schnapps. Together they buried corpses of the fallen that lay in the narrow no-man’s land between them, played soccer with tin cans and straw-filled sandbags for balls, sang carols, took photos, and exchanged mementos and addresses.

The German Veteran Voice

The unique comradeship of war lingered also with Erich Maria Remarkque, who enlisted at 19 in the World War I German army. He, too, admits bitterly that a sense of ideal and almost romance of war, propagated by the state’s total propaganda campaign, turned high school boys into willing recruits for slaughter. Some ten years after the war’s end, he published his first (and what some consider the greatest) anti-war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. In perhaps the most incisive moment of Remarkque’s novel, a young German soldier gazes upon a young French soldier he has killed and ponders their common humanity, with words that undercut the war’s hard-bitten hatred and national chauvinism. “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony.“

War Profiteers

War profiteering in World War I was mammoth: The gunpowder giant DuPont saw its fortunes increase nearly 10-fold during the World War I and wartime profits of General Chemical Company soared by 1,400 percent. Leather, bootmaking, garment and metals industries; airplane, engine and ship builders – all the outfitters of armed conflict – enjoyed immense profit.

Of the estimated $52 billion cost of World War I, industry war profiteers pocketed nearly one third. More than 21,000 new American millionaires and billionaires emerged from the human ashes of the war, while the federal government was mired in post-war debt – a debt paid for by working people’s taxes.

Little has changed with regard to war greed except that war industry profits have grown exponentially together with the national budget for the military. Today spending on military defense greatly exceeds the total spending for our real national security needs, namely education, transportation, housing and community development, diplomacy, environment, science and energy, and health and human services. As a country, the US has moved from being a reluctant, late entrant into World War 1 to being the premier merchant of death in weapons sales and premier militarist nation, engaged in a perpetual state of war waged from an empire of military bases.

Toll of war

World War I, ultimately, was an immense and complex setback for democracy. In his acclaimed book of this war, To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild collates the direct and collateral death, injury, enmities, and poisonous legacies of this total war.

• 40 million solders and civilians were casualties of that war.
• Elevated rates of suicide followed the war.
• 400,000 African laborers, forced to carry war supplies by Britain, died from disease and from being worked to death.
• Total, industrial war seasoned warring countries for conducting atrocities in future wars. Both sides used chemical warfare, which foreshadowed Agent Orange in Vietnam; the British blockaded Germany to starve the country into submission; cities were bombed, which would be replicated and augmented to extreme levels in World War II, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Treaty of Versailles was forged by the Allies and signed by a reluctant Germany on June 28, 1919. It established the reduction of German territory and its disarmament. It also required Germany to make huge reparation payments and to formally admit guilt for starting the war. The British blockade of Germany continued to starve the country after the war’s end. The punitive peace treaty has been widely described as sowing the seeds of World War II: “’The tragedies of the future [were] written into it as if by the devil’s own hand,’” stated historian-diplomat George Kennan.

Coda

After a week of travel along the Western Front and walking among miles of cemeteries for British, Belgium, French and other soldiers killed in war, historian Adam Hochschild finds a lone, out of the way plot with a large cross and a dozen small ones honoring the 1914 Christmas truce, spontaneously celebrated by soldiers on both sides. He notes that the modest memorial was near where they had played soccer together and that on one of the small crosses someone had carved the word “imagine.”

*Veterans Day originated as “Armistice Day” on Nov. 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the end of World War I. In time it became a day to remember veterans of all US wars.

This piece is an abridged and modified version of https://truthout.org/articles/wwi-same-protests-of-futility-folly-heard-today/

References

1. Adam Hochschild. 2011. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p.342.
2. Barbara Tuchman. 1984. The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. New York: Ballantine Books. p.27.
3. Hochschild, p.357.

———–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

WWI The First Modern War: The Germans Release the First WMD | History

The sight of yet another chemical attack on civilians in Douma on Saturday 7 April caused the kind of international outrage that the world now expects and has come to know so well. Scenes of children frothing at the mouth and videos of people shaking uncontrollably were denounced by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres as an “outrage” as the death toll climbed to over 78, at least 40 of whom died directly as a result of inhaling poisonous gas. The culprit was assumed to be the government of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, given its documented use of banned weapons in over 200 chemical attacks since the war began in 2011.

Two days later, the UN Security Council lived up to the predictions of paralysis, after the US and Russia used their veto power to prevent either of their respective resolutions on the issue from being passed. Undeterred, US President Donald Trump, who had tweeted that the “animal Assad” would have a “big price to pay”, moved to form a coalition along with Britain and France. By Friday evening, air strikes had hit several sites near Damascus. Even before the missiles reached their targets, though, what had previously been the claims of a small, if vociferous, section of Assad’s supporters had extended to commentators and analysts; questions started to be asked about whether or not the Douma attack was simply another example of “fake news”.

Such allegations are not new in the Syrian crisis. The regime has long accused opposition groups of faking incidents to support their cause, and Western media of inventing stories to tarnish Assad’s image. Russian websites have largely peddled a narrative sympathetic to their government’s foreign policy in the region, portraying the Syrian opposition as armed terrorist insurgents violating national sovereignty. Over time, regional commentators and analysts have been known to verify news from state news agencies, as well as Russian and Iranian outfits, due to the stories often being backed by unreliable and incomplete evidence.

Read: US: Chemical weapons experts have not entered Douma

Yet, in recent months, such conspiracy theories in relation to the civil war have gained strength, particularly due to the influence of social media, with many now deeming the portrayal of Assad as the primary aggressor to be “propaganda”. The call for Western retaliatory strikes last week has further galvanised “anti-imperialists” — who oppose further intervention — to adopt the regime’s narrative, positing it as the other side of the story.

The left and the far-right

The allegations of a Syrian conspiracy have, in a rare irony, united both ends of the political spectrum. The left has been keen to highlight the alleged lack of evidence implicating the Syrian government in the recent attacks, in an attempt to dissuade Western intervention. Journalist Max Blumenthal controversially summarised what he saw as “the pattern” of events in Syria, appearing to implicate the White Helmets civil defence group in faking the most recent attack, an oft repeated claim of the regime, despite the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated group being made up of non-partisan civilians.

The pattern’s clear now: When the Syrian army advances or liberates cities from NATO/GCC backed insurgents, insurgents allege a chemical attack. Sources are invariably insurgent activists, NATO/GCC backed White Helmets, & SAMS. Independent confirmation is impossible. Bombs away!

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 9, 2018

In Britain, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has also called for a UN-led investigation into who was responsible for the Douma attack, while accusing the British government of going to war without sufficient evidence of who the guilty party is. He was joined in his call by the former leader of the fascist British National Party (BNP), who tweeted his support for Corbyn’s position.

IF he sticks to his guns then for 1st time in my life I will vote #Labour – right now NOTHING is more important than resisting the psychotic rush to #WW3 of Boris & the #neocons Corbyn refuses to blame Assad for chemical attack in #Syria https://t.co/ifxqeFlqvd via @MailOnline

— Nick Griffin (@NickGriffinBU) April 9, 2018

Right wing media outlets such as Breitbart and InfoWars, formerly strong supporters of Donald Trump, have also featured multiple articles on the administration’s determination to invade Syria for its own interests, whilst maintaining that the evidence of Assad’s crimes is all but non-existent.

Between journalists and academics

The discussion has also extended to more mainstream journalists and academics. Earlier this week, acclaimed journalist and writer Robert Fisk wrote in the Independent of his trip to Douma alongside other reporters, all of whom were escorted by Syrian government officials. He tells of his encounters with several residents who claimed that they had no knowledge that a chemical attack had taken place; they said that most of these “fake stories” originated from armed Islamist groups. He also interviewed a Syrian doctor, who argued that whilst some people had suffocated on the night of the alleged attack, it was not as a result of toxic gas, but rather huge dust clouds in the area.

Fisk’s report seems to ignore the statements of the head of the largest medical relief agency in Syria, who told reporters this week that medics who responded to the suspected gas attack in Douma have been subjected to “extreme intimidation” by Syrian officials who seized biological samples, forced them to abandon patients and demanded their silence. It also excluded the fact that tens of thousands people are currently being tortured in jails of the Assad regime, many of whom have been arrested for speaking out against the government’s atrocities; that’s hardly an incentive for those who have survived a four year siege to do the same and give details of the use of chemical weapons.

Such realities also seem to have escaped a group of academics at some of Britain’s top universities who recently launched the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a platform to examine the “role of both media and propaganda” and provide “reliable, informed and timely analysis for journalists, publics and policymakers.” Despite its very recent formation, the group has already attracted criticism for drawing upon Islamophobic tropes and ignoring the crimes of the Assad regime. Professors and lecturers from the universities of Edinburgh, Durham, Sheffield, Newcastle and SOAS feature among the group’s members and advisory board.

The claims of some of the academics have ranged from the insinuations that the White Helmets organisation is a front for Al-Qaeda, to denial of the most recent Douma chemical attack, all based on the underlying theory that the West is exaggerating the Syrian conflict in a bid to undermine Russia on the world stage.

Public perception

The narrative surrounding the Syrian conflict has taken on a life of its own, demanding to be heard, and in the 21st century there is no better place to be heard than on the internet. In the wake of US air strikes in the past week, many have taken to social media highlighting that false allegations of weaponry have been used as a justification for war in the past, namely in the case of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Posts calling people to question the predominant narrative have been shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter, asking why President Assad would gas his own people when he was allegedly on the brink of victory.

This questioning has been encouraged by several pro-Assad and pro-Russia activists, some of whom have garnered hundreds of thousands of followers, an equivalent following to that of mainstream journalists. Sarah Abdullah and Rania Khalek are two such commentators, both of whom boast of more than 120,000 followers on Twitter; they update their subscribers daily with the latest pro-Assad propaganda, popularising hashtags such as #SyriaHoax following atrocities committed by the regime.

Establishing nuance in the narrative

The international community is right to doubt the sincerity of further Western intervention in the Syrian conflict. Despite US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley vindicating the UN Security Council last week for failing to protect the people of Syria, the US has accepted only 44 refugees from the country in the past six months, a 99.3 per cent drop compared to a similar period under President Barack Obama. It is clear that the coalition’s action on “red lines” extends only to temporary strikes on the country, thereby giving the Assad government the level of impunity needed to commit such atrocities again, safe in the knowledge that there will be few permanent or long-term repercussions.

However, the portrayal of the conflict as solely a proxy, imperial war between Russia and the West is reductionist, and ignores the sacrifices of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who protested against the Assad regime demanding freedom and dignity. Contrary to the now prevailing discourse, denouncing further Western intervention whilst also condemning the atrocities of Syria and its allies are not mutually exclusive.

The narrative of the Syrian regime and Russia has proven itself to be untrustworthy time and again. Its conspiracies are not limited to the veracity of certain incidents, but extend to the nature of the conflict altogether and ultimately seeks to prolong the reign of President Assad. The absence of nuance in the current conversation indicates the world’s immunity to the suffering of the Syrian people after seven years of war, and a desire to attribute the bloodshed to more than just one party in an effort to justify the international community’s ongoing inaction. The mainstreaming of pro-Assad arguments is yet another warning sign of the growing ability of political bias to obscure facts in the so-called information age.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Newsy: “OPCW investigators arrive in Douma, Syria”

Seven years into its catastrophic conflict, Syria has witnessed yet another major chemical strike. This time the target was the rebel-held city of Douma in Eastern Ghouta, just outside Damascus. The death toll currently stands at around 70 – making the attack as deadly as the infamous sarin strike at Khan Sheikhoun almost exactly a year ago to the day. It is thought the number of confirmed fatalities could rise to 150.

The White Helmets have reported that most of the victims were women and children. A local journalist said the scene “was like judgement day … the situation, the fear, and the destruction are indescribable”.

Like previous incidents, the attack has been widely blamed on Bashar al-Assad’s government. The agent used has not been confirmed. Witnesses say they smelled chlorine, but the sheer level of destruction suggests that something more lethal may have been used as well. There are allegations that the regime used a sarin barrel bomb.

Whatever the precise details, no-one should be surprised by what has happened. Horrified, yes – but Assad has repeatedly used chemical weapons in the civil conflict since 2012, and clearly he is not inclined to stop.

As per usual, the incident has attracted condemnation from Assad’s enemies around the world. US President Donald Trump tweeted that there will be a “big price” to pay for the attack, and derided Assad as an “animal”. The European Union called for “an immediate response by the international community”. Pope Francis weighed in too: “Nothing, nothing can justify the use of such devices of extermination against defenceless people and populations.”

Tough talk indeed. But whether or not this turns into decisive action is another story. After all, we have been here many times before.

Enough is enough

This isn’t to say the world hasn’t responded at all. After Khan Shaykhun last year, for example, Trump ordered missile strikes against a Syrian airbase with 59 Tomahawk missiles. His reference to a “big price” suggests there could be a similar move in the offing. Asked how the US might respond to the latest attack, White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert was asked whether a US response was coming and replied, “I wouldn’t take anything off the table”.

But previous measures, including Trump’s missile strikes, have achieved little. Many at the United Nations have worked hard to bring Assad and his allies to account, but they have been stymied by Russia’s Security Council veto. Former US president, Barack Obama, succeeded in getting Assad to the negotiating table and – together with the support of Russia – he agreed to accede Syria to the Chemical Weapons Convention, the main international agreement that bans and eliminates chemical arms. But Assad still continues to use chemical arms.

Even if these moves have limited the scale of the Syrian government’s chemical attacks, they have continued. Trump and his administration have repeatedly said Trump will observe the red line against chemical warfare set by his Obama – but the line is still being crossed, again and again and again.

As well as the big attacks that make headlines, Assad has repeatedly overseen smaller chlorine strikes. In 2017, Trump was asked in an interview about Assad’s use of chlorine – and Trump didn’t even know that Assad was still using chemical weapons. This doesn’t suggest the president is treating this as a priority. The world is acting, but it isn’t doing enough.

Securing the future

Failing to act decisively now could set off a domino effect. Allowing anyone to carry out chemical strikes with impunity sends a dangerous message. If Assad is not held to his account for his actions, why should anyone else stop short of chemical violence for fear of the world’s wrath?

Punishing violators in itself reinforces, supports and promotes the convention’s ideals. Leaving them unpunished weakens the norm that chemical warfare is wrong – and failing to make an example of Assad threatens the entire weapons control regime. Some argue that violations will not necessarily bring down the Chemical Weapons Convention, but their arguments assume that those who do violate it will be punished somehow.

The world’s progress in controlling chemical weapons should not be underestimated, and the admittedly limited measures such as Trump’s missile strikes that have been taken against Assad deserve credit. Still, it’s incumbent on all those with the power to intervene to ask themselves how many times we have to see horrific and traumatic images of chemical warfare before stronger action is taken.

It’s very easy to sit in front of a computer and type this. It’s hardly an easy problem to solve, especially while Russia continues to support Assad’s government and its forces. But there are severe implications if Assad is not stopped.

Michelle Bentley, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Royal Holloway

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “☢️ How can chemical weapons attacks in Syria be stopped?”

Russia’s RT links the Skripal poisoning to British jealousy over hosting of the World Cup

There’s something uncannily familiar about Russia’s propaganda antics over the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain. We’ve seen them before in Syria where Russia has steadfastly defended the Assad regime against accusations of using chemical weapons.

On an August morning in 2013 news began to emerge of mass deaths in Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus. A report from Reuters began: “Syria’s opposition accused government forces of gassing hundreds of people on Wednesday by firing rockets that released deadly fumes over rebel-held Damascus suburbs, killing men, women and children as they slept.”

Right from the start, there was little doubt about what had happened: videos of those affected showed classic symptoms of nerve agent poisoning. Within a month, UN inspectors confirmed the worst: the environmental, chemical and medical samples they had collected provided “clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin” had been used in Ghouta.

Sowing doubt

Given that these deaths and injuries occurred in rebel-held areas that were under attack from Syrian government forces and that the government had previously admitted possessing chemical weapons, there was one very obvious suspect. But Russia had other ideas.

Its first response was to question whether anything untoward had actually happened. On the day of the attack, an article posted on the Russia’s RT website described the reports as “fishy” and claimed that international media had simply “picked up” the story from al-Arabiya, a Saudi TV channel which was “not a neutral in the Syrian conflict”.

Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesman, Aleksandr Lukashevich, hovered between denying an attack had taken place and claiming it had been staged (or perhaps faked) by anti-Assad forces. He talked about an “alleged” attack and a “so-called” attack while asserting that “materials of the incident and accusations against government troops” had been posted on the internet several hours in advance. “Thus, it was a pre-planned action,” he said.

Lukashevich’s argument had actually been cribbed from conspiracy theorists on the internet, but without checking properly. Reuters’ report of the attack and some of the videos did appear to have been posted before the attack took place but that was simply the result of automated time-stamping in a different time zone.

Following publication of the UN inspectors’ report, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov acknowledged that it showed chemical weapons had been used but said it offered no proof that Assad’s forces were to blame. This implied the inspectors had failed to reach a conclusion about who was responsible but the terms of reference set by the UN had not allowed them to apportion blame.

Diversionary tactics

Lavrov went on to say that Russia still suspected rebel forces were behind the attack and that the UN report failed to answer a number of questions, including whether the weapons were produced in a factory or “home-made”. He added that the UN report should be examined not in isolation but along with evidence from sources such as the internet and other media, including accounts from “nuns at a nearby convent” and a journalist who had spoken to rebels.

The questions Lavrov raised – about home-made sarin, the nuns in the convent and the journalist who had spoken to rebels – looked suspiciously like a diversionary tactic, and that is what they were. They didn’t withstand serious scrutiny but in propaganda terms they didn’t need to. The point was not to persuade people of anything in particular – which was one reason why many people had difficulty recognising it as propaganda.

The slogan of RT is “Question More”, and its purpose is exactly that: to ask lots of questions, not in the hope of getting closer to the truth but in order to sow as much doubt as possible. This doesn’t require real evidence and it doesn’t matter if some of the “alternative” theories promoted are mutually contradictory or purely speculative, so long as there are plenty of them. If the result is that people become so confused they are unsure what to believe the propaganda can be considered a success.

Russia’s propagandists also have a symbiotic relationship with conspiracy websites in the west which not only re-circulate and amplify the theories but sometimes generate them in the first place.

False flags in Salisbury?

Fast-forward to March 2018 and the English city of Salisbury where Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned. As with Syria in 2013, there was one rather obvious suspect. The Skripals were Russian. Sergei had been a double agent in the murky world of espionage, and as far as Russia was concerned had betrayed his country.

Over the last 40 years a number of mysterious deaths in Britain have been linked to Russia or its predecessor, the Soviet Union. At least two of those involved murder by exotic means – Georgi Markov in 1978, stabbed with a ricin-tipped umbrella, and Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 who was killed with radioactive polonium. There have been other cases too, outside Britain.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found on a park bench “reportedly exhibiting symptoms similar to a drug overdose” according to Russia’s RT. Another RT article suggested they might be drug users.

Amid the initial speculation about what might have caused the Skripals’ poisoning, there was talk in several British newspapers that the substance involved might be fentanyl, a powerful opiate. One factor behind that idea was that fentanyl, or a version of it, is thought to have been used by Russian special forces to subdue Chechen separatists who held 800 people hostage at a Moscow theatre in 2002 (as the Sun newspaper pointed out). RT, however, had a different spin on the fentanyl angle:

“The highly addictive synthetic opiate has been linked to a sharp increase in overdoses in the US and has also resulted in dozens of deaths across the UK. The drug has repeatedly made headlines as part of the so-called ‘opioid crisis’, especially after famous American singer/songwriter Prince died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl in April 2016.

“An eyewitness told the BBC she saw a woman and a man sitting on a bench and that they ‘looked like they’d been taking something quite strong’.”

Since then, the Russians have moved on from trying to deny that a nerve agent attack took place, as they did in Syria over sarin. They are now promoting multiple “false flag” theories – as they also did in Syria over sarin. Daft as the theories might be, in Syria’s case they found some vocal supporters in the west – and the same thing seems to be happening now with the Skripal affair.

“I think this will go down with the Gulf of Tonkin incident as one of the great hoaxes, with the most serious implications in all of history,” former British MP George Galloway told Sputnik Radio’s listeners.

With Syria, the main false flag theory was that rebels attacked themselves with sarin to create the pretext for a large-scale military intervention by western powers against the Assad regime. This was also linked to the dubious claim that western powers had spent years plotting “regime change” in Syria. Despite two confirmed sarin attacks, however, western powers have still not responded in the way the theory has been predicting.

With the Skripal affair, Russia is strongly suggesting a false flag operation carried out by the British government but is unclear about its exact purpose.

Galloway, who became notorious for his tribute to Saddam Hussein in 1994, suggested it might have something to do with Putin’s re-election or the World Cup (which is due to be held in Russia this summer). The Russian foreign ministry also appears to favour a World Cup connection: the British are “unable to forgive” Russia for winning the right to host this summer’s contest.

More vaguely, Sputnik quotes Helga Zepp-LaRouche – leader of the German Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität party and wife of the controversial American, Lyndon LaRouche – as blaming British intelligence for “fabricating another Litvinenko case as a pretext for another anti-Russia escalation”. It’s unclear why Sputnik regards her as an authority on the matter.

While mainly trying to direct suspicion towards Britain, the Russians are also speculating that some other country might be the culprit – almost any country apart from Russia. According to a former Kremlin adviser quoted by Sputnik News, “every laboratory in the west including Porton Down which is only seven miles away from Salisbury, has a sample” and there are “are rouge agents of a different nation that have gotten access to this particular nerve agent”. The mention of “rouge” (rogue) agents may be intended as a reference to Ukraine.

These ideas have already acquired some resonance at the further ends of the political spectrum (both left and right) in the west. Look on Twitter and you will find that many of those adopting them have previously been active in questioning the Assad regime’s sarin use.

Not surprisingly, there have been calls to cancel RT’s television broadcasting licence in Britain – which would probably be a mistake. RT would have a field day complaining about being victimised, and blocking its TV output would have little practical effect. RT would still be able to function online, which in some ways may be more important because its propaganda is often circulated in the form of YouTube videos.

No matter what anyone does to try and stop it, though, propaganda will always exist. The important thing is to recognise it for what it is, and not to be fooled by it.

Brian Whitaker is a former Middle East editor of the Guardian. He is the author of several books about the region, most recently Arabs Without God: Atheism and Freedom of Belief in the Middle East

Via Al-Bab.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.

False claims in the UN security council: Syria’s Bashar Ja’afari

At a meeting [last month] of the UN security council Syria claimed the US and France now doubt that the Assad regime has ever used chemical weapons. The claim was false but it provides an interesting example of how propaganda can be created.

Speaking on February 14, Syria’s representative at the UN, Bashar Ja’afari, told the council:

“One of the most important political magazines, the American Newsweek, published an article on 8 February written by Ian Wilkie entitled ‘Now Mattis Admits There Was No Evidence Assad Used Poison Gas on His People’.

“The United States Secretary of Defence admits in that article that there is no proof of the use of toxic gas by the Syrian government against its people, neither in Khan Shaykhun [last year] nor in Al-Ghouta in 2013.”

Mattis had said no such thing. In fact, he said the Assad regime was to blame for both attacks.

Laboratory tests by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have previously established that the sarin involved was of a type manufactured by the regime.

Ja’afari’s claim arose out of a news conference at the Pentagon on 2 February where Mattis was questioned about reports of recent chemical attacks in Syria using chlorine.

“Is this something you’re seeing that’s been weaponised?” a reporter asked.

“It has,” Mattis replied, adding that the deadly nerve agent sarin may have been used too: “We are more – even more concerned about the possibility of sarin use, the likelihood of sarin use, and we’re looking for the evidence.”

Mattis explained that there were “reports from the battlefield” from people who claimed sarin had been used. but added: “We do not have evidence of it. But we’re not refuting them; we’re looking for evidence of it.”

He said the American suspicions of renewed sarin use arose partly out of the Assad regime’s previous behaviour: “they were caught using it” during the Obama administration (a reference to the Ghouta attacks in 2013) and “they used it again” after Trump became president (Khan Sheikhoun in 2017).

Mattis’s phrase, “We do not have evidence”, was clearly referring to the allegations of new chemical attacks but the Russian propaganda channel, RT, latched on to it and re-purposed it in a report which began:

“Washington has no evidence that the chemical agent sarin has ever been used by the Syrian government, Pentagon chief James Mattis has admitted” (italics added).

A few days later Newsweek magazine published a similar claim, with an article headed: “Now Mattis admits there was no evidence Assad used poison gas on his people”.

The article’s author, Ian Wilkie, described Mattis’s “no evidence” statement as “striking” and continued:

“Mattis offered no temporal qualifications, which means that both the 2017 event in Khan Sheikhoun and the 2013 tragedy in Ghouta are unsolved cases in the eyes of the Defense Department and Defense Intelligence Agency.”

This was completely untrue, as Wilkie would have seen if he had bothered to check the transcript of the news conference. Despite numerous people pointing out Wilkie’s error, Newsweek did not withdraw the article or add a correction. Instead, 10 days later, it published a second article from Wilkie claiming “the Assad regime’s culpability is vastly under-proven by the public evidence”. Newsweek described Wilkie as “an international lawyer and terrorism expert and a veteran of the US Army (Infantry)”.

‘Corroboration’ from France

In his speech to the UN, Ja’afari then went on to claim Mattis’s misreported words had been corroborated by France:

“The French Minister of Defence, Florence Parly, also said yesterday, like her American counterpart, that there is no documented proof of the use of chlorine gas by the Syrian Government.”

A closer look, though, shows that Parly’s words had also been twisted.

Last May, shortly after becoming president of France, Emmanuel Macron said he viewed chemical weapons as a red line: “Any use of chemical weapons would result in reprisals and an immediate riposte, at least where France is concerned.”

In a radio interview on 9 February, armed forces minister Parly was asked, in the light of fresh reports about chemical attacks, if Macron’s red line had now been crossed. (The original transcript in French is
here.)

Interviewer: Do you have confirmation, I mean confirmation, that barrels of chlorine have been used by Syrian regime forces against Syrian civilians?

Minister: We have possible indications of chlorine use, but we do not have absolute confirmation, so it is this confirmation work that we are doing, with others elsewhere, because obviously the facts must be established.

Interviewer: Last May Emmanuel Macron indicated that a very clear red line – I’m quoting – existed on our side, on the side of France, and therefore use of a chemical weapon by anyone – I’m still quoting the president – would be the object of reprisals and an immediate response from the French. We are there, aren’t we?

Minister: Exactly, we can’t say it with certainty, and that is what we must achieve.

Interviewer: So, for the moment, for lack of proof, the red line has not been crossed?

Minister: For the moment, for lack of certainty about what has happened, about the consequences of what has happened, we cannot say that we are there …

Use of chlorine as a chemical weapon is more difficult to confirm than sarin through laboratory tests, which may partly explain the French minister’s hesitancy.

In 2014, however, a fact-finding mission from the OPCW concluded “with a high degree of confidence” that chlorine had been used:

“Thirty-seven testimonies of primary witnesses, representing not only the treating medical professionals but a cross-section of society, as well as documentation including medical reports and other relevant information corroborating the circumstances, incidents, responses, and actions, provide a consistent and credible narrative.

“This constitutes a compelling confirmation that a toxic chemical was used as a weapon, systematically and repeatedly, in the villages of Talmanes, Al Tamanah, and Kafr Zeta in northern Syria. The descriptions, physical properties, behaviour of the gas, and signs and symptoms resulting from exposure, as well as the response of the patients to the treatment, leads the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] to conclude, with a high degree of confidence, that chlorine, either pure or in mixture, is the toxic chemical in question.”

A further report provided more detail.

Brian Whitaker is a former Middle East editor of the Guardian. He is the author of several books about the region, most recently Arabs Without God: Atheism and Freedom of Belief in the Middle East.

Via Al-Bab.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Syria: Chemical attack suspected in Eastern Ghouta siege”

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told BBC radio “If we know that it has happened, and we can demonstrate it, and if there is a proposal for action where the UK could be useful then I think we should seriously consider it.”

Britain would consider joining US military strikes against the Syrian government if there is evidence chemical weapons are being used against civilians, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Tuesday.

Johnson said he hoped Britain and other Western nations would not stand by in the event of a chemical attack, voicing support for limited strikes if there is “incontrovertible evidence” of the Syrian’s government involvement.

“If we know that it has happened, and we can demonstrate it, and if there is a proposal for action where the UK could be useful then I think we should seriously consider it,” Johnson told BBC radio.

Over the past week, Syria’s army and its allies have subjected the rebel-held enclave of Ghouta near Damascus to one of the heaviest bombardments of the seven-year war, killing hundreds.

Britain is part of the US-led coalition involved in air attacks on Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, but the government lost a parliamentary vote on the use of force against the Syrian government in 2013.

Johnson said he supported the US decision to fire cruise missile at Syrian government targets last year after almost 100 people, including children, were killed in a gas attack on the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun.

The United Nations accused the Syrian government of being responsible for an attack that used sarin gas.

“What we need to ask ourselves as a country and what we in the West need to ask ourselves, is can we allow the use of chemical weapons, the use of these illegal weapons to go unreproved, unchecked, unpunished,” Johnson said.

However, he warned there was little international appetite for sustained military action against the Syrian regime.

“The people listening to us and this program in eastern Ghouta cannot get the idea the West is going to intervene to change the odds dramatically in their favour,” he said.

The Syrian government has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons and said it targets only armed rebels and militants.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

United Nations: The UK on Syria Ceasefire Vote – Media Stakeout (24 February 2018)

The unusual statement from the “White House” on Monday saying that there were indications that the Syrian regime was preparing to use poison gas has provoked much head-scratching both inside the Trump administration and around the world. Why would the “White House” say this? Is it preparing the way for another missile strike on a Syrian military target? Why? Who? It is sort of like a sordid murder in a pulp mystery novel. Who had means, motive and opportunity?

It should be said that the Russian pundits can be forgiven for being confused. Trump’s statement apparently came as a huge shock to the Department of Defense and senior officers in the military and also to the State Department.

Although the top, more political levels of the Department of Defense swung into action to support the White House charge, apparently the officers who would have known if the allegation had been true were taken by surprise.

Who at the White House put this meme out? It wasn’t Trump, since he would have tweeted, and he hasn’t said anything about it. Apparently Jared Kushner is in actual charge of foreign policy, so maybe it is he. Kushner is alleged to be behind Trump’s support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in their kerfuffle with Qatar, to the extreme annoyance of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Tillerson has about had it with the White House insiders who keep over-ruling him and frankly humiliating him, and is said to have exploded at them on Friday, with Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner in the room.

Then it was alleged yesterday that the late-Monday White House announcement had already deterred Syria from use of poison gas. . The ghost ended up haunting itself.

As for the Russian press, BBC Monitoring has a round up.

The popular Moskovsky Komsomolets suspects that Trump is gearing up for another missile strike on the al-Assad regime. It says that such interference by the US will just prolong the civil war in Syria. Hitting the regime, the paper says, would show that the US doesn’t actually care about terrorism, but is committed to regime change. Boris Dolgov is quoted with some further speculation. The US, he says, wants to get rid of al-Assad and thus deprive Russia of a key ally in the Middle East. The added bonus for Washington, he alleged, was that once the Syrian regime collapses, radical Muslim fundamentalists will sweep into power in Damascus and then pursue terrorism against Russia in the Caucasus, as among the Chechens.

The centrist Nezavisimaya Gazeta said that Russian experts doubt that Trump is planning another strike on Syria. It worries, though, that Iran may encourage the al-Assad forces to use gas. This action would in turn result in a US strike, which would sour relations between Russia and Trump and so forestall a US-Russia rapprochement. Tehran, it implies, prefers that the superpowers be at odds with one another and is conniving at that outcome.

So there you have it. The whole thing is an American plot to hand Syria to al-Qaeda, expel Russia from the Middle East, and embroil the Russian Federation in massive and debilitating terrorist attacks by Muslim radicals encouraged behind the scenes by the USA. That’s dark.

Or, Trump is being successfully trolled by a Machiavellian Iran conniving to keep tensions high between Washington and Moscow, so that Iran remains a valuable asset to Russia.

Needless to say, none of these allegations is true. The main force backed by the US in Syria at the moment is leftist Kurds, not al-Qaeda in Syria (The “Syrian Conquest Front”). There is no reason to think the US wants radical extremists to take over Syria or wants them to destabilize Russia. Well, the Neocons might want that, but they are to say the least not in power.

Iran has a moral objection to the use of gas and is certainly not encouraging al-Assad in that direction (Iranian troops suffered from Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks in the 1980s). Indeed, the Iranian opposition blames the ruling ayatollahs for their shameful support of the secular, dictatorial Baath regime in Syria, in general, and many Iranians consider it a national humiliation, given the ideals of the 1979 revolution. On the other hand, it is true that Iran is afraid that Trump will steal Putin from them.

So, I conclude that nobody has the slightest idea what is going on here, but a lot of people are afraid it could lead to dire consequences.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

CBS This Morning: “White House warns Syria will “pay a heavy price” for any new chemical attack”