Syria: Another stinking pile of Democratic Doo Doo

The truth about Syria is emerging and will one day - it is to be hoped - see the perpetrators of a staged revolution hauled before the World Court - or better still, fall victims to their own petard - none of them are what anybody would call secure in their establishment.

From the earliest days anybody who was reading more than the US media - where Saddam was depicted as having children beaten and killed, his people brutalized by police goons and cast into dungeons - were hearing a quiet dissonance in the 'chorus of freedom' rising in Syria.    If it hadn't been for disorders breaking out across the Arab world,  as people "cried out for more democracy on social media' - as well as a break from rising bread,  food and fuel prices (after a western engineered food staples price increase), we might not have understood how Syria would 'go wobbly',  like Libya and Egypt  did. After all,  the Syrians and their government seemed to have coped, fairly-well, with a 10 year drought and population shift into the urban areas - none of that caused an uprising.  It turns out that what did cause an uprising was the CIA and Saudis providing weapons and money as well as numbers of foreign fighters, to take things to a dark side. And we 'suckers for a good fight', out west, were panting for some humanitarianism after the press and media pulled another wag the dog on us. America was almost disingenuous in its 'uninvolvement',  as it 'let' the French and British call for the 'invasionary overthrow'. It did  set an ambassador to provide 'photo ops' of visits to 'friendly riots' and protests  - while he begged Assad for  mercy and a resignation. Photos of what appeared to be American 'trainers',  in mufti, started to appear on military photo sites.   Within the first year there were car bomb attacks in Damascus and other towns and a retaliatory strike that was rumoured to have killed Saudi Security Minister  Bandar Bin Sultan,  who disappeared from the Saudi 'whirl' after that explosion  and  has yet to return to the public eye.

Sarah Abed offers this explanation of the early days

Every Syrian I have spoken with, whether they side with Assad or not,  explain that it was not local forces, on either side, that caused them to flee the country - it was "gunmen" - armed foreigners who quickly took the fight to unexpectedly violent levels and threatened  to involve them in it directly, or indirectly.

Who these gunmen were was not unknown to the US security services and, hence, to the government.  Material leaked by Snowden pointed to the direct involvement of the Saudis in directing attacks that killed civilians in Damascus. At least one operation noted in US security sources

The intercept that might have changed everything

Six months before Assad was accused of gassing his own people the first time, a British newspaper printed what it claimed were emails from a hacked site in Malaysia belonging to a British security firm. The emails detailed plans to import Libyan weapons of Russian manufacture and engineer an outrage that could be blamed on Assad.  That story quickly went south when the security firm sued the British paper that published the story for libel. That case later wound-up, successfully, for the security firm - who, if they didn't make money off the Syria plan,  made money from the court ruling. e are very aware that, at about the same time the British court ruled, Assad was accused of firing sarin tipped missiles into a rebel-held area. The UN investigated and Obama threatened war.

We all 'know' that Assad used rocket artillery to gas his rebelling people. An incident that nearly led to a war with the USA, did lead to Assad dis-arming himself, chemically, and was later investigated and demonstrated that the incident might have been more like that spurious, 'emailed  scenario' mentioned above, than the one we all believed.

Would the  news that 'the bozos',  so roundly congratulated by -  and later armed at the behest of -  John McCain, were in fact the command echelon of what would turn out to be  ISIS,   have changed anything? Not even if they 'offed' the Pope,  or bull-dozed every church in Syria.  They were there to remove Assad for us. And had they not tried removing the Shiite government of Iraq instead - threatening much of the 'goodness' we had already done there, they might well have succeeded making that Caliphate, governed from Baghdad, instead of Mosul, Idlib,  or Raqqa.

If they'd been really smart they'd have gotten us to arm and pay for it all  - massacring everybody only after we anointed them.

'Bang' to the Nth

There are places on Earth where violent men with guns are a regular fact of life. We like to think that 'those people' in 'those places' hold a lesser value for life than we, more enlightened folk do. But in all the great gun range that is our ballistic world,  one land stands head and shoulders above the rest for the regularity of banal killings executed with a firearm  - and the reticence of the governments or legislatures to put any meaningful  restrictions on the right to own a firearm 'guaranteed' under the national constitution - that land is the United States of America

a jaded, biased perspective from the ax-grinders at the Intercept


And so it was only with mild shock and a little dismay that the World learned that America had self-inflicted another 'national tragedy'- as opposed to say another attack by those who hate freedom - that would have been really serious. As it is there are some roads closed on the Vegas Strip, windows busted in a tourist hotel and the next audience taking in some live 'ennertainment' will be doing so with an ear cocked for a volley of automatic rifle fire.

The undertakers re still busily packing corpses for FedEx shipment and the hospitals are only starting to tote-up the costs to be passed on to insurers or, worse, sent to home addresses. As in most of its other tragedies America is 'go funding me'  dollars at the victims. The 'News' networks are beating the story to death and even if they don't really understand what happened, most Americans aren't thinking it had as much to do the 'the beauty of our weapons' as much as the mentality of a trigger-man, who fired into a crowd so far away he could only imagine the effect of his shots. Although he did have 'optics' on at least one of his weapons - he might have seen,  but he probably didn't hear.

He wasn't long for this world either - being deceased himself by the time - within minutes that it took for the swat squad, alerted by a 'fire alarm' set off by the battlefield barrage,  to come through the wall. Strange that the picture of the dead man's body - making an assumption he, somehow, made his head something to be kept from the public -  had something that looked very much like another supine person's foot  beside his leg.  What was up with that?

This past week another attack was thwarted. Actually it wasn't an attack. It probably wasn't thwarted either.  It wasn't even noticed.

The Airport bomber




But the real problem with America and its guns is:

Maybe to get some attention, or maybe just because he was  'mad' or 'nuts',  another shooter cut loose in two schools in Chicago killing 2 and wounding  2 others.   And somebody went wack-o in Maryland an killed thee people - one in a nearby state.

The beauty of it is that,  three weeks later,  it's like nothing happened.