Syria lies waiting, exposed and vulnerable.

When will the vultures move in for kill?

The Syrian situation changes by the hour. Writing about it can be a frustrating task, for almost everything one says about it has to be modified later as new events occur. This is where we stand right now:

The UK and France have backed out of joining the US in its plan to attack Syria. They say they want to wait for more evidence of Syrian “wrongdoing”. They point out that they will feel happier about attacking Syria if and when the UN chemical inspectors in Syria have completed their report. The US, which has already made up its mind that the Assad government is guilty, is apparently not interested in “evidence of guilt”. It is now determined to “go it alone.”

A barrage of missiles fired at regime targets from the sea appears to be the most likely option. These include the Presidential palace, Military intelligence, the National Security HQ, the Ministry of Defense, Parliament, and the Central bank. The regime’s greatest strength, its elite forces, foremost among which is the 4th armored division, will have to be taken out. Syria’s substantial air defenses, which include multiple arrays of Russian-made missiles, will also have to be destroyed.

If stockpiles of chemical weapons are hit in the punitive process, deadly neurotoxins will be released over a wide region, causing huge numbers of deaths among civilians. Far more innocent people are likely to die at America’s hands than were killed in recent chemical attacks laid to Assad’s account.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, warned the West of “extremely dangerous consequences”, and went on to add that “using force without the approval of the UN Security Council is a very grave violation of international law.”

Russia does not wish to get involved in any future conflict, Lavrov hinted, but the implication was that Russia might have to get involved if Mad Dog America went too far—for example, by killing Russian advisers, many of whom are to be found in Syria right now. Any attack on Russian ships in the region, moreover, could lead to only one outcome: World War III.

The Obama administration has rejected seeking Congressional approval for its planned attack on Syria, doubtless afraid that the US Congress will strongly disapprove of its headlong rush into “a totally unapproved, extralegal war.”

For the same reason, the US government has ordered the UN inspectors to leave Syria at once, without completing their report, “apparently hoping to avoid the report proving them wrong and throwing a monkey wrench into the war scheme.”

The UN inspectors will be forced to leave Syria today (Saturday, August 31) before completing their investigation satisfactorily.

The UN inspectors’ report is in any case a red herring.

All the participants know very well that the inspectors’ mandate is simply to ascertain if a chemical attack actually took place, not to point the finger of blame at any particular party.

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The chemical attack in Syria, which has reportedly claimed the lives of 322 civilians, has been described by US secretary of state John Kerry as a “moral obscenity”.

The American-backed military dictatorship in Egypt, however, killed 1,295 innocent civilians in a two-day period. Did America protest? On the contrary, they backed the carnage there. And Kerry even went so far as to make the fatuous comment that the military dictatorship, which had just ousted a democratically elected government, was doing its best to “restore democracy.” (Seumas Milne, The Guardian, 28 August, “An attack on Syria will only spread the war and killing”).

To paraphrase an excellent point made by Paul Craig Roberts here: one reason for the rush to war is to prevent the UN inspectors coming up with a contradictory report, thus disproving Washington’s unsubstantiated claim that Assad was responsible for killing his own people with nerve gas. This would only serve to underline the fact that Washington was itself responsible for a false flag attack against Syria, carried out by its own hired terrorists known as “the Syrian rebels.”

This disreputable bunch of jihadis, including remnants of Al Qaeda, are arguably the ones responsible for herding a large number of children into one place and then gassing them to death—the blame then being pinned on the Syrian government by Washington.

Syrian children probably killed by the Syrian “rebels” with chemical weapons given to them by Israel. So think many respected commentators like George Galloway. (See here Saudis

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The planned attack on Syria will be America’s ninth military intervention in a Muslim country in 15 years. These are eight other Muslim countries America has attacked under the pretence that it wants peace with the world: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Mali, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. After it has attacked Syria, at the bidding of its Zionist master, America then intends to round off its “peace mission” by destroying Iran.

America is one of those countries constantly looking for pretexts to attack other sovereign states, usually democratic ones, in the interests of its Zionist master; and if there are no pretexts for war, it will invent pretexts—and then fabricate the evidence to justify its belligerence. It did this in Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin incident; and it did so again to spectacular effect in Iraq, inventing imaginary weapons of mass destruction which could apparently reach London in 45 minutes.

In retaliation for an alleged Al Qaeda attack, America bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, killing and wounding scores of innocent Sudanese civilians. America doesn’t seem to care who it kills. Its latest “hate affair” with Syria is a case in point. Should America wait for the UN inspectors to gather their evidence and present a full report? Good heavens, no! Why bother? Bomb first, ask questions later!

The use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime is, according to US Secretary of State John Kerry, a “moral obscenity“, but the infinitely more lethal deployment of nuclear weapons by America and Israel is evidently not.

While we don’t know for sure that Assad has used chemical weapons—and the likelihood is that he has not—we do know for sure that America used atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Quite needlessly, as it turns out. Since the war was effectively over and Japan was only too anxious to surrender.

We also know for a fact that America has used vast quantities of depleted uranium in Iraq, causing monstrous birth deformities there, and that it has used white phosphorus and Agent Orange both in the Middle East and beyond.

It smacks of hypocrisy for America to scold Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons. This is one pot that certainly can’t afford to call the kettle black.

Paul Craig Roberts again:

The corrupt British government has declared that Syria can be attacked without UN authorization, just as Serbia and Libya were militarily attacked without UN authorization. In other words, the Western democracies have already established precedents for violating international law. “International law? We don’t need no stinking international law!” The West knows only one rule: Might is Right. As long as the West has the Might, the West has the Right.

This is what the US does almost every day of the week in “Afpak” (the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan) to Afghan and Pakistani civilians, mostly women and children, with its killer drones. It’s what the Israelis have been doing in Israel to the Palestinians for the last 65 years. These two nations that openly flout international law, America and Israel, have killed between them a thousand times—perhaps ten thousand times—more innocent civilians than Assad is alleged to have killed in recent chemical attacks.

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America and its belligerent allies have recently found that they can no longer launch unprovoked attacks on Israel’s enemies within the confines of international law. To do so they need unanimous agreement between the five permanent members of the Security Council: the US, Britain, France, Russia, and China. Russia and China have rightly refused to give these international banditti the right to go on the rampage.

No matter. The world’s Superpower has recently found a crafty way to get round international law. It is called the ‘Responsibility to Protect‘ (R2P). This sneaky little device now gives America and its allies carte blanche to meddle in any part of the world they want—in order to “protect” people from their own governments. This is now its threadbare justification for attacking Syria.

It’s strange how R2P has never been used as an excuse for America to meddle in Israeli affairs. Don’t the Palestinians need “protecting” from systematic abuse and ethnic cleansing? Apparently not. When Israel is the oppressor, that’s fine and dandy.

R2P has no application in Egypt either. The American-backed dictatorship in Egypt is free to kill Egyptian civilians by the score. America yawns, shrugs, and remains totally unconcerned.

The Syrians, for some reason, are a different kettle of fish. They need “protecting” from the Evil Assad who, as you might expect, has been compared to Hitler. America’s compassion, completely dormant when it comes to the Palestinians and the Egyptians, suddenly bubbles up and overflows over Syria.

The only trouble is, the Syrian people have not asked America to rescue them from the evil clutches of their leader Bashar al-Assad. They much prefer Mr Assad, their democratically elected leader, to their self-appointed “rescuer” Barack Obama.

Responsibility to protect? America? Is this the country whose leaders were apparently ready to launch a devastating false flag attack against their own people in the 1960s, in several American cities, in order to have a pretext for declaring war on Cuba which they planned to blame for the same attack?

This dirty little operation was known as Operation Northwoods. It was aborted by President Kennedy. Which is probably one of the reasons why he was assassinated.

In America it’s the good guys who bite the dust.

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Finally, who killed almost 3000 American civilians on September 11, 2001? Was it really 19 Muslims with box cutters, or was it a false flag attack engineered by the Bush administration with the help of Mossad and their Israel Firster friends in America?

Many people think America killed its own people on 9/11, with the help of Israel and American neoconservatives, all of them eagerly anticipating a “Pearl Harbor” type incident—a momentous event that would give them an excuse to attack the Muslim world and make America into the Israelified police state that it has now become under Homeland Insecurity.

It seems to me that if America is prepared to kill its own people on American soil, then it has no justification whatever for meddling in foreign countries and “protecting” people who don’t ask to be protected.

If I were a Syrian, I would want America to keep its distance. I would politely request these kindly Americans to stop trying to “improve” my life by killing my mother and father, my uncles and aunts, my brothers and sisters. I would beg them to stop killing children. I would beseech them to stop bombing mosques in which people are praying. I would implore them not to bomb our hospitals, killing the sick and dying in their beds. I would ask them to spare the wounded and women giving birth. This is not the way, I would tell them, to bring freedom and democracy to a country.

I don’t think mass murder is a good way to protect people.

Truly, a collective psychosis appears to run through certain segments of the American public. Their politicans, by and large, clearly belong in psychiatric institutions. Instead of sitting in Congress, they should be sitting in padded cells.

“In the long run, it’s perhaps best that they are politicians,” a friend told me the other day. “Otherwise they’d have been serial killers.”

I shook my head sadly.

“Not so,” I said. “They kill more people as politicians than they would as serial killers. Bush and Blair achieved a far higher score than Jack the Ripper.”