An obsession that has shaped much of foreign policy formulation in Washington over the last decade has been the drive to prevent a nuclear ‘catastrophe’ — that being the world-destablizing effect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

What makes this obsession farcical, disingenuous, and dangerous is that the individuals at the vanguard of this effort possess large arsenals of nuclear weapons. We are being told that we should worry much more about a nuclear threat than a nuclear reality.

There is a certain parallel with the gun lovers’ argument that guns don’t kill people — people kill people. Similarly, there is a far greater fear of who might control nuclear weapons than the weapons themselves.

One of several indications that we continue to live in the nuclear age with a large measure of comfort is the frequency with which these weapons of massive destruction are referred to as nukes. Like all nicknames, nuke evokes a sense of familiarity; a notion that the danger such weapons pose is so remote that they should provoke little fear — unless, that is, they were to fall into the wrong hands.

There are currently 10,000 nuclear weapons scattered around the globe and of these, around 1,800 are ready to be launched in between 5 to 15 minutes. The fact that none of these have been intentionally or accidentally detonated fosters the illusion that we have little to worry about — that an issue that few people concern themselves with need be of little concern because the people who are in charge of these weapons have created fool-proof systems of command and control, making accidents impossible.

The writer Eric Schlosser points out, however: “The people for whom this is still a threat, the people who are most anti-nuclear, the people who are most afraid about this, are the ones who know most about it.”

Schlosser is author of the newly released Command and Control, whose publication coincides with yesterday’s “exclusive” in The Guardian on a secret document, revealing how close America came to a catastrophic nuclear accident in 1961 when a Mark 39 hydrogen bomb almost exploded in North Carolina on January 23, 1961.

Ed Pilkington writes: When he started on his nuclear researches, Schlosser conceived the book as something contained and compact. It would be the tale of one of the most serious accidents in the nuclear age, when, in September 1980, a Titan II missile, similar to the one he had witnessed taking off from Vandenberg [in 1999], exploded in its silo in Arkansas following routine repair work that turned bad. The missile was carrying a thermonuclear warheadwith a yield 600 times that of “Little Boy”, the bomb dropped over Hiroshima. The warhead was blasted hundreds of meters into a ditch, but failed to detonate.

As he started digging his way down into the rabbit hole, he began stumbling on other examples of mistakes and near-misses. One led to another until he found himself sitting on a mushroom cloud of disturbing nuclear accidents. When he requested under the Freedom of Information Act the release of an official record of all the incidents that had befallen the American nuclear arsenal in the 10 years to 1967, he was astounded to find it extending to 245 pages.

The stories he came across suggest that nothing but a miracle has prevented an accidental Hiroshima or Nagasaki taking place on US soil. In 1958 a Mark 6 atom bomb was accidentally dropped into the backyard of the Gregg family in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Three years later, two hydrogen bombs, with a combined power of more than 500 Hiroshimas, were accidentally dropped over North Carolina after a B-52 broke up in mid air. Neither bomb detonated when they landed in a meadow, but a later secret investigation concluded that in the case of one of the devices only a single low-voltage switch stood between the US and catastrophe. In 1966 a hydrogen bomb was dropped inadvertently over the coast of Spain, also from a stricken B-52; it took six weeks of intensive searching before it was found and retrieved from the ocean bed.

As the mass of detail piles up, an important lesson emerges from the book. The way Schlosser explains it to me is that “our ability to create dangerous things exceeds our ability to control them. We are talking about hubris – our lack of understanding of our own flaws and lack of humility in the way we approach technology.”

Ever since August 21 there has been a proliferation of rumors among what I dub the false flag brigade, supporting the view that whatever happened in the suburbs of Damascus that day had nothing to do with the Assad regime. “The event” whose nature is still being disputed was supposedly an attempt to trigger Western military intervention in Syria for the purpose of bringing down the regime.

The many videos of the dead and dying made it hard to dispute that something catastrophic had occurred. Initial reports that the areas in which the dead were concentrated had come under rocket attack from Syrian government forces and that rockets were landing without exploding — a signature of chemical weapons whose toxicity would be degraded by a large explosion — were countered with vague stories about rebels having released the chemicals in a false flag operation.

Some stories involved the use of improvised rockets (which turned out not to be rockets “Hell Cannons“) while others claimed the chemicals had been released from weapons that had been transported into the target areas and then handled improperly.

One of the most significant features of the alternative theories on the chemical attack was that none appear to have promoted the most plausible explanation on how rebels could have used chemical weapons: that they were using weapons captured from government stockpiles.

For narrative purposes, there were two problems in suggesting that rebels were using such weapons. Firstly, that would require an admission that the government possesses such weapons — an admission that many anti-interventionists are unwilling to make. But secondly, and more importantly, to suggest that chemical weapons have fallen into the hands of rebels is to conjure up a scenario that it has long been stated by the U.S. government would trigger a necessity for military intervention, including the use of ground forces.

Having said that, during the period between the attacks and the release of the UN report investigating the use of chemical weapons, there has been no physical evidence discovered that lends weight to any alternative explanation. And since no convincing alternative has emerged, those who resist the assertion that the regime launched the attacks have increasingly simply voiced skepticism about the evidence supporting the widely accepted interpretation of what happened.

Given that there are multiple sources of evidence showing the distinctive design of the type of rocket used in the attack (a design shown in the UN report), the regime and those who currently want to portray it as a victim of false accusations would at this point be best served by evidence showing the same type of rocket being used by rebels.

Lo and behold, a LiveLeak account created on September 16 has provided all the requirements — smoking guns, gas masks, glimpses of what look like the same kind of rocket and “jihadists” who have helpfully attached flags to their howitzer identifying their militia. Brown Moses Blog has subsequently posted the videos on YouTube.

Eliot Higgins writes: The men in the video claim to be Liwa al-Islam, and the many flags in the video are also marked Liwa al-Islam. In the videos they are shown to launch the same unusual munitions (I’ve dubbed UMLACAs) used in the August 21st sarin attack.

Obviously, this is meant to be proof that Liwa al-Islam were responsible for the August 21st attack, but there’s a lot about it that seems dubious.

First of all the video quality is awful, so it’s very difficult to make out a lot of details. It’s also rather odd it’s so dark when August 21st was a full moon, and there’s no lights in the city visible. Apart from that, there’s three things the videos seem designed to really push, that the UMLACAs are being used, it’s August 21st (repeated on each of the videos), and it’s Liwa al-Islam. They don’t just say they are Liwa al-Islam, but everything is draped in Islamic black standards with Liwa al-Islam written on it.

A look though YouTube channels used by Liwa al-Islam, here and here, doesn’t seem to show videos where they’ve draped black flags over the weapons they are using, as seen in these new videos, and the new videos also don’t appear to have the Liwa al-Islam logo anywhere, which they do seem to like plastering all over their equipment. It’s also a bit odd they’d cover everything with the logo, yet film it using such a poor quality camera.

After the August 21 attacks, let’s just imagine that a team in Syrian government intelligence was assigned the task of producing “evidence” which could be circulated on social media that would support the claims that the attacks had been carried out by Assad’s opponents. What would the “evidence” need to contain?

1. Clearly identifiable culprits: The LiveLeak videos are labelled “Syrian terrorists.August 21” and prominently display Liwa al-Islam flags.
2. Elements that will signal to non-experts that chemical weapons are involved: The men in the videos are wearing gas masks.
3. Recognizable munitions: Even while most of what’s happening in the videos is shrouded in darkness, there are multiple shots of what look like the rocket sections of what Higgins has called UMLACAs.

How difficult would it be for the regime to pull this off? Not very difficult.

If these videos are not Syrian government propaganda or do in fact indicate that chemical weapons have fallen into the hands of opposition fighters, the regime now has a problem.

With Russia’s support it is now pursuing a political strategy that hinges on its ability to secure and destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles. An ongoing visible demonstration of this commitment will serve as a kind of insurance policy that makes Assad’s continued rule an unpalatable yet a seeming necessity in the eyes of the Obama administration.

If, however, Syria lacks this ability, then sooner or later chemical weapons are very likely to be used again. At that time, the regime will be accused of either have reneged on its commitment to abandon its chemical weapons arsenal, or, to have lost control. Either way, the regime will no longer be viewed as indispensable.

Footnote: I missed this when it appeared in Foreign Policy three weeks ago, but it looks like Syria’s “unique” chemical weapons munitions were actually modeled on an American design.

American Surface Launch Unit-Fuel Air Explosive from the 1970s.

Whatever else anyone wants to say about yesterday’s shooting spree by Navy veteran Aaron Alexis in Washington yesterday, the event was as American as apple pie.

Information somehow deemed of relevance to his killing of 12 people, ranges from the ridiculous — he was having difficulty finding parking spaces (which is not to minimize the frustration that can cause) — to the ridiculously obscure — he had “an abiding interest in Buddhism and Thai culture”.

And why, pray tell, did a New York Times reporter give greater prominence to Alexis’ interest in Buddhism, than to his PTSD?

[A construction manager] said he was in New York during the Sept. 11 attacks, and described to a detective “how those events had disturbed him,” according to the detective’s report. His father told investigators that Mr. Alexis had problems associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, and had been an “active participant” in rescue attempts on Sept. 11.

A 9/11 survivor with PTSD — that might be of more relevance than the parking situation or the interest in Buddhism.

Above all, the most blindingly obvious fact about the case is that whatever gave rise to the troubles inside Alexis’ mind — and I don’t think we need the findings of any investigation to conclude that he did indeed have a troubled mind — the vehicle that translated his cognitive state into a physical reality was a gun.

In other countries there are just as many people with just as deeply troubled minds, but outside America it’s much less common that the bridge between extreme emotions and the world is a lethal weapon.

Killing people is the way some Americans talk. Guns give them a voice. The message is banal — bang, you’re dead — yet it’s America’s mantra from Washington to Hollywood.

MedStar Washington Hospital Center Chief Medical Officer Janis Orlowski made this plea for an end to gun violence:

“Let’s get rid of this. This is not America. This is not Washington D.C. This is not good. So we have got to work to get rid of this.”

But this is America and it is Washington DC. Nothing can change without confronting reality and there is no question that gun violence is part of the American way of life.

Moreover, the gun in the hand of the individual mirrors the violent power of the nation.

Michael Vlahos writes:

We are Americans, and Americans are by definition, exceptional, because we are chosen. No one else: Not ancien monarchs and sultans, not Victorian prime ministers and les présidents, can go forth among humanity today and lay waste to the wicked. Only we Americans are entitled to do so, declaring all the while the unimpeachable righteousness of what we do.

But behind this love of violent power and this insistence on being exceptional, is a shadow — a gnawing sense of inferiority: that minus its guns and minus its exceptionalism America might be looked down upon.

At heart, America is troubled by an abiding fear of the world.

Scientists at NASA are justifiably thrilled that Voyager 1, the space probe which was launched in 1977, has been confirmed to have entered interstellar space, having continued on its million-miles-per-day journey taking it beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles in the space surrounding the Solar System.

Over the last 36 years, Voyager has traveled about 12 billion miles away from the Sun. Announcing the latest milestone in a mission that has continued far longer than anyone expected, John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator of science missions, said: “Someday humans will leave our cocoon in the solar system to explore beyond our home system. Voyager will have led the way.”

Befitting that sentiment, the theme from the original Star Trek TV show was played in the background at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I say sentiment in the hope that “someday” was supposed to signal that Grunsfeld was indulging in a childish fantasy and not making a prediction. But although I hope he didn’t mean to be taken seriously, I fear that he and his colleagues really do believe that someday human beings will venture beyond the Solar System.

Such a journey would face all sorts of technical challenges and also ethical ones. It would require the creation of space-travel human slaves. This being a multi-generational journey from which no one would return would require the initial crew to reproduce, raising children whose mission in life had been determined at conception — children who never dreamed of becoming astronauts but were simply given no other choice.

No doubt when Voyager 1 was launched, many of the NASA scientists involved in its creation were convinced that by now, in their advanced age, they would be enjoying the Jetson lifestyle and have grandchildren who were busy colonizing the Moon.

While human life and life on this planet are inextricably bound together, the visions of space travel that we have been encouraged to entertain for much of the last century, have in many ways poisoned the modern imagination.

They do so by fostering the idea that life beyond Earth would be an advance from life on Earth. Worst of all, they conjure up the possibility that if we really screw things up down here, we might find some better alternative some place else.

In reality, if it turns out that the evolutionary path which led to Homo Sapiens proves to be a dead end — due to our insatiable appetites and destructive capacities — it won’t just mean the end of humanity but also the end of life for many other species. Indeed, our “success” has already spelled doom for thousands of species that might otherwise have thrived.

Someday, the one and only human adventure into interstellar space may be a quest to recover the Golden Record on Voyager. Human culture and much of life having been wiped out, the last hope of salvaging humanity will rest in a record no one will be able to play.

If, however, in the detritus of human civilization one turntable survives, our forebears may get a chance to listen to Blind Willie Johnson sing “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” as they ponder: what the hell were those guys from NASA thinking?

For an elite — be it a monarchy, an aristocracy, a military regime, or a government — to exercise and sustain its power, its power needs to operate largely unquestioned. A population will acquiesce to the dictates of a ruling power for only so long as most people believe they possess less power than their rulers. Otherwise, why would the many consent to being controlled by the few?

For this reason, the propagators of conspiracy theories, while presenting themselves as political rebels who by “exposing the truth” challenge the power of the state, actually have the opposite effect. They breed political apathy, presenting state power as so pervasive and so absolute in its control over the affairs of the world, that protest can never actually rise above symbolic acts of defiance. Alex Jones can engage in the political theater of alerting the world to the supposedly nefarious deliberations of the Bilderberg meetings, but the global elite continues refining and implementing its diabolical plans — because that’s what global elites do.

I grew up in a country that used to be occupied by an imperial power, that country being Britain and the power being the Roman Empire. Close to what later became the border between England and Scotland, the Roman Emperor Hadrian built a wall to “separate the Romans from the barbarians.” It’s not the most imposing of walls — nothing in comparison to the Great Wall of China — and since the Romans had succeeded in taking control of large swaths of Europe, one wonders, what kind of threat could the Picts, the “barbarian” tribesmen north of the wall, possibly pose to Rome’s military might?

Recent excavations on both sides of the wall have revealed the existence of stable native settlements suggesting that day-to-day life was relatively peaceful both to the south and north. The wall’s purpose may have been much more symbolic than defensive. Having occupied an island, the Romans may have built the wall, purely for the sake of creating a border.

Then as now, borders act as constant reminders that our freedoms are circumscribed by governments. Hadrian’s Wall may have served no other purpose than showing the natives who was in charge by controlling when gates would be opened or closed and carefully monitoring who passed through them.

States still cling just as strongly to the symbols of power — symbols that communicate: we’re in charge.

This is why terrorism poses a threat. Terrorists have negligible military strength — the power they wield is by casting doubt on power and making governments appear ineffectual. Counter-terrorism thus mirrors terrorism itself in as much as it attempts to reinvigorate the symbols of power and make losses of control appear momentary.

The underlying reality upon which neither terrorists nor governments nor conspiracy theorists want to cast light is the degree to which no one is control.

This week we witnessed one of those rare occasions when the veil suddenly falls away and politics as a sometimes farcical exercise in make-believe, suddenly becomes transparent.

On Monday, CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan, asked Secretary of State John Kerry: “Is there anything at this point that his [Assad’s] government could do or offer that would stop an attack?”

We all now know how Kerry responded and the unintended sequence of events that followed.

Somewhere, there may be a few conspiracy theorists who even at this moment still cling to some notion that a master plan is being enacted — that Brennan’s question was planted; that we are witnessing another ruse. But she isn’t a dumb reporter. She has degrees in foreign affairs and Middle East studies, has studied Arabic and reported from across the region. The question she posed needed asking and no doubt it could have been posed by others, yet Kerry’s offhand response made it clear that this was not a question for which he had a prepared answer. Nor did he have any sense about where his answer might rapidly lead.

The fact that Kerry’s faux proposal, after having been dismissed by the State Department, would then be seized on first by the Russians, then the Syrians, and then the White House, revealed the completely opportunistic way in which each player was operating.

If Brennan’s question had really been planted, it must have been planted by a secret Russian-Syrian-American cabal — and that being the mother of all conspiracies, I guess we’d better include the Israelis.

In reality, no one could have predicted that Kerry would have taken Brennan’s question. He could have turned to someone else and now instead of debating the likelihood that a plan to decommission Syria’s chemical weapons can be agreed upon and carried out, we might instead be considering the political consequences of Obama soon facing a defeat in Congress.

Such is life, stitched together by adventitious events which form the twists and turns of the unexpected. Things happen and we call them opportunities, frustrations, and disappointments. We plot a course, stay on course, veer off course; purpose sometimes seeming crystal clear while at others shimmering like a mirage. All the while we hope that in the grander scheme of things there must be some design and yet periodically we get stabbed by a sense there might be none.

“Syria said it would cease production of chemical weapons and disclose the locations of its stockpiles to the United Nations, Russia and others, as Damascus seized on a possible diplomatic route to avert international military action,” the Wall Street Journal reported today.

The first half of that sentence is factual and the second half is interpretative. The media and others have been so quick to assume that the Assad regime’s swiftness in responding positively to Russia’s initiative is an expression of fear — that it serves as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the threat of force — few have paused to consider an alternative motivation: that giving up chemical weapons may ensure Bashar al-Assad’s survival and ultimate victory.

One thing about which no one should be in any doubt is that the Syrian government understands better than anyone else does, what would be involved in destroying its chemical weapons stockpiles. For them, this isn’t an abstract proposition.

Syria’s agreement to give up its chemical weapons will likely mean its acceptance of an undertaking that may take as long as a decade to complete, says Cheryl Rofer, who supervised a team destroying chemical warfare agents at Los Alamos.

The only people with the technical skills to carry this out are the U.S. and Russian militaries. Teams assigned with this task would have to operate with the protection of the Syrian army. The only way of ensuring that the operation could successfully be completed and that chemical weapons could be prevented from falling into the hands of opposition militias would be for Assad to remain in power. The United States and Russia would in effect become the guarantors of Assad’s continuing rule.

Moreover, even if a deal is finalized and all the relevant governments sign on, due to continuing fighting it might be months or years before its implementation even begins.

No wonder Damascus has been so quick to seize this opportunity.

Foreign Policy reports: Russia’s proposal for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to place his chemical weapons under international supervision and then destroy them is quickly gaining steam. Assad’s government accepted the plan this morning. A few hours later, President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande announced that they’d seriously explore the proposal. It already has the backing of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and a growing number of influential lawmakers from both parties. There’s just one problem: the plan would be nearly impossible to actually carry out.

Experts in chemical weapons disposal point to a host of challenges. Taking control of Assad’s enormous stores of the munitions would be difficult to do in the midst of a brutal civil war. Dozens of new facilities for destroying the weapons would have to be built from scratch or brought into the country from the U.S., and completing the job would potentially take a decade or more. The work itself would need to be done by specially-trained military personnel or contractors. Guess which country has most of those troops and civilian experts? If you said the U.S., you’d be right.

“This isn’t simply burning the leaves in your backyard,” said Mike Kuhlman, the chief scientist for national security at Battelle, a company that has been involved in chemical weapons disposal work at several sites in the U.S. “It’s not something you do overnight, it’s not easy, and it’s not cheap.”

The decades-long U.S. push to eliminate its own chemical weapons stockpiles illustrates the tough road ahead if Washington and Damascus come to a deal. The Army organization responsible for destroying America’s massive quantities of munitions says the effort will take two years longer than initially planned and cost $2 billion more than its last estimate. The delay means an effort that got underway in the 1990s will continue until roughly 2023 and ultimately cost approximately $35 billion. [Continue reading…]

My headline might sound like it comes straight from the Onion but it’s a faithful rendering of the opening sentence in this report from the New York Times — the latest acrobatics from an administration that didn’t need the UN until it discovered it couldn’t manage without the UN:

The White House and a bipartisan group of senators joined the international diplomatic momentum on Tuesday to avert an American military attack on Syria over its use of chemical munitions in that country’s civil war, responding positively to a Russian proposal aimed at securing and destroying those weapons.

The group of senators, including some of President Obama’s biggest supporters and critics, were drafting an alternative Congressional resolution that would give the United Nations time to take control of the Syrian government’s arsenal of the internationally banned weapons.

If the alternative resolution gained political traction, it could stave off a Congressional vote — and possibly a debilitating defeat for the Obama administration — in the coming days on a more immediate resolution authorizing the use of force, which a majority of Americans appear to oppose. That resolution, approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, had been losing ground in both parties in recent days. Passage appeared increasingly difficult in the House and possibly the Senate as well.

At the same time, a senior White House official said Tuesday that administration officials — who just last week had been dismissing the United Nations as ineffective in the Syrian conflict — had begun working with American allies at the United Nations to further explore the viability of the Russian plan, in which the international community would take control of the Syrian weapons stockpile.

“Debilitating defeat”? Enough with the euphemisms. Debilitating = humiliating.

So, Obama drove into a ditch and the Russians were kind enough to haul him out. The French were only too eager to cut themselves loose from a doomed project. The Assad regime possibly sees that it will end up a net winner by agreeing to give up its chemical weapons. And the international community can rally under the flag of the UN proud to have defended the conscience of the world in upholding the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.

There’s just one small problem. There’s another party that will have to cooperate in this process — if it’s going to advance outside conference rooms — and that is the Syrian opposition.

Assad’s potential reward is that he can be confident that he will face no further threats from the U.S. — and perhaps he’ll gain even stronger support from Russia.

What’s in it for the opposition? Confidence that the next hundred thousand dead — just like the first hundred thousand — won’t be killed by chemical weapons?

A year ago U.S. officials were saying that 60,000 troops would be needed to secure Syria’s chemical weapons sites.

The United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention sixteen years ago and it still hasn’t completed the elimination of all its stockpiles.

When asked by a journalist this morning whether there was anything Bashar al-Assad could do to avert American military strikes, John Kerry answered: “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week — turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.”

To predict Syrian intransigence is one thing, but to suggest “it can’t be done” seems to imply that the Obama administration is so strongly committed to attacking Syria that it is now unwilling to consider any alternative. At the same time, this commitment is to what Kerry describes as “an unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”

U.S. policy towards Syria as it is currently being articulated is a resolute commitment to engage in military action that will have no effect on the outcome of the war. Is this a policy? Or an affectation? Is this about sending a message or striking a pose?

Ten days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported:

One U.S. official who has been briefed on the options on Syria said he believed the White House would seek a level of intensity “just muscular enough not to get mocked” but not so devastating that it would prompt a response from Syrian allies Iran and Russia.

“They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,” he said.

It’s hardly any wonder that when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, was asked in the Senate last week what the U.S. is seeking in Syria, he said: “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”

President Obama and his accessories are treating this moment as a test of the conscience of the world. And now it appears even Russia and Syria are willing to participate in the charade.

Following Kerry’s offhand remark about what he regarded as a purely hypothetical situation, Russia seized on the opportunity. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia, one of the strongest supporters of the Assad regime, urged Syria to comply with Mr. Kerry’s call.

“We are calling on the Syrian leadership not just to agree to put chemical-weapons stores under international control, but also to their subsequent destruction, as well as fully fledged accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention,” Mr. Lavrov said.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, in comments to reporters in Moscow, didn’t provide any specifics, other than to say that Syria welcomed the Russian proposal.

“The Syrian Arab republic welcomes the Russian initiative, motivated by the concerns of the Russian leadership for the lives of our citizens and the security of our country,” Mr. Moallem said, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency.

Mr. Moallem didn’t provide any further details of whether Damascus supported both turning over its chemical weapons to international monitors and ultimately destroying them, as Mr. Lavrov proposed.

Mr. Moallem didn’t address Russia’s call for Damascus to accede to the global convention banning chemical weapons.

He said Syria’s position on the Russian proposal was motivated “out of our faith in the wisdom of the Russian leadership, which is striving to prevent American aggression against our people.”

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said Syria should be encouraged to put its chemical weapons beyond use, but added that the international community must be wary in case it uses any such offers as a diversionary tactic.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his support to the proposal, and said he is drawing up plans for Syria’s chemical weapons to be moved to a secure location within the country where they could be eliminated under U.N. supervision.

Slim as the odds might currently seem, let’s suppose that Syria follows through. After all, given that the use of chemical weapons was Obama’s only red line and the Assad regime has had little trouble killing 100,000 of its citizens by conventional means, getting rid of these weapons might now seem like a relatively small trade-off in exchange for enjoying continued free rein in the ongoing task of wiping out the opposition.

In the event that Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles are destroyed, President Obama, John Kerry, Samantha Power and the other self-appointed guardians of the world’s conscience can declare a great success and yet the misery of Syria’s people will not have been alleviated in the slightest.

But were Obama to set his vanity aside and forget about an offhand remark on red lines he made in a news conference a year ago, he might pause to remember a much more significant commitment he made five years ago when he was trying to persuade Americans that he had what it took to become a strong president:

Russia might be Syria’s most powerful supporter, yet because of the roles that the Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah play in defending the Assad regime, it is Iran that wields the greatest amount of influence with its closest regional ally.

Unlike Israel, which has become increasingly transparent in expressing its desire for the war in Syria to continue — “let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death,” as a former Israeli diplomat put it last week — Iran has a much greater interest in arriving at a political solution to the conflict.

As Time notes:

Much like Washington, Tehran finds itself debating what to do with Syria.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened several times to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and under him Iran’s nuclear program has grown enormously in defiance of international sanctions. But Iran has a new president. Hassan Rouhani won a resounding victory in June, in part due to his promises of engagement with the West.

Certainly, the tone out of Tehran has taken a 180. Last week, Rouhani tweeted a happy new year to “all Jews, especially Iranian Jews” celebrating Rosh Hashanah. And his newly appointed Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is widely expected to lead the new round of nuclear talks with the West later this month, tweeted at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter that Iran “never denied” the Holocaust and “the man who was perceived to be denying it is now gone.” He was presumably referring to Ahmadinejad.

Rouhani’s tone on Syria has also been different, not so much in what he’s said but in what he hasn’t. In a speech before the Assembly of Experts on Wednesday, Rouhani said if Syria is attacked by the West, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will do its religious and humanitarian duty and send food and medicine.” He notably didn’t threaten bombs or retaliation. In other speeches, Rouhani has noted that Iran has bitter experience with chemical weapons: some 20,000 Iranian soldiers were killed and upwards of 100,000 Iranians were injured by Iraqis using chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. “We completely and strongly condemn the use of chemical weapons, because the Islamic Republic of Iran is itself a victim of chemical weapons,” Rouhani said on Aug. 24, according to the ISNA News Agency.

Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a reformist who threw his support behind Rouhani before the elections, went so far as to blame the Assad regime for the attack, while most Iranian hardliners have blamed the Syrian opposition. The remarks were censored and he later issued a statement supporting the Syrian regime. Still, his remarks reflect the raging debate within Iran about Syria.

Few in Washington can be blind to the changes taking place in Iran right now, yet from Obama downwards, virtually no one has the courage to advocate seizing the most significant diplomatic opportunity to have emerged in a decade. Dialogue with Iran not only holds the key to a possible end to the war in Syria but also the beginning of a path leading to a deescalation of tensions with Israel. Moreover, as Iran’s international isolation diminishes, Saudi Arabia will have less freedom to fuel Sunni-Shia sectarian tensions which have flared across the region.

Could talking to Iran yield so many benefits? Not all at once and not quickly, but the opportunity is there and the biggest obstacles lie in the United States and in Israel.

Since the end of the Cold War, the national security economies of both countries have thrived through the continuation of conflict in the Middle East. War and the threat of war have been good for business and good for bloated defense budgets.

Moreover, a region that seems locked in interminable conflict, serves as a convenient foil behind which Israel’s occupation of a future Palestinian state becomes ever more entrenched and the so-called peace process becomes a sideshow bereft of any credibility.

Maybe there’s one useful lesson Obama can draw from the last few days: When the supposedly all-powerful Israel lobby pulls out all the stops in order to rally the kind of Congressional support that only this lobby holds in its power, it looks like AIPAC and its allies can’t actually deliver.

Has a corner been turned? Has Washington discovered it no longer needs to live in fear of retribution from the lobby?

In the rather pretentious form of a “memorandum” for “the president”, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes:

There is a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its supporters — providing a strong circumstantial case that the August 21 chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters. The aim is reported to have been to create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the war.

According to some reports, canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened. Some people in the immediate vicinity died; others were injured.

We are unaware of any reliable evidence that a Syrian military rocket capable of carrying a chemical agent was fired into the area. In fact, we are aware of no reliable physical evidence to support the claim that this was a result of a strike by a Syrian military unit with expertise in chemical weapons.

The “we” is the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity: Thomas Drake, Senior Executive, NSA (former); Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.); Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan; Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.); W. Patrick Lang, Senior Executive and Defense Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.); David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.); Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.); Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.); Todd Pierce, US Army Judge Advocate General (ret.); Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army, Iraq; Coleen Rowley, Division Council & Special Agent, FBI (ret.); and Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.).

Do these guys have no internet access? Of course that’s a facetious question. Even though I applaud the stand that many of these folks took in opposing the war in Iraq and continue to take on issues such as mass surveillance, the willingness of former intelligence analysts to attach their names to a statement like this should be taken as yet another indication that the term, U.S. intelligence, is an oxymoron.

“We are unaware…” “we are aware of no reliable physical evidence…” — this sounds like James Clapper testifying in Congress. Rather than parade their lack of awareness, maybe they should spend more time doing research and less time issuing memoranda.

Some people may feel that anything appearing on YouTube can’t qualify as reliable evidence, so if that includes you, don’t bother reading any more of this post.

What follows is primarily based on the work of Eliot Higgins who runs Brown Moses Blog. He has distinguished himself as one of the leading analysts of weapons being used in Syria and I see in his work no evidence that he has any political axe to grind. Even now, he suspends judgement on whether chemical weapons have been used and leaves this to be determined by the UN. Where he has focused a lot of attention is on the munitions associated with alleged chemical weapons attacks and this is where his work has recently been most informative.

Soon after August 21, when the false flag brigade swung into action, one of the first “smoking guns” to become popular was a video showing rebels using artillery fired gas tanks:

A couple of problems with this particular piece of “evidence” quickly emerged. Firstly, the original video turned out to be a month old, so the attack being shown clearly wasn’t the one that occurred on August 21. But more importantly, the weapon itself was already well-known — an improvised devise dubbed the “Hell Cannon.” Its producers were so proud of their accomplishment they created a promotional video showing how they turn propane tanks into fertilizer-filled bombs that can then be fired out of a cannon. While the video shows the ingenuity with which Syria’s rebels have made use of their scant resources (proof, incidentally, that contrary to a widely held belief, Syria is not awash in foreign supplied weapons), more than anything it shows the crudeness of the kinds of devices that can be created in a welding shop. Keep this in mind when reviewing the evidence that follows.

At this time, among reasonable observers, there is little doubt that a large number of Syrians died on August 21 and the dozens of videos available showing victims, strongly indicate that the cause of death was some kind of lethal airborne chemical.

McGovern and his fellow intel retirees apparently believe that the source of the deadly chemical was canisters that had been brought into the areas where the deaths took place and that the canisters had accidentally been opened.* I can’t quite figure whether this is supposed to be a false flag operation or a false flag operation gone wrong. In any case McGovern claims there is a “growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East” to support this theory.

McGovern is employing a commonly used rhetorical ploy when he says this: he is citing evidence yet gives no indication that he knows what this “evidence” actually is. Perhaps the evidence is so technical that one would need to be an intelligence professional to understand it, or, more likely, he hasn’t a clue whether there actually is any such evidence and is merely parroting someone else’s claim that such evidence exists.

My attitude is: show me the evidence, then I’ll decide whether it’s compelling. As things stand, all McGovern is doing is circulating rumors.

Eliot Higgins, on the other hand, has evidence that merits careful examination and it starts with the video below. (I posted a shorter version of this previously but it’s worth watching the whole thing.)

The first thing to note is a gray missile that can be seen at the beginning of the video being delivered to a missile launcher. The missile is about ten feet long with small guidance fins at the right end and a tank at the other that’s roughly 18″ wide and 36″ long. Above the missile is an orange hydraulic hoist that is presumably used to move the missile from the delivery vehicle to the launch vehicle. (The video does not show this happening. We see the launch vehicle without missile and then with missile.)

Aside from noting the dimensions and shape of the missile itself, it’s also worth noting the delivery vehicle: a new Mercedes tractor and trailer with hydraulic lift adds up to an expensive item, way beyond the means of any militia that is struggling just to pay for its bullets.

In a screenshot from an edited copy of the same video, the assumed structure of the missile (seen a fraction of a second after its launch) is highlighted:

As Higgins notes, this is a missile design that has not been observed anywhere outside Syria. Unlike the Hell Cannon, this is not simply an explosive projectile – it is a rocket and as photographs below and the videos above make clear, the missile itself is industrially engineered, its design must have been rigorously tested, and the delivery system costs tens of thousands of dollars — multiple reasons to believe that this was not improvised by rebels.

One of the features of chemical weapons that has been widely noted is that they do not carry high explosives which would destroy the chemical agent only carry a small amount of explosive — they are designed to rip open on impact and as a result much of such a missile can be recovered. As a result a lot of evidence on the form of the missiles has been gathered at the site of the alleged chemical attacks.

One of Higgins’ findings has been that there are at least two forms of the missile linked to the chemical attacks. One believed to be armed with chemical agents and another with high explosives. The video below shows the latter variety in a missile that failed to explode and which is being dismantled by a rebel group in order to salvage the explosives. The shape of the missile corresponds with the one appearing above.

Among those who are skeptical about the claim that the regime would use chemical weapons at this time — a period in which their power seems to be on the rise — a question reasonably posed is this: Why now? What motivation could they have for an attack that would seem to be contrary to their own interests?

Firstly, the presence of rebels in the districts that were under attack has been intractable and poses a real threat to the security of the regime and Damascus. But the question, why now? contains within it what may be a false assumption: that chemical weapons have not already been used with some frequency.

While August 21 stands out because of the death toll, there have been several cases in which chemical weapons are believed to have been used before. The following disturbing video posted on YouTube in early August shows a dog in convulsions and several other dead animals, all of which appear to be victims of a chemical attack. The twisted remains of a missile nearby resemble the structure of the missile shown above, minus the canister casing which would have ripped off on impact.

The use of a design which could carry either high explosives or chemical agents may have been conceived specifically so that the use of chemical weapons could be concealed in the event that the sites of these attacks were later subject to inspection.

What happened on August 21 may have been planned as another routine chemical weapons attack. What might not have been planned and might even have been accidental, was the strength of the chemical agent employed.

Needless to say, none of this amounts to proof about what happened. Nevertheless, this is what I think can reasonably be called evidence-based speculation as opposed to rumor-based speculation of the kind Ray McGovern and others are promoting.

If in due course it becomes established with reasonable confidence (confidence not merely among Obama administration officials but also independent observers and the public at large) that chemical weapons were indeed used by the Assad regime on August 21, does that mean that the United States is both justified and wise in launching an attack on Syria in order to punish Assad and deter future use of chemical weapons?

The Obama administration is pressing its case as though such proof closes the argument. The argument about whether chemical weapons were used thus has less to do with the facts and is instead functioning as a proxy argument. Those who oppose military strikes seem to think they can only do so by questioning who was responsible for the chemical attack — some go a step further and question whether such an attack even took place.

The fundamental problem with this kind of skepticism is that as the administration convinces Americans that a devastating chemical weapons attack took place and that the Assad regime is most likely responsible, then the more solid this position becomes, the more willing people will be to defer to the administration in determining an appropriate response.

What the administration has not even attempted to demonstrate is why its plan for a calibrated attack would have much chance of bringing about its desired effect.

The result may be that the regime simply exercises more discretion in its future use of chemical weapons. It may also periodically make limited use of chemical weapons in order to test American willingness to escalate the conflict.

There is however one outcome from a U.S. attack on Syria that is virtually certain: Syria will become even more inaccessible to journalists and as a result the plight of its people will shift from garnering little American attention to no attention at all.

* A reader has correctly pointed out that McGovern did not describe the alleged opening of the alleged containers containing the alleged chemicals as having occurred accidentally. McGovern wrote: “According to some reports, canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened.” Since it has been widely distributed, I’m assuming that the reports he’s referring to include a report in Mint Press in which a rebel is quoted saying, “unfortunately, some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions.” Since McGovern didn’t provide links to any of his sources, he has left it to his readers to engage in a certain amount of guesswork.

Bashar al-Assad is probably already planning his victory parade.

First Obama says he’s decided to attack Syria, but then he immediately says he’s seeking authorization from Congress. But then he signals he’ll attack even without the support of Congress. Then AIPAC wheels out its big guns in Obama’s support, but for once it doesn’t look like anyone’s too worried about what the Israel lobby thinks. Even though Israel itself supports Obama, more than anything they just want to see the war in Syria continue. “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here,” says a former Israeli diplomat. And now Obama’s latest effort to rally international support has fallen flat — even the French are getting cold feet.

Is the president who likes to lead from behind now ready to lead with on one behind?

Apparently not. The White House isn’t ready to raise the white flag just yet but it’s already signalling that it may soon concede defeat.

Garance Franke-Ruta writes: President Obama does not intend to act in defiance of Congress if it votes down a resolution authorizing the use of force in Syria, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken told Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition Friday.

“Has the president decided what he will do if Congress votes no on using force?” Inskeep asked during the short segment.

“You know Steve, when, after the events of August 21, we reached out to Congress and we had conversations with members of Congress across the country,” Blinken replied. “And the one thing we heard from nearly all of them is that they wanted their voice heard and their vote, and their votes counted.”

“The president of course has the authority to act, but it’s neither his desire nor his intention to do, to use that authority absent Congress backing,” Blinken said.

It was the second such signal-sending move of the day, following on the heels of Peter Baker’s report in the New York Times:

Although Mr. Obama has asserted that he has the authority to order the strike on Syria even if Congress says no, White House aides consider that almost unthinkable. As a practical matter, it would leave him more isolated than ever and seemingly in defiance of the public’s will at home. As a political matter, it would almost surely set off an effort in the House to impeach him, which even if it went nowhere could be distracting and draining.

Another way to look at this: If Obama were comfortable acting alone — that is to say, without the support of Congress, the United Nations, NATO, the Arab League, or any major allies save France — to order a strike on Syria, he had the opportunity to do so without going to Congress and requesting that each of its members rouse their electorates and invest political capital in considering and voting on the question for themselves. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. has intercepted an order from Iran to militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Baghdad in the event of a strike on Syria, officials said, amid an expanding array of reprisal threats across the region.

Military officials have been trying to predict the range of possible responses from Syria, Iran and their allies. U.S. officials said they are on alert for Iran’s fleet of small, fast boats in the Persian Gulf, where American warships are positioned. U.S. officials also fear Hezbollah could attack the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

While the U.S. has moved military resources in the region for a possible strike, it has other assets in the area that would be ready to respond to any reprisals by Syria, Iran or its allies.

Those deployments include a strike group of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and three destroyers in the Red Sea, and an amphibious ship, the USS San Antonio, in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would help with any evacuations.

The U.S. military has also readied Marines and other assets to aid evacuation of diplomatic compounds if needed, and the State Department began making preparations last week for potential retaliation against U.S. embassies and other interests in the Middle East and North Africa.

U.S. officials began planning for a possible strike on Syrian regime assets after the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus in which the U.S. says Syrian government forces killed over 1,400 people using chemical weapons. The U.S. military has prepared options for an attack and beefed up its military resources in the region, including positioning four destroyers in the Eastern Mediterranean.

That process slowed last weekend when Mr. Obama said he would first seek an authorization for using military force from Congress.

A delay in a U.S. strike would increase opportunities for coordinated retaliation by groups allied with the Assad government, including Shiite militias in Iraq, according to U.S. officials. [Continue reading…]

In the event that the U.S. goes ahead with strikes on Syria, it goes without saying that U.S. interests across the region will be possible targets for acts of retaliation of some kind from a variety of possible sources. So why have U.S. officials chosen to leak this particular classified intelligence on a purported threat from Iran? Is this all part of President Obama’s new found desire to promote transparency in the intelligence community? Unlikely.

Maybe there are some members of the administration who are trying to hit the brakes and want to alert the public to the risks involved in the attacks. Think Benghazi.

But this report isn’t based on whistle-blowing — it’s based on a briefing and the object of the exercise soon becomes clear.

An alarm bell is being rung and the message to Congress is: don’t hold up the strikes on Syria because if you do, you will be responsible for the next Benghazi.

But just a minute! Wasn’t it only last weekend that Obama declared: “our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.”

It’s not time-sensitive, but the longer the delay, the greater the risks of retaliation.

It’s not time-sensitive, but the delay that’s already taken place through seeking Congressional approval means that the Pentagon is already working on expanding the target list.

But if the White House is now hitting the panic button, this might have less to do with the information its getting from the Pentagon and more to do with the word from Capitol Hill.

Concerted pressure from AIPAC notwithstanding, there is a strong possibility that Congress may this time around pay more attention to public opinion than anything else and as a consequence reject Obama’s plan. Obama will then be on a trajectory to enter his own unique expression of unilateralism: no support from Britain, nor from the UN, nor from Congress, nor the American people. Even George Bush never attempted to go it alone to this degree.

Obama’s already passed the point of no return. He’s committed the U.S. to this operation with or without the support of Congress.

With Libya, Obama led from behind. With Syria, he may be on the brink of leading with no one behind.

Here’s a friendly bit of advice to some Syrians: If you happen to own a small two-axle flatbed truck — the kind you might use for hauling construction materials, produce deliveries or that kind of thing — and you don’t want to get hit by an American cruise missile, you might want keep your truck in a garage for a few weeks.

It’s now reported that the Pentagon is expanding its target list and will be attempting to destroy “equipment used to deploy chemical weapons.” Most Americans probably think that such equipment would be readily identifiable as military equipment, but if the image below is reliable — it’s a screenshot from a video believed to show a missile launcher used for chemical weapons — then the equipment in question, once covered by a tarpaulin, is probably indistinguishable from thousands of trucks being driven around every single day in Syria for perfectly innocent purposes.

On the other hand, let’s give the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt and assume that its intelligence is so strong that it knows exactly which white trucks at which it should aim. Can it be equally confident that none of them will actually be carrying chemical weapons? Can we be sure that the U.S. effort to prevent the further use of chemical weapons will not instead result in the release of more sarin?

The New York Times reports: President Obama has directed the Pentagon to develop an expanded list of potential targets in Syria in response to intelligence suggesting that the government of President Bashar al-Assad has been moving troops and equipment used to employ chemical weapons while Congress debates whether to authorize military action.

Mr. Obama, officials said, is now determined to put more emphasis on the “degrade” part of what the administration has said is the goal of a military strike against Syria — to “deter and degrade” Mr. Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons. That means expanding beyond the 50 or so major sites that were part of the original target list developed with French forces before Mr. Obama delayed action on Saturday to seek Congressional approval of his plan.

For the first time, the administration is talking about using American and French aircraft to conduct strikes on specific targets, in addition to ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles. There is a renewed push to get other NATO forces involved.

The strikes would be aimed not at the chemical stockpiles themselves — risking a potential catastrophe — but rather the military units that have stored and prepared the chemical weapons and carried the attacks against Syrian rebels, as well as the headquarters overseeing the effort, and the rockets and artillery that have launched the attacks, military officials said Thursday.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that other targets would include equipment that Syria uses to protect the chemicals — air defenses, long-range missiles and rockets, which can also deliver the weapons. [Continue reading…]