Why was BBC 5 Live News telling us that Britain, France, Germany and ….Israel supported the strike on Assad? Why no mention of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey? Is the BBC feeding into the conspiracy theories…ISIS…the ‘Israeli Secret Intelligence Service’? Is the BBC deliberately trying to stir up Muslim anti-Western radicalism?
Trump is to blame for Syrian gas attack and no doubt will be getting the blame for the terror attack in Sweden…didn’t he put the idea in their little heads? Only on the BBC [and possibly RT] could it be possible to blame a man who has only been President for two months whilst the sainted Obama, president for 8 years, is applauded…and this from a BBC that for years utterly refused to mention Ed Miliband’s name when discussing the 2013 vote and his responsibiity for the betrayal of the Syrian people….
Syria chemical ‘attack’: Is Trump partly to blame?
There is an argument that the Trump administration’s “hands-off” approach to Bashar al-Assad emboldened the Syrian President to carry out atrocities like the chemical attack for which he’s being blamed.
Years of Obama grandstanding as a moral fence sitter with the BBC cheerleading that policy and only two months into Trump’s administration does the BBC suddenly find such a policy might have its faults?
The BBC has only just woken up to the fact that Ed Miliband betrayed the Syrians with his own cowardice dressed up as moral grandstanding and in effect was a major contributor to the half a million deaths in Syria, the rise of IS and the millions of refugees that flood Europe and the Middle East….naturally the BBC forgets its own role in that vote in 2013 when it refused to release the video of a chemical attack on a school until after the vote had happened knowing that if released the MPs might well be influenced to vote for some kind of military action.
The BBC is a disgrace….Obama’s role is being whitewashed out of history…his ‘quiet’ policy [ie refusal to commit and take responsibility] being applauded and Trump blamed for saying what everyone else was saying reluctantly…maybe the best solution is to leave Assad in power in order to deal with IS first….yes Obama sat back and let it all happen…but there’s a difference….
Obama’s policy on Assad evolved, shaped by Russia’s entry into the war on the side of the Syrian regime, and by his administration’s growing focus on the fight against the Islamic State group.
“Everything is done through a counter-terrorism lens,” a US official who worked closely with these issues told me in December. “Would they like Assad to go away? Yes, but only if they feel that wouldn’t undermine US interests as they define it.”
Given these realities, Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry concentrated on what he thought was achievable – de-escalating the violence and getting some sort of political process off the ground in co-ordination with the Russians.
He crystallised this quiet policy shift in December 2015, when he accepted Moscow’s demand that Assad’s fate be determined by his people.
Noting that the removal of the president was a “non-starter” as a pre-condition for talks, he said the focus was on facilitating a peace process in which “Syrians will be making decisions for the future of Syria”.
Sound familiar?
Yes, but there’s a difference.
The Obama administration, especially Kerry, continued to emphasize that Assad was responsible for the bulk of the violence in Syria, that his brutality fed the extremism that spawned the Islamic State group, and that there could be no peace if he continued in power.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been ambivalent, very publicly washing his hands of the issue.
Others have a different view….The Telegraph…
John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov: The handshake that removes any chance of Assad’s fall
Any prospect of Britain and America taking military action against Mr Assad ended, though, when Mr Cameron lost his Commons vote and Mr Obama lost his nerve.
Since then Mr Assad has enjoyed a remarkable revival in his fortunes, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to fill the void created by Western inaction and deploy his own forces to Syria in support of the regime in Damascus.
More to the point, Assad has continued to use chemical weapons against his own people. Only last week Boris Johnson, our Foreign Secretary, was railing against the Russians, calling on them to end their “indefensible” support for the Assad regime. Now he finds himself having to offer British support for the ceasefire that Mr Lavrov has brokered with Mr Kerry – an agreement that is guaranteed to keep Mr Assad in power for the foreseeable future.
The Obama administration has watched Iran devastating Syria to keep the bloody Assad regime in power without objecting to the war crimes perpetrated against Syria and its people. Even when the Assad forces used chemical weapons against Syrians, the Obama administration created the proper nasty scenario to keep the criminal safe by punishing the weapon not the user. Part of the scenario was handing over the whole Syrian affair to Putin to finish what the Assad and Iran militias could not. It even gave Russia the chance to veto any proposal or resolution to put an end to the Syrian tragedy. All was to keep Assad in power; it was said that Assad has always been under the implicit protection of the American eye. Obama should be proud of such a human rights and human protection record in the history of a country that claims to be the land of the free.
From US News…
Report: Obama Sees Assad in Power Into 2017
Documents show the administration has backed off its insistence that the Syrian leader step down immediately.
President Barack Obama has softened his position that Bashar Assad must step down as a condition for Syrian peace talks, acceding to Russian demands and ensuring that the dictator’s tenure will outlast that of his own, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.
From Think Progress…
Syria haunts Obama and it could haunt his legacy, too
It might be a stretch to say Obama supports keeping Assad in power, but it’s hard to argue that his administration’s policies haven’t been doing exactly that.
After more than five years of war and 450,000 deaths, the Syrian civil war will surely add an asterisk to President Obama’s legacy. Obama has said the mass destruction and loss of life “haunts me constantly,” but he has also told reporters he is skeptical that any other decision would have changed the status-quo in Syria today.
Obama’s skepticism, however, is not enough for many Syrians who feel the United States has let down the Syrian people in the face of starvation sieges, chemical weapon (mostly chlorine) attacks, and repeated airstrikes on civilian targets perpetrated overwhelmingly by the Assad regime and their allies.
From Breitbart…
Hayward: Obama Loses to Bashar Assad, a ‘Tyrant’ Who ‘Massacres Innocent Children’
Obama himself has been calling the Syrian dictator a monster for years. He just doesn’t do anything about it. Having abdicated all responsibility for global leadership, deliberately weakened America abroad with his noxious “smart power” and “lead from behind” philosophy, and created a power vacuum like nothing seen since World War II, Obama has been effectively leaning against the Oval Office wall and wondering when someone else will come along to rescue the Syrian people from Assad.
Oh and best of all…the BBC’s Nick Bryant…so very off-message…
One of the reasons why the world has become so disorderly is because America is no longer so active in imposing order……Washington has lost its fear factor.
World leaders nowadays seem prepared to provoke the wrath of the White House, confident that it will never rain down on them.
It explains why the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, after unleashing chemical weapons against his people, continues to bombard them with barrel bombs.
Assad’s flouting of American warnings is especially noteworthy.
In killing so many civilians with chemical weapons, he flagrantly crossed the “red line” imposed by Obama, but escaped punishment.
The president was unwilling to carry through on an explicit threat, in what was the biggest foreign policy climbdown of his presidency and also one of the most significant in the past 50 years.
Even supporters of Barack Obama believe he made a fatal strategic mistake, because it demonstrated endless flexibility and a lack of American resolve.
Needless to say, despots around the world took note.
The most plausible analysis of Trump’s response is here:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/159300836386/the-syrian-air-base-attack
There was a time we could expect the BBC to look behind the soundbites, but now even their “best experts” are a long way behind a cartoonist.
RJ thanks for that – a good analysis and one which I hope is correct. Cartoonists, of course, often have the ability to sum up a situation very succinctly, but it’s interesting that Adams does it in words rather than pictures.
The mainstream media is not telling us who these renamed Al-Qaeda terrorists in Khan Shaykhun are, but Islamic terrorists sacrificing children for the benefit of help from the United States at a time that Al-Qaeda is losing to the secular regime in Damascus would make sense to anyone with intelligence. However these facts have emerged.
On May 3rd, 2016, Seymour Hersh said that Hillary Clinton approved the sending of sarin gas to Syria to set up a sarin gas attack and place the blame on the shoulders of Assad. So that the U.S. could invade Syria and blame Assad. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. Seymour Hersh stated “Evidence leads directly to Obama who is still active in Washington, Martin Dempsey, former CIA Director John Brennan who is now working with the BBC and Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar.
Also, the Free Thought Project reports that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was operating as a “rat line” for Gaddafi’s weaponry while Hillary Clinton was at the helm.
Also, Christopher Lehmann said on October 7, 2013 that top U.S. and Saudi officials were responsible for the chemical weapons being used in Syria.
Also, in January, Ron Paul said in an interview that false flag attacks could be used by both the so-called American “deep state” and foreign actors to draw the Trump administration into foreign engagements.
Also, Wikileaks has a video out describing this as a False Flag Chemical Attack.
What total BS!!!