This is a common and disastrous theme in contemporary society. As long as we are willing to perceive, or deem ourselves responsible for, only one small part of our world, the suffering of the world as a whole can be overlooked, or declared beyond our job spec: ‘I’m an oil executive, it’s not my job to protect the climate.’ ‘I’m an arms manufacturer, it’s not my job to prevent people killing each other.’ ‘I’m a science writer, it’s not my job to comment on my government’s war crimes.’
There is a certain kind of liberal who places great faith in the ICC as a means of resolving conflicts and holding war criminals and human rights abusers to account. Personally, I think that faith is quite badly misplaced.
The ICC in it’s current incarnation is far too open to political manipulation and pressure from the stronger states of the world to be considered a neutral arbiter. This potential Resolution, which grants the U.S. and Israel immunity from prosecution, demonstrates that clearly.
Video evidence that ALQaeda used Chemical Weapons on Syrian Soldiers! No wounds on the body, but blackened contorted suffocated faces with gas masks close by in a last ditch attempt to survive the suffocation. Dead soldiers can be seen but curiously no obvious evidence of conventional war wounds. From this Its obvious they had the capability and the will to use the gas on civilians in Ghouta and now again on Syrian soldiers
Eight months after an August 21 attack in the Damascus suburbs, the assumption that it was a Syrian government-sponsored attack continues to dominate discussion of the issue. But significant new information has become available that makes an attack by opposition forces far more plausible than appeared to be the case in the first weeks after the event.
While NATO member states and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC ) persist in presenting Syria as a dictatorship, the country continues its reforms. On June 3, it will elect its President of the Republic, while the war continues to ravage a part of its territory. Damascus is doing everything possible to ensure that this election is democratic and blameless, while its attackers have instructed their media to minimize the coverage and their jihadists to disrupt the procedings.
What many people don’t realize is the UK was interfering in the Syria war before the vote – arming and training the Syrian insurgents fighting to overthrow the Assad Government. And although a US-UK military strike has been averted, the UK is continuing to support the insurgents.
Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff.
The sobering fact for many Americans is that the world would be a better, far more peaceful place if only their government spent more time and resources tending to their own country’s onerous social needs. Needless to say, America would be a far better place too for its citizens.
But this eminently reasonable outcome won’t happen under present circumstances because US governance relies on imperialist conflict-making abroad.
The governments in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are controlled by the dumbest, and most short-sighted leaders in the Middle East. Naturally, they won’t survive much longer. Their policy of supporting international Jihadist terrorism and religious extremism in Syria will backfire. Syria will not be another Afghanistan.
As the West pursues a dangerous confrontation with Russia via the Eastern European nation of Ukraine and the newly independent region of Crimea, the global public must recall how events like the August 2013 Damascus “chemical attack” were insidiously executed, lied about, and eventually buried when their political capital was spent.
By David Edwards (Media Lens) News that 2015 might turn out to be the first year since 1914 when British troops will not be fighting a war somewhere in the world appeared to come as a shock to many. But in fact, the British record of Permanent War stretches back much further. Seumas Milne commented in the Guardian that empire […]
Based on the fact a majority of Syrians support the government, and would therefore face the wrath of the fundamentalist rebels rather than the army they see as protecting them, a fact which is further evidenced by the vast majority of internally displaced people fleeing “rebel liberation” for the refuge of government safe-zones; then the wilful misrepresentation of the death toll becomes evermore deplorable.
