Syrian War

[Eric the Green]

I think we have to differentiate our ideas of what deception may have occurred, depending on who is president and from which party (s)he comes. The Iraq deception was part of Bush's Project for a New American Century, a deliberate scheme to exert power in the Middle East including by invading countries. I too could tell that the Iraq WMD "proof" was phony. Obama had no such project. We can't just assume that because deception occurred in 2003, that it also occurred in 2013. Obama was simply not as interested in starting mid-east wars as Bush and his cabal were. Kerry had ran against Bush on the issue of the WMD deception, and as Sec. of State was aware of the need not to repeat the mistake in 2013.

I'm not sure about the evidence regarding the 2013 proposed attack, which Obama backed off from. The statements by Hersh are controversial, and the rockets might have come from a closer location anyway. And the USA did not use the NY Times story as the basis for their threatened attack anyway. They had secret evidence, apparently.

I checked out the MIT article. Grounds for further thought.

The question seems to be whether the rockets used had a long enough range to have been fired into opposition-controlled areas from regime controlled areas. The maps also show some neutral territory closer to opposition-held neighborhoods which the Syrian military could have occupied. The wikipedia article suggested that the regime had occupied some closer areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack

Skeptics argue that the al-Nusra radical Muslim terrorist groups could have made the weapons, and could have fired the rockets on the territory they controlled. We know that Al Qaeda in Iraq (now the Islamic State) killed people in order to help foment the civil war in Iraq, so it's plausible that their terrorist allies in Syria could have killed rebel civilians in order to arouse an American attack on Assad, whom al-Nusra was fighting as allies of the Free Syrian Army.

The pro-US and UN intelligence seemed to conclude that the sarin was of the same type the Assad regime had used before. Satellites picked up missile firings from regime-controlled areas into rebel-held areas at the time of the attacks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat...story.html

Reports say the rockets used to attack the eastern suburbs were a 330 mm motor type, not the 140 mm type analyzed by MIT. The Soviet-era 140mm rockets were used to attack closer targets to the South. But I saw no info yet about the range of the 330mm rockets.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/human-rights...l-weapons/

Human Rights Watch said in 2013 that the 140mm rockets had a 9.8 km range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_investi...#Responses

I admit that the various reports I have seen are not conclusive, as far as I can tell, about who fired the weapons in 2013. This article covers the various accounts, and includes both the longer-range attribution of 9.6 km to the Soviet 140mm rocket (which the Soviets had earlier supplied to Syria), and the accounts that the regime controlled territory closer to the attacks than stated in the skeptical accounts.
http://middleeast-armscontrol.com/2014/0...nclusions/

Now we have a new group in charge in the USA. Trump was not keen on starting a US war against Syria. But he did like to show that he was tough where Obama had been weak.