LAST week, US President Donald Trump authorized precision bombing attacks against several targets in Syria. The bombing was carried out in retaliation against an alleged chemical gas attack by Bashar Al Assad against his own people. Mainstream media personalities in the West ran stories and reports weeping about the poor victims of the chemical attack, and it was these appeals that had triggered the whole escapade.
That’s the official narrative anyway. Reality, though, is a little more complicated. The chemical attack that had set off this entire debacle had been carried out shortly after Trump insinuated on Twitter that he will remove US military presence from Syria.
To provide further context about this situation, it’s important to point out that prior to the alleged chemical gas attack and the US armed response, Assad’s forces had effectively won the country’s civil war, which meant that he had no incentives to deploy such weapons against any targets – civilian or otherwise.
So the big question here is why would Assad do that? The truthful answer is that he wouldn’t. Unless Assad is a lunatic madman that enjoys killing his own people for laughs and giggles, he would not have launched the chemical attack that would have inevitably triggered an armed response from the Western Powers.
For those who reject the official narrative, the most likely culprit of the gas attack were the Syrian rebels who carried it out in the hopes of triggering some sort of US response and also to prevent Assad from achieving final victory. Such a response would give them the breathing room they need to regroup and retaliate.
They have achieved these goals to a certain extent. Trump did attack Assad, but the attack hit three empty buildings, and injured three civilians as of the writing of this article. Minimal results when one consider the larger context of the Syrian civil war.
But the whole bombing attack serves other purposes other than weakening the Assad regime and prolonging the war. First, it was an attempt to appease the neocons in the United States, who were probably alarmed by Trump’s proposals to withdraw from Syria, and thus strengthen Iran and Russia.
Secondly, the strike was meant to appease Israel and other Sunni governments who also view Shia Syria and Iran as threats.
Thirdly, the strike was meant to weaken the credibility of Russia in the region (The Russians didn’t shoot down the bombs as they had threatened).
Fourthly, it was meant to intimidate China and North Korea by showing them that the US is still willing to launch a few missiles to make a point (Trump will be meeting Kim Jong Un very soon, and this attack will be on the back of his mind)
And finally, the bombs were meant to show to the world that America was still willing and able to launch attacks when it wants to do so.
None of these reasons involve crying about gassed civilians, and that’s because the civilians are ultimately irrelevant in the grand of scheme of things. Suffering and deaths are irrelevant. In politics and in war, which is politics by other means, what matters is power, and that’s what the chemical and bombing attacks were ultimately about: Keeping and manipulating power by those behind the scenes. Pictures of dead children and weeping widows are just tools to manipulate the heartstrings of the masses./PN
