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(cc photo: Alisdare Hickson)
This week on CounterSpin: The United States military is, at any given moment, visiting lethal violence on human beings—with families, and hopes and dreams—in a range of countries around the world. Media coverage is a sort of roving spotlight, highlighting one or another of those nightmares, and enjoining the US public to care about it, for a minute, and in a particular way, even if they haven’t heard much about it until now, and might stop hearing about it next week.
That coverage, while it may be full of narrative detail, is generally crude in message: There are good guys (hint, that’s always going to be the United States) and bad guys…. Those will be whoever the article tells you they are, even if they just got through presenting those bad guys as good guys in another context. And there’s an implied encouraged response, which virtually always involves dropping bombs, and virtually never involves ascertaining what regular people say they want and need to live in peace.
So, as corporate media talk about Syria, where a recent airstrike by the US—legality be damned—is meant to represent the US doing the right thing in the world, you are right to ask questions. What is actually happening in Syria? It’s a real place, with real people—not a talking point; do the people there welcome intervention—by the US, Russia or anyone? Are the principles supposedly guiding US intervention in Syria really principles—in the sense of being universally applied—and if not, why are they being invoked now?
Americans can be forgiven for not knowing what’s going on in every other country. They are also right to ask whether media demanding that their country’s president order devastation on another country’s people are actually informing them, or just doing state PR.
We’ll talk about US military intervention in Syria with Gregory Shupak. He teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and is author of the new book The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media.
Transcript: ‘The US Is Not at All Interested in the Welfare of the Syrian People’
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You guys did a great job talking about the current situation in Syria, but when talking about going forward and getting the us out of Syria there was a lack of emphasis on why. That emphasis should be on the fact that the US has been targeting Syria for years now and that any Russian defensive measures have come secondary to US attacks, proxy or otherwise.
Dear Janine Jackson,
Much has been said regarding the Syrian Civil War, the recent chemical agent attack in Douma, and the missile attacks by USA, UK, and France. Much of this is biased and self-serving. The Saturday 14 April 2018 article in The Guardian entitled,, The Syria bombing is a disgraceful act disguised as a noble gesture, expresses well the truth of this action. While I believe it is clear chemical agents were used, it is unclear who used them. It’s well known that some rebel groups have such agents, and the production of chlorine gas is quite simple. It is also well known that Israel has a significant arsenal of chemical weapons. Both groups have reason to attempt the use of chemical agents that the West would blame on Assad.
The USA has provided support in the form of munitions and training to selected rebel groups from the beginning; this has only prolonged the killing and suffering of Syrian civilians. This suffering includes 500,000 deaths, 3 million Syrian refugees in the Middle-East and Europe, and a total of 6 million displaced Syrians.
I ‘m sending a WORD copy of The Guardian article with the hope you might read it and perhaps publish/report something that discusses another viewpoint on the Syrian issue.
I’m a physicist, retired after 38 years from Los Alamos National Laboratory with assignments to JRC-EURATOM, USDOE, and the IAEA. My field is nuclear safeguards and nonproliferation. My personal information is as follows”|:
Dr. T. Douglas Reilly
148 Monte Rey South
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87547
phone: 505-672-1044
email: filosofo@aol.com
I thank you for considering this article and my comments.
Take care, doug reilly
The Syria bombing is a disgraceful act disguised as a noble gesture
Moustafa Bayoumi
The US-led barrage shows just how little interest the global powers have in ending Syria’s ghastly war
Sat 14 Apr 2018
‘Regional and global powers now exploit Syria for their own advantage and apportion out its territory for repeated bombing.’
The bombing of Syrian government targets by the United States, Britain, and France is a disgraceful and ineffectual act masquerading as a noble gesture. Far from preventing a more vicious war, the bombing instead legitimizes the continuation of the conflict. In fact, what this barrage of weapons really reveals is how little interest the global powers have in ending Syria’s ghastly war.
Syria: who are the key players in the conflict?
Similar to the attacks on Syrian government targets that Donald Trump ordered just over a year ago, the airstrikes this time will not seriously damage Bashar al-Assad’s larger military capacity, nor are they intended to. Instead, we’re told that the western bombing campaign has specifically aimed munitions at locations where the storage and testing of chemical weapons occurs.
But wasn’t last year’s attack meant to put an end to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and aren’t these the weapons that he was supposed to have destroyed under international auspices in 2014? At this rate, should we expect that an aerial bombing mission to finally and completely destroy Assad’s chemical weapons will be launched every April?
The question is ridiculous, of course, but so is the idea that this attack will accomplish anything beyond boosting the war-making egos of its protagonists and enabling Assad, his reprehensible regime, and his allies to complain of being the perpetual victims of western aggression. Beyond the bombast on both sides, Syria’s daily misery will continue.
These strikes mark the first time Theresa May of Britain and Emmanuel Macron of France have committed their respective militaries into combat, and they have done so, according to May, “to protect innocent people in Syria from the horrific deaths and casualties caused by chemical weapons, but also because we cannot allow the erosion of the international norm that prevents the use of these weapons.”
May’s words might sound more intelligent than those of Donald Trump, who in his statement about the attacks told the American people: “Hopefully, someday we’ll get along with Russia and maybe even Iran, but maybe not.” But what May’s words really reveal is not the ethical reasoning of a head of state but the devastating lack of moral concern by the international community when it comes to the people of Syria.
The fact that three of the world’s most powerful militaries have now been mobilized into action, even for a limited campaign such as this one, to prevent “the erosion of the international norm” of using chemical weapons is far from comforting. Since the war began, Assad’s regime has engaged in the repeated and dreadful use of barrel bombs and mass starvation, the systematic torture of thousands of citizens and the laying siege to multiple cities, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of more than half the population. Yet, all of this horror does not seem to “erode an international norm” and certainly has not motivated these western leaders to any meaningful action to end the war.
On the contrary, regional and global powers now exploit Syria for their own advantage and apportion out its territory for repeated bombing. At this point, the country has been bombed by the Assad regime, the United States, Britain, France, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, and the UAE.
Rather than limiting war, this latest bombing of Syria normalizes the war’s ongoing brutality. Forget the chemical weapons for a moment. The bombing of Syria by the western powers essentially and unconscionably establishes near total warfare on civilians as an acceptable “international norm.” Our politicians will wallow in their most recent action, calling the bombing a great success for our civilization. In fact, it’s much more akin to our demise.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
“While I believe it is clear chemical agents were used, it is unclear who used them.”
Well in this case your beliefs are wrong. Everyone who has reached the area so far says the attacks were staged including the taped interviews with the children pictured as victims of the attacks. As near as anyone can tell some people trapped in a burning building died of carbon monoxide poisoning when the British and American funded White Helmets showed up and started yelling gas, The only hospital in the area reports not receiving any victims of gas or chemical poisoning, none of the first responders were take ill, etc.
Missed opportunity with this interview. Mr. Shupak is able to make an argument for US withdrawal from Syria, but obvious questions were left unasked by Ms. Jackson. What was Mr. Shupak’s opinion of what would likely happen after a US withdrawal? What would Iran do? What would Russia do? How would that effect the ability of international terrorists groups to operate? While I tend to agree that US involvement in Syria is misguided, it would have been very interesting to hear the educated response of someone with a viewpoint on US withdrawal similar to Mr. Shupak’s respond to these questions.