Nations of Virtue bay for blood after alleged Syrian gas attack

The "red-liners" are making a concerted effort to use this chemical weapon issue as the lever that will directly engage the US and some of the me-too nations in the euphemistically tagged "Syrian Crisis."

News sites across the western world are at this very moment unanimous in blaming Assad for the attack.

The source of this info seems to be William Hague, who apparently gets the straight skinny directly from George Sabra of the UK-US sponsored Syrian National Coalition.

Therefore this is an obviously impartial verdict coming down the chain of a whole lot of folks with no irons in the fire.

Bullshit!

It's almost impossible to imagine that Assad's military brain trust would choose to deploy chemical weapons on the very day that UN chemical weapons inspectors arrive in the country.

The entire "red line" issue is a bit of a red herring to begin with. Why has it been decided, and by whom, that spending a half hour bleeding to death while trying to push your intestines back where they belong after being collateral damage in a Hellfire missile strike is a perfectly acceptable death, but dying in your sleep in a gas attack is a red line, the crossing of which marks a war crime?

But politics being what it is, it looks more and more as though the red-liners will have their way.

The blow-back will come soon enough, and once again the pundits will scratch their collective heads and wonder aloud why "they" hate us.

Syrians take to streets in show of support for al Qaeda

The mis-handling of the Syrian "spring" has to be one of the greatest US foreign policy debacles of our times. Or is it?

It's been clear that American policy has been to lead from behind the scenes as proxies Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia took the lead in importing and arming the anti-Assad forces. And it's been clear to most of the world for well over a year that the "foreign fighters" who have been converging on Syria have what might delicately be termed "al Qaeda affiliations."

Recently there have been indications that Washington too is aware of this. First the charade of re-jigging the "Syrian National Council" into the "Syrian National Coalition" to make it more "representative". When the Syrians duly jumped through Hillary's hoops on that count, the US suddenly realized that the single most effective fighting force in Syria was in fact the Jabhat al-Nusra, aka al Qaeda, and promptly added them to their official list of terror groups.

This is all in the context of explaining why the US cannot directly arm the  "rebels", and the people of Syria took to the streets to make known their displeasure.

In terms of a Syrian spring, a Syrian liberalization, a democratic Syria, etc, none of this makes any sense.

Can American foreign policy really be that inept and self-defeating?

But what if this entire Syria exercise is just preparing the ground for an invasion of Iran? Suddenly a Syria in ruins is not such a bad thing. Plenty of good excuses to drop tens of thousands of American and/or NATO troops in to restore order/ deliver humanitarian aid / secure the weapons of mass destruction / etc etc.

And those tens of thousands of Sunni fundamentalist fighters on the ground in Syria? I'm guessing that America will permit herself just enough of an accommodation with "al Qaeda" to hand those lads maps to Tehran.

Suddenly it all makes sense!

Statesmanship can be hard work

That could be why the likes of Prime Minister Stephen Harper might prefer the company of the "Post-UN" crowd. How much more convivial to share the smug superiority of the like-minded while exchanging "humanitarian" awards.

To attend at the General Assembly on the other hand could entail hearing unpleasant truths. Just yesterday, for example, Syria's Foreign Minister accused certain of the Nations of Virtue of "supporting terrorism."

If one defines "supporting terrorism" as the out-fitting, organizing, funding, and leading of armed insurgents in a pre-meditated campaign to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem is quite correct. The countries he referred to in his speech have acknowledged as much.

In today's The Independent Kim Sengupta writes at length about the dilema facing the terror facilitators as they try to pick and choose which of the terrorists they are spiriting into Syria can be relied upon to return the heavy weapons that await them in Turkish warehouses. It is one thing to claim that you are supporting "Syrian freedom-fighters."

It's quite another when those fighters aren't Syrian and would be, under other circumstances, more than happy to turn those weapons on their benefactors. Not every lesson of the Libyan adventure has been entirely lost on the Nations of Virtue.

It is beyond dispute that a great number of the foreigners the West has been empowering in Syria would in other circumstances be labelled "al Qaeda." It has also been apparent for some time that it's exactly those fighters who have been doing by far the lions share of the heavy lifting in the armed struggle against Assad.

Syrian National Council boss Radwan Ziadeh was of course quick to denounce al-Moallem as a liar. The SNC needs to preserve what few shreds of credibility it has, and rallying the West to the support of al-Qaeda terror attacks doesn't cut it. Therefore those who speak the truth are shouted down as liars, while the liars boycott the UN and spend their time showering one another with humanitarian prizes.

This would be a great time for true statesmen to stand up for truth at the United Nations. It would be a great opportunity for the Canadian delegation to prove that they are something other than docile poodles in the NATO/US/Israel axis.

Alas, that would take courage. That would be hard work. Better to close the Iranian embassy, delegate Canadian diplomatic functions to Italy and the UK, and generally disengage from the world.