Zombie Did we just drop bombs on Syria?

Darn that Obama.

barfo

 

Who is the approved spec in South America? French Guiana?

 

Fucking Obama!

 

Just curious, did you read the article that Assange linked to?

 

The only good guys are the Syrian citizens.

ISIS is purely a Sunni reaction to Shiia reprisals against them after Sunni ruled apartheid-like states were toppled. When the Sunni were on our side in Iraq, ISIS did't exist, and Al Qaeda in Iraq was a handful of criminals. Even the Nobel Prize winning warmonger used it as an excuse to bail on finishing the job in Iraq.

Before the Arab Spring, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (after all the blood/treasure we spent) were not experiencing IEDs and bombing from drones and aircraft, tanks in the streets, and so on.

Anti Iraq war protesters thought we should leave Saddam in place. What a bunch of hypocrites when it's the emperor who wore no clothes who was the warmonger.

Assad is not our doing, and not our business to overthrow. Have a look at their air force, mostly Soviet Union aircraft with a smattering of French made ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Arab_Air_Force#Pre_Syrian_civil_war_aircraft_inventory

 

Indeed. Iraq used chemical weapons in its war with Iran - probably both sides did. We hated Iran, we hated Iraq and shouldn't have gotten involved. I think we hated Iran more because of the recent hostage crisis (Carter years), and ongoing taking of hostages by Iranian sponsored terrorist groups. The Reagan administration picked the winner of that long and bloody war by providing Saddam with satellite intelligence (where Iranian tanks were located, etc.).

We made Saddam. That's the only moral authority we had for going into Iraq to take him out.

It also goes to show that foreign policy must evolve. It did to some degree. Reagan administration helped Saddam win the war with Iran, Bush administration went to war against Saddam and put troops in Saudi Arabia. The next administration routinely bombed Iraq on many days, flew no-fly zone patrols, and massive aerial bombing campaigns, all the time talking about how Saddam had and made mass quantities of WMDs.

EDIT: That Iraq was using chemical weapons wasn't some secret known only to US leadership and intelligence communities. It was reported on TV news at the time, in the newspapers, etc.

And while this is an Iranian news source, I believe the relevant facts are true. Particularly about the US embargo on chemical weapons precursors, the urging of other nations to follow suit, and the UN resolution condemning the use of those WMDs. This is dated 1984:

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/chemical_warfare_iran_iraq_war.php

Chemical Warfare In The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988
SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) Fact Sheet,
Authors: Julian Perry Robinson and Jozef Goldblat, May 1984


Allegations
There have been reports of chemical warfare from the Gulf War since the early months of Iraq s invasion of Iran. In November 1980, Tehran Radio was broadcasting allegations of Iraqi chemical bombing at Susangerd. Three and a quarter years later, by which time the outside world was listening more seriously to such charges, the Iranian Foreign Minister told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that there had been at least 49 instances of Iraqi chemical-warfare attack in 40 border regions, and that the documented dead totalled 109 people, with hundreds more wounded. He made this statement on 16 February 1984, the day on which Iran launched a major offensive on the central front, and one week before the start of offensives and counter-offensives further south, in the border marshlands to the immediate north of Basra where, at Majnoon Islands, Iraq has vast untapped oil reserves. According to official Iranian statements during the 31 days following the Foreign Minister's allegation, Iraq used chemical weapons on at least 14 further occasions, adding more than 2200 to the total number of people wounded by poison gas.

Verification
One of the chemical-warfare instances reported by Iran, at Hoor-ul-Huzwaizeh on 13 March 1984, has since been conclusively verified by an international team of specialists dispatched to Iran by the United Nations Secretary General. The evidence adduced in the report by the UN team lends substantial credence to Iranian allegations of Iraqi chemical warfare on at least six other occasions during the period from 26 February to 17 March.

The efficiency and dispatch with which this UN verification operation was mounted stand greatly to the credit of the Secretary General. His hand had presumably been strengthened by the announcement on 7 March by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that 160 cases of wounded combatants visited in Tehran hospitals by an ICRC team "presented a clinical picture whose nature leads to the presumption of the recent use of substances prohibited by international law". The casualties visited were reportedly all victims of an incident on 27 February. The ICRC statement came two days after the US State Department had announced that "the US Government has concluded that the available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". Iraq had denounced the Washington statement as "political hypocrisy", "full of lies", a fabrication by the CIA, and had suggested that the hospital patients examined by the ICRC had "sustained the effects of these substances in places other than the war front". On 17 March, at almost the same moment as the UN team was acquiring its most damning evidence, the general commanding the Iraqi Third Corps, then counter-attacking in the battle for the Majnoon Islands, spoke as follows to foreign reporters: "We have not used chemical weapons so far and I swear by God's Word I have not seen any such weapons. But if I had to finish off the enemy, and if I am allowed to use them, I will not hesitate to do so".

Some Consequences
On 30 March, the UN Security Council issued a statement condemning the use of chemical weapons during the Gulf War. Evidently none of the five permanent member used its veto power to block the condemnation. That same day the US government announced that it was instituting special licensing requirements for exports to Iraq and Iran of particular chemicals that could be used in the manufacture of chemical weapons, and that it had urged other governments to do likewise. Other governments have since taken similar steps.

Reports of Iraqi chemical warfare have dwindled since the UN Security Council statement, but they have not stopped altogether. A British television team filming on the Iranian side of the Majnoon Islands front encountered evidence of a mustard-gas attack in mid-April. But Iranian media are no longer publicizing such reports, perhaps mindful now of potential negative impacts on their domestic audience.

 

Francona is a CNN contributor. Apparently he says things they want to broadcast.

From the foreignpolicy.com link:



We embargoed the materiel needed to make chemical weapons. It was the USSR, China, and Western Europeans (Germany) who provided the knowhow and materials.

 

Here you go, Rasta.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201704071052402239-airfield-damage-attack-employee/

 

Assad himself? No but we have evidence that the Syrian military did. We track everything that flies over Syria.