I think you've resided too long in the nation that introduced us all to the joys of the Gestapo and industrially organised genocide. Germany stands for very little and sets almost no example. The Polish foreign minister (a nation lost 20% of its population last time Germany got terribly involved in events beyond its own border) recently lamented that these days it is the absence of German leadership that is more to be feared than its active involvement.

Freedom and democracy, along with rule of law, are good things, worthy of emulation. America successfully exported them to West Germany once, and even [LIFTED] German Eurosnob should be grateful to them for it.

The US has only ever to my knowledge invaded one major oil producing nation, and they didn't colonise it. They may have failed to bring the full benefits of peace and democracy there, but that has more to do with the body rejecting the transplant than an act of fraud. They were naive to presume that they would be welcomed as bringers of freedom; and they had a misplaced belief that democracy is an institution with powers to create other civic virtues like independent judiciaries, when in fact it is equally one that requires those things as prerequisites. The Iraq invasion was a bad idea, and the subsequent administration was even worse, but it wasn't imperial colonisation.

America has learned a lot from its mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Britain learned a lot from its messy dissolution of its empire, France from theirs. All of those countries learned among other things to lower their expectations when intervening abroad. But not to give up on the idea of ever doing so again.

By contrast, Germany learned from its own brutality, and the national humiliation of defeat and state dismemberment to recoil from its shame and evade international responsibilities. Germany has been a pliant dog, walked on a French leash ever since. Talk of being seen as strong, and not butt kissing is absurd when all your hosts did was choose a different rectum to pucker up for.

What's the evidence that it was the Syrian home forces and not the Islamist rebellion that set off the weapons? How exactly do we know who did what to whom?
Syria is a debt free state. Syria is a secular state, something of a rarity in that corner of the world. Syria also has some lovely oil and gas reserves.
Taking a moment for some clarification is no bad thing, and it's interesting to see the US posturing with it's new best friends.

Kerry's intel at least



http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-576 ... al-attack/

It takes a lot of gas kill 1,000 people in the street, which is a rather well ventilated area. If you don't have artillery pieces capable of dispersing it properly and rely instead on just opening up a lot of barrels, it takes an extraordinary quantity. Nobody there except the Syrian army has either the necessary munitions or the quantities of product to carry out this attack.

Syria shot unarmed protesters in the street to begin this thing. It is not a secular regime as such. It is dominated by one particular Islamic sect that happens to be in a minority (and viewed as especially heretical by other sects), and so had little to gain from harnessing popular religion as a political force.

Their oil industry isn't terribly interesting. And to be honest, people who think we would bother to invade countries to get at their oil are idiots. It was a stupid myth that the Iraq invasion was about control over oil, and it would be even more ill-educated to presume that anyone would bother doing the same for the trickle that Syria produces. All we want from oil producing states is that they get the stuff out of the ground onto the open market. Fungibility makes precise control of given reserves completely pointless.

It is funny, I was laying in the bath this morning, after I wrote my previous post and thought what a contrast it is between the time when Germany was battling its sbre and invading countries and America was standing back and refusing to get involved, they were very isolationist and only when they were directly attacked did they have the resolve to get involved in the war. Now it seems the shoe is on the other foot and the American Military Industrial Complex needs a succession of wars to exist and they have a very big sphere of influence.

Russia's Vladimir Putin challenges US on Syria claims

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23911833

The assumption there is that it's beyond the wit of the Islamists to have captured the armaments, which given the messy nature of the war is quite possible. This also isn't helped when I hear interviews with Syrian foreign diplomats trying to explain away the video footage of the dead and injured as being an elaborate hoax, staged with children who are joking and smiling.



They're more secular than, for instance, Iran, Israel, or many of the neighbouring territories.




I don't think it's a huge secret, nor a conspiracy theory to point out that Haliburton made huge profits from the Iraq war. That's just substantiative fact.
The US loves oil and gas. As you say, it's in everybody's interests to have that resource on the open market, and hopefully with a favoured nation status to the powers that 'helped' the victors out.

However, above all, simply making the assumption that because a chemical attack is a bit tricky to pull off therefore it must have been orchestrated by the incumbent power (although refusing the UN inspectors does look shifty) isn't enough to go to war.
We need proof of who released them, which I haven't seen.
We also need to think carefully about what happens next, who are we holding the door open for. From what I've seen, they're not terribly nice people, and we'll more or less end up arming various Islamist groups with a huge chip on their shoulder about western powers. These things have a habit of biting us in the arse.

It's not that funny for a grown adult to be so limited in outlook and understanding.

At the outset of WW2 the USA should have got more deeply involved. They knew perfectly well that it was only a matter of time before they were drawn into it, as did the Axis powers. But if the Japanese hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor, and America had stayed out of the war until it was over, would they have been morally superior for it? It would have been a disaster for the rest of us, Germans included.

I don't understand why we would be so anxious to let so many die at the hands of a brutal regime. But above all I can't comprehend how anyone of that persuasion would have the nerve to consider themselves morally superior to those who want to prevent a worsening of that catastrophe.

There is a peculiar moral weakness in those who, upon seeing others attempt to do good, say "you only want to do that so you can look like a hero".

At the outset of WWII, the USA were still picking sides. They could just as easily have gone with the other lot.

Your second sentence there is indecipherable.
As for the first. If the regime has allowed enough of the agents necessary for manufacture of such quantities of gas, let alone the rockets or artillery shells needed to deliver them effectively, for this to be a devious false flag operation. Then they really ought to own up and hand the rest over to somebody capable of properly securing and safely destroying the offending munitions.

It is clutching at straws to hope that blame for this event is hard to ascertain. If Assad's forces didn't do it, then you have to look for foreign governments to blame, because there is no way that the rebels could have enough of this stuff, nor means to deliver it, using only what they have captured.

Sure. In a very limited and unimpressive way, they can be secular if you like. They aren't secular enough for it to count as anything much in their favour. And they are evil and repressive and murderous enough that there's no point trying.


That's the cost of waiting it out so long, and one we will now have to pay. Remember, those islamists became the main focus of the anti Assad forces because they had the military success, which came from having guns, which came from having open backing from the Gulf states.

If we'd backed the rebels a year or more ago, they would be a much more secular bunch than they are now. If we wait another year we will surely have by then a choice between various local flavours of Taliban. But so what? Assad has murdered so many of his people that things can't go back the way they were, not ever. It's an impossible war for him to win, so one set of his enemies or another is going to get rid of him, and whether we helped them win or not, we will still therfore have to deal with his successors. Exactly how scarred and ravaged Syria will become before that happens is the only question.

None of that matters though. Right now the duty of the international community is to ensure that nobody can gain battlefield advantage with chemical warfare. That means hurting Assad enough that he loses any ground he has gained.

I'd be interested to see you try and concoct a plausible narrative of how that might happen.

i believe that they bombarded the area and hit, with that bombardment, a hidden dump of this type of weapon

its a large open area so delivery via shells would require a massive bombardment over a period of time
as this happened in this large open area in a very short period, i believe that they hit a stock pile and this stock pile was released over this area

hence the delays, because they didn’t even know ...

Syria: UK rules out new vote on military strike - Hague

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23918915
...


Syria: Assad 'Planned Gas Attack Last Summer'

http://news.sky.com/story/1135749/syria ... ast-summer

Feel the sources! They're all concerned citizens, you know.
...


Obama 'has the right' to strike Syria regardless of Congress vote, says Kerry

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/s ... ress-kerry

Very true. Under American law the 'commander in chief' has the power to deploy military resources any way he/she sees fit and the two houses have no legal veto over that. In this case, it's a courtesy and an attempt to provide political backing. I believe this was also true in the UK up until relatively recently I believe (I.e. the Prime Minister could order UK forces into conflict without the permission of parliament). I remember reading something about it being changed post Iraq, but it may have been a bill that didn't make it through parliament - although I can't see any reason why anyone in Parliament would vote against having a veto, assuming they were asked if they wanted on.


I'm afraid there's a bit more to it than that. Chemical munitions are not bullets, they're more sophisticated than that. You have to remember the first requirement in using chemical munitions is not to get yourself killed by them. That's actually surprisingly tricky, given the tiny amounts of these agents that are a lethal dose. OK, first of all, the active agents aren't stored inside the shells or bombs. That would be dangerous - more vessels holding the agent means more places it can leak from - and it would also cause the active agent to degrade quickly. Basically, the weapons are 'charged' with the agents just before they are fired (in the case of shells) or loaded onto the plane in the case of bombs. Until then, it's stored somewhere it can't leak out and kill half your own army and the ordnance is inert. Then it is generally put in the weapons by people who really know what they are doing and have the correct protective equipment because, again, what you don't want is the stuff to kill you before you get a chance to use it. Then it is fired at or dropped on the opposition, where the shell/bomb rather than exploding - which would incinerate most of your lethal stuff instantly, rendering the whole exercise pointless - operates as an aerosol as it falls, hopefully spraying the agent over a wide area. So you need to set things like how high you want the weapon to 'go off', the dispersal pattern you want and the concentration of stuff you're loading in.

Short version : To use chemical weapons effectively, you need the right equipment and the people who are trained correctly in how to manage and use it. The idea you could just nick a couple of 150mm shells full of Sarin and fire them off at someone else is ludicrous. You'd stand a much greater chance of killing yourself or your friends than anyone else.

Now, I'm not saying it's beyond any likelihood that the opposition have those trained people - either defectors from the Assad regime or who have gained the necessary training elsewhere in the world. That is perfectly possible. However the idea the rebels came across a bunker full of chemical weapons and decided to try them out on a population loyal to them is, to me, stretching credibility beyond breaking point.

Sarin gas can be delivered via mortar or even a shoulder launched system.
If a small group of enthusiastic Japanese people can kill or injure nearly 1000 people on the underground (obviously prevailing conditions are different, population density etc), I wouldn't get to worried about it being a complicated delivery system to be honest.