Syria Gas Attack- What Now?

In response to the 'what now' question in this thread title, it seems Obama is thinking, "IRAN!"

US President Barack Obama says Iran should draw "a lesson" from the deal reached over Syria's chemical weapons. Iran's nuclear programme is a "far larger issue" for the US than chemical weapons, Mr Obama told the ABC network. Mr Obama said despite the fact that the US had not used force against Syria, a "credible threat of force" could lead to a deal.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24102723

I'm sure they're quivering after this latest show of political force.
 
If that report's true, and would anyone be surprised if it were, WMD in the ME is like the Saw or Friday the 13th series. I half expect to see Abdullah Clampett and Co. loading down their Model T camel and hitting the road.
 
In response to the 'what now' question in this thread title, it seems Obama is thinking, "IRAN!"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24102723

I'm sure they're quivering after this latest show of political force.

What Iran can draw from this lesson is that the USA is full of hollow rhetoric, it's politicians are blundering idiots and this is probably the best time of all to get assertive to the point of conflict.

I can just see the facebook messages being exchanged between Iran, Russia, Syria right now, more LOLs than porn bloopers could ever hope to get.

When will Obama learn to shut his fucking pie hole? The man has no shame, he really has some balls to talk big about his (our :wall:) achievements over the Syria debacle.
McCain needs to STFU up too. Time to retire.
 
Secretary Kerry makes an offhanded remark about Syria turning over its chem weapons... Putin calls him on it.

Senator McCain makes an offhanded comment about writing an op-ed in Pravda... Pravda calls him on it.

Combined with President Obama calling chem weapons a "red line" and then Syria calling him on that, America is looking pretty silly right now.
McCain should remind people that Putin attacked georgia without a UN declaration, and it's hypocritical to demand what he didn't seek. Then see if Pravda prints it.

But he won't, he's a Chicken Hawk.
 
Elizabeth O'bagy now admits she lied about her Ph.D.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/09/17/pro-opposition-syria-analyst-admits-faking-phd-story/

O'Bagy reportedly countered that she had defended her dissertation, and was simply waiting for the university to confer the degree.
But in a statement to The Daily Beast, O'Bagy reportedly admitted she was never enrolled in that program. She apparently applied to a joint master's/Ph.D. program, but was not accepted. She was only in the master's program.
"I would like to deeply apologize to every person with whom I have worked, who has read and depended upon my research, and to the general public," O'Bagy said in a statement. "While I have made many mistakes and showed extremely poor judgment, I most particularly regret my public misrepresentation of my educational status and not immediately disclosing that I had not been awarded a doctorate in May 2013."

ETA a little more on "Dr". O'bagy
http://swampland.time.com/2013/09/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-elizabeth-obagy/

Born into one of the few non-Mormon families in Holiday, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, O’Bagy’s interest in Islam was cemented when her classmates ostracized the one Arab boy in her high school after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. O’Bagy graduated from Georgetown with a bachelors degree in Arabic and went to live in Cairo for two years before returning to Washington to seek her masters and PhD from her alma mater in Arabic Studies. At the end of 2011 she began an internship with the Institute. She was hired a year later as a Syria analyst, making half a dozen trips into rebel-held parts of Syria. By May, weeks after completing her masters degree, she was acting as McCain’s Sherpa for his surprise trip into Syria to meet with rebel groups.
 
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It's cool- college football bought us some time.

INDIANAPOLIS, IN – Pentagon and NCAA sources have confirmed that military action against Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria will be delayed until after the completion of the 2014 college football season.

While military leaders publicly admit the possibility that another war could hurt an understaffed military amidst budget cuts, private emails show their true motivations: “I don’t want to watch football in another shitty KBR dining hall at 3am in Bumfuck, Middle East,” one read.

“I already missed LSU’s national championship game because I was in Afghanistan in 2008,” said one disgruntled Marine, “if I miss them this year then I might have a blue on blue.” Others recommended starting the war during baseball or basketball season, since only three people care about those sports, and one of them is Kim Jong-un.
 
McCain should remind people that Putin attacked georgia without a UN declaration, and it's hypocritical to demand what he didn't seek. Then see if Pravda prints it.

But he won't, he's a Chicken Hawk.
McCain has all the makings of a great politician, he just never learned how to be conservative.
 
Very interesting report by Robert Fisk on the gas attack..

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/gas-missiles-were-not-sold-to-syria-8831792.html
While the Assad regime in Damascus has denied responsibility for the sarin gas missiles that killed around 1,400 Syrians in the suburb of Ghouta on 21 August, information is now circulating in the city that Russia's new "evidence" about the attack includes the dates of export of the specific rockets used and – more importantly – the countries to which they were originally sold. They were apparently manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1967 and sold by Moscow to three Arab countries, Yemen, Egypt and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. These details cannot be verified in documents, and Vladimir Putin has not revealed the reasons why he told Barack Obama that he knows Assad's army did not fire the sarin missiles; but if the information is correct – and it is believed to have come from Moscow – Russia did not sell this particular batch of chemical munitions to Syria.

Since Gaddafi's fall in 2011, vast quantities of his abandoned Soviet-made arms have fallen into the hands of rebel groups and al-Qa'ida-affiliated insurgents. Many were later found in Mali, some in Algeria and a vast amount in Sinai. The Syrians have long claimed that a substantial amount of Soviet-made weaponry has made its way from Libya into the hands of rebels in the country's civil war with the help of Qatar – which supported the Libyan rebels against Gaddafi and now pays for arms shipments to Syrian insurgents.

There is no doubt that Syria has a substantial chemical weapons armoury. Nor that Syrian stockpiles contain large amounts of sarin gas 122mm missiles. But if the Russians have indeed been able to identify the specific missile markings on fragments found in Ghouta – and if these are from munitions never exported to Syria – the Assad regime will boast its innocence has been proven.

In a country – indeed a world – where propaganda is more influential than truth, discovering the origin of the chemicals that suffocated so many Syrians a month ago is an investigation fraught with journalistic perils. Reporters sending dispatches from rebel-held parts of Syria are accused by the Assad regime of consorting with terrorists. Journalists reporting from the government side of Syria's front lines are regularly accused of mouthing the regime's propaganda. And even if the Assad regime was not responsible for the 21 August attacks, its forces have committed war crimes aplenty over the past two years. Torture, massacre, the bombardment of civilian targets have long been proved.

Nevertheless, it also has to be said that grave doubts are being expressed by the UN and other international organisations in Damascus that the sarin gas missiles were fired by Assad's army. While these international employees cannot be identified, some of them were in Damascus on 21 August and asked a series of questions to which no one has yet supplied an answer. Why, for example, would Syria wait until the UN inspectors were ensconced in Damascus on 18 August before using sarin gas little more than two days later – and only four miles from the hotel in which the UN had just checked in? Having thus presented the UN with evidence of the use of sarin – which the inspectors quickly acquired at the scene – the Assad regime, if guilty, would surely have realised that a military attack would be staged by Western nations.

As it is, Syria is now due to lose its entire strategic long-term chemical defences against a nuclear-armed Israel – because, if Western leaders are to be believed, it wanted to fire just seven missiles almost a half century old at a rebel suburb in which only 300 of the 1,400 victims (if the rebels themselves are to be believed) were fighters. As one Western NGO put it yesterday: "if Assad really wanted to use sarin gas, why for God's sake, did he wait for two years and then when the UN was actually on the ground to investigate?"

The Russians, of course, have made similar denials of Assad's responsibility for sarin attacks before. When at least 26 Syrians died of sarin poisoning in Khan al-Assal on 19 March – one of the reasons why the UN inspectors were dispatched to Syria last month – Moscow again accused the rebels of responsibility. The Russians later presented the UN with a 100-page report containing its "evidence". Like Putin's evidence about the 21 August attacks, however, it has not been revealed.

A witness who was with Syrian troops of the army's 4th Division on 21 August – a former Special Forces officer considered a reliable source – said he saw no evidence of gas shells being fired, even though he was in one of the suburbs, Moadamiya, which was a target for sarin. He does recall the soldiers expressing concern when they saw the first YouTube images of suffocating civilians – not out of sympathy, but because they feared they would have to fight amid clouds of poison.

"It would perhaps be going beyond conspiracy theories to say the government was not involved," one Syrian journalist said last week, "but we are sure the rebels have got sarin. They would need foreigners to teach them how to fire it. Or is there a 'third force' which we don't know about? If the West needed an excuse to attack Syria, they got it right on time, in the right place, and in front of the UN inspectors."
 
I dont have the words......

Sen. John McCain has hired Elizabeth O'Bagy, the Syria analyst in Washington who was fired for padding her credentials, The Cable has learned. She begins work Monday as a legislative assistant in McCain's office

"Elizabeth is a talented researcher, and I have been very impressed by her knowledge and analysis in multiple briefings over the last year," McCain told The Cable in a statement. "I look forward to her joining my office." McCain's office said there would be no further comment on the matter.



http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/p...s_controversial_syria_analyst_elizabeth_obagy
 
"What now?" Maybe instead of intervening militarily in Syria, we should "Give War a Chance."

http://www.shadowspear.com/shadowspear-news/106380-in-syria-give-war-a-chance.html

Writing long before the GWOT, OCO, or whatever it is we’re calling our existential struggle against violent Islamic extremism these days, an intriguing article by Edward Luttwak appeared in the highly-regarded journal Foreign Affairs. Published in 1999, Luttwak’s article was called “Give War a Chance,” a title that reflected a complete rejection of the “give peace a chance” mantra of a previous generation. “Give War a Chance” was controversial and thought-provoking because it exposed the fundamental paradox of military intervention: that by intervening, the peacekeepers often unintentionally make the situation worse.
 
I love how 2-3 weeks ago we HAD, ZOM-to-the-mutha'farking-G, HAD to intervene in Syria.

Now it is buried on almost every news site.

'Murica.
 
I love how 2-3 weeks ago we HAD, ZOM-to-the-mutha'farking-G, HAD to intervene in Syria.

Now it is buried on almost every news site.

'Murica.
The .gov shutdown conveniently emerged as the big story.
 
I love how 2-3 weeks ago we HAD, ZOM-to-the-mutha'farking-G, HAD to intervene in Syria.

Now it is buried on almost every news site.

'Murica.

Yep. Now we're all besties up in here.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/07/us-russia-set-for-first-talks-since-syria-deal/

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Monday, saying that news that international disarmament experts had begun dismantling and destroying Syria's chemical weapons arsenal and the equipment used to produce it represented "a good beginning," and Assad deserved credit for honoring the terms of a deal reached last month to secure and destroy the regime's weapons.
 
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