On April 11, one of the “smartest” US presidents ever
tweeted: “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get
ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You
shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys
it!”
When Donald Trump’s advisers drew his attention to the fact
that he might have telegraphed his intentions of bombing Syria to Moscow, the
imbecile came up with an even more childish tweet the next day, saying: “Never
said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so
soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done
a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?”
Fact of the matter is that during the last week, Donald
Trump has been so distracted by the FBI’s raid on the office of his attorney
Michael Cohen and the release of former FBI director James Comey’s new,
tell-all book that he has paid scant attention to what has happened in Syria.
He kept fulminating about these two issues throughout the last week on his
Twitter timeline and mentioned the alleged Douma chemical attack in Syria on
April 7 only in the passing.
Even though Trump’s babysitter Defense Secretary James
Mattis admitted on the record that though he was sure chlorine was used in the
attack in Douma, Syria, he was not sure who carried out the attack and whether
any other toxic chemical agent, particularly sarin, was used in the attack. If
chlorine can be classified as a chemical weapon, then how is one supposed to
categorize white phosphorous which was used by the US military in large
quantities in its battle against the Islamic State in Raqqa?
Despite scant evidence as to the use of chemical weapons or
the party responsible for it, Donald Trump ordered another cruise missiles
strike in Syria on Saturday in collaboration with Theresa May’s government in
the UK and Emmanuel Macron’s administration in France. The strike took place a
little over a year after a similar cruise missiles strikes on al-Shayrat airfield
on April 6 last year, after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan
Sheikhoun, that accomplished nothing.
Both these strikes in Syria were not only illegal under
international law but also under American laws. While striking the Islamic
State targets in Iraq and Syria, Washington availed itself of the war on terror
provisions in the US laws, known as the Authorization for the Use of Military
Force (AUMF), but those laws do not give the president the power to order
strikes against the Syrian government targets without the approval of the US
Congress which has the sole authority to declare war.
The Intercept has recently
reported [1] that the Trump administration has derived the authority to
strike the Syrian government targets based on a “Top Secret” memorandum of the
Office of Legal Counsel that even the US Congress can’t see. Complying with the
norms of transparency and rule of law have never been the strong points of
American democracy but the new US administration has done away with even the
pretense of accountability and checks and balances.
What further defies explanation for the Saturday’s strikes
against a scientific research facility in the Barzeh district of Damascus and
two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities in Homs is the fact that Donald
Trump has already
announced [2] that the process of withdrawal of US troops from Syria must
begin before the midterm US elections slated for November. If the Trump
administration is to retain the Republican majority in the Congress, it will
have to show something tangible to its voters, particularly in Syria.
Thus, it appears that the “one-off strike in Syria,” as
articulated by James Mattis, was nothing more than a diversionary tactic to
distract attention from Trump’s domestic troubles. Rather than deterring the
Syrian government from its alleged use of chemical weapons, the Saturday’s
cruise missiles strikes were meant as a show of force against Moscow.
On March 4, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working
for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found
unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A week
later, another Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov was found dead in his London home
and police has launched a murder investigation into his death.
Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and before
his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the cover
of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in 2010
and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Theresa May’s government has concluded
that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade
nerve agent, Novichok.
On April 9, Yulia Skripal was discharged from hospital and reportedly
the condition of Sergei Skripal is also improving rapidly, which means they
might not have been poisoned by Novichok. In fact, Russia’s Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov shared the
results [3] of a Swiss laboratory on Saturday that “BZ toxin” was used in
the Salisbury poisoning which was never produced in Russia, but was in service
in the US, UK and other NATO states.
Nevertheless, the US, UK and European nations expelled
scores of Russian diplomats and the Trump administration ordered the closure of
Russian consulate in Seattle. In a retaliatory move, Kremlin also expelled a
similar number of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the
closure of American consulate in Saint Petersburg. The relations between Moscow
and Western powers have reached their lowest ebb since the break-up of Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War in December 1991.
The fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed in
the Saturday’s strikes in Syria, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by France and 8
by the UK aircrafts shows that the strikes were nothing more than a show of
force by a “powerful and assertive” US president who regards the interests of
his European allies as his own, particularly when he has given a May 12
deadline to his European allies to “improve and strengthen” the Iran nuclear
deal, otherwise he has threatened to walk out of the pact in order to please
Israel’s lobby in Washington.
No comments:
Post a Comment