This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations on 13 Nov 2013 under the title ‘What prevents Australia from showing empathy for Syrians?‘
Australian foreign policy makers seem not to realise that the demographic makeup of Australia means increasing numbers of us are connected to victims of wars instigated by the United States. If loyalty to Australia is required of us in a future war, it may not be forthcoming from huge sections of the community.
The problem of a divided country and divided loyalties is inevitable when successive Australian governments have aligned with Washington even though America’s foreign policy this century is being determined by warmongering neoconservatives.
Soon after 9/11, when US General Wesley Clark informed the world that the US planned to ‘take out’ seven countries – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran – we can’t have been paying attention.
Plans to ‘take out’ countries would be ‘crimes against peace’. They would require covert, nefarious activities that would be impacting peoples a long way from North America, England, and Australia.
Some of the most chilling of such activities occurred in Syria. This article gives particular attention to one of them.
Washington’s ‘taking out’ of Syria would have to depend on a skewed narrative and a foreign-backed militant Islamist ‘revolution’.
The basic human values of most, if not all, Australians would predispose us to being suspicious of a US neocon war and the ‘revolution’. We would normally show empathy for the victims. However, we have been distracted by the narrative with one dominant theme: ’Assad is a brutal dictator who kills his own people’.
As one Middle East specialist described it, ‘Assad’ is like a magician’s diversion, used to distract us while Syria is being ‘bled to death’.
Tragically, the mainstream media, many NGOs and bodies linked to the UN push the simplistic war narrative. It might be due to their close links to Washington; or intense pressure from Washington; or the bias of their funding sources.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been no exception.
In response to particularly biased commentary on the ABC, I have submitted lengthy complaint letters to the ABC’s Audience and Consumer Affairs. These letters (e.g. here, here and here) cover almost all I know about the war and include aspects of it that demand investigation even now – if we are genuinely committed to values and beliefs that can unite Australians.
In this article, I will give renewed attention to the claim that Syria crossed President Obama’s ‘red line’ when it used chemical weapons against its own people on 21 August 2013.
A recently published memo from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) gives reason to further challenge this oft-repeated claim.
However, before starting, it helps to give thought to the nature of the neoconservatives’ war on Syria.
Unlike the Iraq war with its shock and awe and ‘Coalition of the Willing’ boots on the ground, the ‘taking out’ of Syria has more closely resembled the US interventions last century in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, where proxy forces – the Contras in Nicaragua and the mujahideen in Afghanistan – were armed and funded to be America’s ‘boots on the ground’.
In Syria, the US uses the ‘moderate rebels’, a euphemism for hundreds of different militant groups comprising a mix of local and foreign fighters, ranging from radical to extreme, but all ready and willing to kill, so hardly ‘moderate’. They have united at times to commit the most dastardly of crimes.
Insurgents in Syria have been supported by a western international coalition, mostly in the air. The justification given for the uninvited Coalition forces in Syria is ‘on the basis of the collective self-defence of Iraq, given that ISIS has established bases in Syria’. (It may also be to window-dress America’s illegal occupation of Syria’s oil-rich region and the looting of Syrian resources.)
The ADF joined the coalition in Syria in 2015. Ostensibly in Syria to take out ISIS, the ADF was involved in an air attack which killed scores of Syrian soldiers, enabling the ISIS forces they had been fighting to take territory. ‘Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’ said he wouldn’t ‘speculate about what went wrong…’
When part of the narrative for a war on Syria is ‘Assad has killed more people than ISIS’, the killing of Syrian soldiers can be easily dismissed in the West.
I first heard that loose claim about ISIS and ‘Assad’ – a useful one to justify aggression against the Syrian Army – in June 2014 from a former Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren.
It was in the same year militants (including al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra) controlled almost the entire Syrian border with Israel. Some crossed into Israel, because Prime Minister Netanyahu was photographed visiting wounded insurgents in an Israeli military hospital.
Image above: Screenshot taken from Middle East Security Report: Jabhat al-Nusra
Former Israeli ambassador Oren said, ‘If we have to choose the lesser evil….the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites… From Israel’s perspective, if there is got to be an evil that is going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.’
We can assume, therefore, that the ADF’s involvement in the killing of Syrian soldiers and the cover it provided ISIS forces would have been sanctioned by our close allies.
The ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program still broadcasts reports that favour the ‘revolution’ in Idlib province, despite the fact that extremist Sunni militant groups are in charge of the province.
Unlike the ABC, American analyst William Van Wagenen works to expose the ‘revolution’ and its unholy alliance with western and allied intelligence agencies.
(Many of Van Wagenen’s well-resourced articles are published by the Libertarian Institute. We may be repelled by the domestic policies of the US libertarians, but libertarians are a strong challenge to neocon wars. For example, in 2012, in response to the horrific images of a massacre in Houla, Syria, Australia expelled Syria’s top diplomats, whereas Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian, declared to Congress: “Falsely blaming the Assad government for a so-called massacre perpetrated by a violent warring rebel faction is nothing more than war propaganda”.)
Van Wagenen’s latest article brings our attention back to that alleged sarin gas attack in Ghouta, Damascus, on 21 August 2013 – the attack that supposedly crossed President Obama’s ‘red line’ and justified western military strikes on Syria.
But two months earlier, the 20 June 2013 (DIA) confidential memo revealed that there were ‘two possible suspects for any nerve gas attack (in Syria) – (the Syrian government) and al-Nusra‘. The DIA memo pointed out that “The al-Nusrah Front associated sarin production cell is the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre 9/11 effort.”
What is concerning is the memo apparently didn’t reach the White House (or Canberra!) before the alleged sarin gas attack. It meant the White House could blithely point the finger at the ‘regime’ and ignore al-Nusra which had a strong force in Ghouta.
Despite not having seen the DIA memo, President Obama didn’t order military strikes against Damascus. He had been advised by his National Security Advisor, James Clapper, that attributing blame for the nerve gas attack wasn’t a ‘slam-dunk’.
Also, General Martin Dempsey, who ‘had initially supported an immediate military response’ changed his mind and reportedly ‘warned the president that the nerve used in the attack did not match that known to exist in the Syrian army arsenal’.
Even two years later, in 2015, Michael Flynn, the Director of Defence Intelligence under Obama, maintained the alleged chemical weapons attack ‘could have been committed by other forces in an attempt to draw the United States into the conflict’.
However, in the same year, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop insisted “the whole conflict” in Syria began when President Assad “unleashed chemical weapons against his own people”. Presumably, her office had been poorly advised.
Even two of Australia’s ‘experts’ on terror, David Kilcullen and Waleed Aly, continued to maintain the regime was responsible when there was reason to quash such certainty.
Ms Bishop might have been much more circumspect, if DFAT officers had given attention to a 288 page report, Murder in the SunMorgue, by a neuropharmacologist, the late Dr Denis O’Brien.
Over a six month period, Dr O’Brien scrutinised the images and videos that rebels presented to the world, supposedly showing hundreds of victims of a regime sarin gas attack. Dr O’Brien didn’t doubt that he was looking at the victims of a sinister crime.
However, he couldn’t see key indicators of sarin poisoning, for example, cyanosis (blue skin), ‘fecal incontinence’, and salivation. The ‘livor mortis’ colour of a victim of sarin poisoning would be dark blue to purple, he points ouf. What he observed were victims with ‘red/pink’ skin.
He concluded he was observing the victims of either carbon monoxide or cyanide poisoning, gasses that could not be carried in a missile, but favoured in gas chambers.
Van Wagener gave O’Brien’s work attention in his lengthy report: ‘Sarin Doesn’t Slice Throats’: The 2013 Ghouta Massacre Revisited, 14 June 2022. Its title refers to O’Brien noticing that at least one victim of the alleged sarin gas attack had had his throat cut.
If the victims were gassed and if al Nusra had the means to leave traces of sarin in the area for UN inspectors to find, there remain at least two questions: Why? Who orchestrated it?
Van Wagener presents a strong case for it being a false flag operation coordinated by Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the CIA and Mossad, among others, and involving al-Nusra, which we know from the DIA memo had access to sarin. (It wasn’t until 2017 that our government designated al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra a ‘terrorist organisation’.)
Another question: who were the victims of the gassing?
Dr O’Brien posited that some of the women and children were Alawites abducted after various insurgent groups – including ‘moderate rebels’ and ISIS – joined forces in early August 2013 to massacre scores of villagers in Latakia province.
Image above: A screenshot taken from a video no longer online, showing abducted Alawite villagers. The writer of this article published the image with the video link, then live, in a 2015 complaint letter to the ABC. The link was available on this site: ‘a closer look on Syria‘.
The plan to ‘take out’ Syria has relied on us having a visceral response to horrifying images from ‘massacres’, such as that in Houla (2012) and in Ghouta (2013). Civilians have been murdered to create those images.
Since the start of Syria’s ‘Arab Spring’, there was mayhem and violence orchestrated by the enemies of Syria. The late Rev. Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch priest living in Homs, wrote: ‘From the beginning, I have seen armed demonstrators … and they were the first to start shooting at the police. Very often, the violence of the security services is a response to the brutal violence of the armed insurgents.’
A country can’t be ‘taken out’ without violence – violence begets violence, and this becomes a powerful, cyclical force. Younger generations are damned by events they can’t possibly understand; nevertheless, they hear family express hate-filled calls for revenge.
Over fifty years ago, in an anti-war address, Martin Luther King described his country as the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world’. Even so, during those years, the only ‘revolution’ mounted in the US was a non-violent one. The Weather Underground blew up empty government buildings – they were designated ‘terrorists’, but theirs was a non-violent ‘revolution’. Generations since have become inured to state and violent ‘revolutions’, accepting of genuine, nightmarish terror even. These are dangerous times.
In Australia, it seems the best of human values were sacrificed by our political establishment when we became an accomplice in the nefarious plans to ‘take out’ countries.
One dissenter was a former prime minister, Malcolm Fraser. He would have understood the risks involved in standing up to the neoconservatives, still in response to the alleged ‘regime’ sarin gas attack in 2013, he signed a public statement urging restraint, reminding us of the lies that were told to take us into the war against Iraq.
We may never adequately recompense the people of Syria for our contribution to the destruction of their country and to their current impoverishment, but we could take the first step with truth-telling.
We must trust that the courage and humanity needed to take this step are within us.
Susan Dirgham
President of Australians for Reconciliation and Truth Towards Syria (ArttS)
November 2023
Additional References
- U.S. Department of State: Ninth Anniversary of the Ghouta, Syria Chemical Weapons Attack PRESS STATEMENT NED PRICE, DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON AUGUST 21, 2022
- EXCLUSIVE: SYRIANS IN GHOUTA CLAIM SAUDI-SUPPLIED REBELS BEHIND CHEMICAL ATTACK, by Yahya Ababneh and Dale Gavlak, 29 August 2013
- Gas missiles ‘were not sold to Syria’, by Robert Fisk, 21 Sept 2013, The Independent
- Syrian Activist on Ghouta Attack: “I Haven’t Seen Such Death in My Whole Life”, Democracy Now, 23 August 2013, veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn raises pertinent questions in this interview (transcript online)
- The evidence of chemical attack seems compelling – but remember – there’s a propaganda war on, by Patrick Cockburn, 22 August 2013, The Independent
- Syrian insurgents guilty of ‘red line’ 2013 sarin chemical attack, study finds, by Aaron Mate, 26 July 2021, The Grayzone
- Turkish MP Eren Erdem claimed that evidence from a court case pointed to ‘Turkish nationals dealing directly with Isis and other terrorist groups in Syria, supplying them with sarin gas.’
- Prof Theodore Postol and Richard Lloyd – MIT Report, 14 Jan 2014, Possible Implications of Bad Intelligence
- Seymour Hersh – London Review of Books, 17 April 2014, The Red Line and the Rat Line Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
- The late Robert Parry – Consortium News, 10 March 2016, Neocons Red-Faced Over ‘Red Line’
- Peter Hitchens: Why the deafening silence over Syria and its chemical weapons is so concerning, 2020 (This short video commentary does not relate directly to the 2013 alleged chemical weapons attack in Ghouta. Nevertheless it is relevant here. It concerns the independence and integrity of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – the OPCW.)
- Aaron Mate at UN: OPCW cover-up denies justice to Syria victims, 24 March 2023 (This article relates to an alleged chemical weapons attack on 7 April 2018 and pressure on the OPCW to suppress the findings of its inspectors.)
- IDF chief finally acknowledges that Israel supplied weapons to Syrian rebels, by JUDAH ARI GROSS, 14 Jan 2019, The Times of Israel
