None of us will ever forget today, not in our lifetimes. But I am struck, today, by how it is increasingly discussed less in the media – and perhaps by all of us, too.
Is that good? Is that normal? Is it a mistake? I don’t know the answer. But I am thinking about it – and the victims and the consequences – today.
In Calgary in January. Nasty Bob, we need you! Anyone want to help make this happen?
These guys, by the way, deserve all the credit for making the Hot Nasties relevant, 30 years after the fact. Buy their EP here!
And come to the show in Calgary!
Palma Violets strike a Hot Nasties pose!
Out now on Rough Trade!
This is one of those days, for me.
Also lawbreakers like this guy, or this one, or this one. Under Quebec law, they’re effectively criminals, you know.
Saying that truth is a casualty of war isn’t new. It’s the world’s oldest declaration, you might say.
Syria is no different. Monday, Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad gave an interview in which he casually acknowledged chemical weapons may have been used in Syria — but, if so, by his enemies, not him. “There has been no evidence that I used chemical weapons against my own people,” he told Charlie Rose of PBS.
Asked if he possessed chemical weapons, Assad again argued in the alternative. If he did, the Syrian dictator told Rose, they were under “centralized control.”
Got that? Sounding irritated that Assad was being given airtime to spout bald-faced lies, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry erupted. “I just gave you real evidence of a chemical weapons attack,” he said. “I’m confident about the state of the evidence. Read the unclassified report on whitehouse.gov — what does (Assad) offer?
“This is a man who has just killed 1,000 of his own citizens. This is a man without credibility.”
Credibility is indeed the issue. Various governments have confirmed Assad used chemical weapons against his own people on the morning of Aug. 21 in a suburb of Damascus. Fifteen hundred were killed, one-third of them children.
Doctors Without Borders, who many (including this writer) cited in the days following Aug. 21, issued a statement confirming Syrian civilians had experienced “mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent,” and this was “a massive and unacceptable violation of international humanitarian law.” The group added it lacked the ability to assign blame, something missed by many (including this writer).
Doctors Without Borders was the first international aid group to issue a report on the Aug. 21 gassings. As such, the New York Times reported, “its report appears to lend credibility to other accounts by witnesses and to the opposition’s estimates of the dead.”
But is that really credible? Well, for those of us who have said we favour limited military action against Assad for his use of chemical weapons against his own people, various counter-arguments have been offered up. That military involvement can sometimes be a slippery slope (true), that the opposition rebels are worse (after Aug. 21, untrue), that the real motive for a strike is oil and money (untrue).
Mostly, however, those who are unmoved by the victims in the Aug. 21 attack — those who are indifferent about our collective obligation to punish the use of chemical weapons — have simply said one thing, over and over: Prove it happened. “I doubt/deny it happened.”
This line is Zundel-like in its simplicity. No matter how much evidence is marshalled, deny it is sufficient. Insinuate that it has been forged. Then go back to sleep.
For this, we can thank George W. Bush and his illusory weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. WMD has given genocide-deniers a useful excuse for inaction for generations to come.
There is a striking symmetry to the positions of the genocide-deniers and Bashar al-Assad. The ghastly implications of that are apparently lost on the former.
But not on the latter. He remains grateful the real truth remains a casualty — along with the hundreds murdered on the morning of Aug. 21.
What HuffPo has done has inspired me. Along with my own previously-posted comment rules, here’s a new one: if I see a handle I don’t recognize – and particularly if the commenter is highly critical of others – I will send him/her a confirmation email. If it bounces back or goes unanswered, bye-bye. Au revoir.
…like much else they do. What a colossal farce.
It amazes me – amazes me – that the paid-up citizens of Ford Nation thought they were doing their heroes a favour by bringing Press Council complaints against media organizations who did extraordinary investigative work about the drug-related enthusiasms of DoFo and RoFo.
All that these addled, knuckle-dragging fools have done is given the Star and Globe privileged opportunities to testify, in brutal detail, how (a) Rob Ford was in a video smoking crack and how (b) Doug Ford was a drug dealer in Etobicoke. Which said media are doing, right now, without making use of the word “alleged.”
You know that old adage about “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it?”
It’s true.
Rallying support for military action — or, more broadly, actual war — is no simple thing these days. Writing paeans to peace, in a modern democracy, is a lot easier.
Barack Obama has had this problem for a while now. Slightly more than a year ago, in July, a spokesman for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad let it be known that the outlaw regime had stockpiled chemical weapons.
A newspaper called the New York Times reported it, and Assad did not seek a correction. His representatives gave on-the-record interviews, in fact, stating the chemical weapons — they acknowledged they were “weapons of mass destruction” — would “never be used against the Syrian people.”
The Syrian stockpiles included sarin gas, mustard gas and cyanide. Sarin is a nerve agent that goes to work within a minute, paralyzing your lungs.
Mustard gas is a cytotoxic agent that forms big blisters on your skin and lungs, and it has been around for almost 200 years. Its first known use was by the Germans, against British and Canadian soldiers in France in 1917 during the First World War.
Anyone familiar with the movies knows about cyanide; a tiny amount of hydrogen cyanide will kill you in minutes.
A year ago, Obama knew that Syria had the third-largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world. He also knew that Syria was one of only a few states that had never ratified the international convention against the use of chemical weapons (along with Angola, Myanmar, Egypt, Israel, North Korea, and Sudan).
Knowing all this — knowing that Syria has in fact been making chemical weapons since the 1980s — Obama issued a warning. Famously, he said the use of chemical weapons was a “red line,” and the crossing of it by Assad would draw a swift and mighty response.
Last month, Assad used sarin gas in a predominantly Sunni Muslim area, just east of Damascus. This has been confirmed by the British, the French, the Israelis, the Turks, the Americans and even Doctors Without Borders. For its part, the United Nations stated that it believed chemical weapons had been deployed on at least four occasions during the nearly three-year Syrian civil war, although it couldn’t say which side was responsible.
In the not-so-distant past, all of that should have been enough. The red line had been crossed.
But in the modern era — buffeted as it is by Photoshopped images, and Internet hoaxes, and widespread cynicism fed by presidents and prime ministers spinning about “weapons of mass destruction” — Obama’s task was not made any easier.
Obama made appeals to decency, and references to the body count, and the strategic necessity of it all. In every respect — in every way — he was right. So far, however, the American people are not onside — and likewise many erstwhile allies. Congress evinced no enthusiasm for any of it, but has reluctantly gone along.
The consequences of failing to act, to some of us, were readily apparent. It will embolden Assad, and persuade him to use chemical weapons again and again. It will encourage his terroristic allies in Iran and Hezbollah, and lunatic states like North Korea.
It will suggest laws and conventions against chemical weapons are a crude joke — and likely reduce the American superpower to an international laughingstock.
It will isolate and jeopardize western allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Israel.
It will magnify the refugee crisis caused by the Syrian civil war — now affecting more than 1.5 million men, women and children.
But most of all, it will render us less human. Nearly 1,500 innocent civilians were murdered by Bashar al-Assad on the morning of Aug. 21. One third of them were children.
Rallying support for military force is, as noted, no simple task. No one likes it.
But on Aug. 21, a red line was truly crossed. And if we do not acknowledge that — and if we do not act on that — we are indeed slightly less human than we once were.
History, as someone once said, is watching.
