Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

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The 'internationally-recognized government of Syria' has run an internationally recognized ethnic cleansing campaign against the country's Sunni population, the vast majority of it hasn't been a part of ISIS (Maybe you have a problem with the map, but the Yazidi genocide happened in Iraq). Speaking of ISIS, maybe if Assad didn't intentionally release jihadis from Sednaya, or didn't support their previous incarnation in Iraq, we wouldn't have these problems. That's why there are complete sanctions on Assad, which will not be removed until he falls.

As for the gas massacres, the conspiracy theories just get madder and madder. Obviously, the rebels are supposed to have attacked themselves for the XX time after seeing all the previous gas attacks led to no reaction? While never ever using them against Assad troops? The Assad regime being the only one in theater with the equipment and capability of staging a gas attack? Some people are just shilling for mass-murder.

The Iranian government isn't elected. Everything is controlled by the Supreme Leader and IRGC, and the 'elected' offices have no power. The 'elected' offices where the only people who are allowed to be elected are those that support the regime[0], and protesters are killed[1].

You're right about one thing - the Saudis are not much better. Then again, they didn't support a WMD attack and deny it later, like Iran apologists do. Nor do they officially have genocide aims against other countries. Maybe the apologists secret admire the Mullah's aims, and that's why they defend the regime.

[0] https://apnews.com/44ad5910fa3e1a297d6c0b5ad6c3c59f

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-protests-specialrepo...

Haha we have sanctions on Cuba for Pete's sake. Sanctions don't imply anything. They do kill thousands of people a month in Venezuela alone [0], with corresponding numbers in a dozen other nations so good job I guess.

There was no "gas attack". Some murderous slaving ISIS criminals took a sledgehammer up on the roof, knocked out some holes, and shoved some empty canisters into them. Then they mixed some bleach with some muriatic acid and left the scene. Later, there was of course some chlorine residue. But simple physics proved that full canisters of poison gas hadn't been "dropped out of helicopters": the roof wouldn't have stopped so many of them. [1] Actual gas bombs of the sort that USA sold to Saddam for use against Iran are carefully constructed devices that can actually be dropped from aircraft and expected to distribute poison gas. Dropping bare storage cylinders only works in the movies. The real conspiracy theory is that the internationally-recognized government of Syria had anything to do with those attacks. They had neither means nor motive. The "moderate rebels" (really ISIS) that USA had been supporting had both.

Of course you don't care about details. Even your pose of criticism of Saudi is cynical. You want to sell the Saudis bombs to kill Yemeni children right up until they don't want to buy them anymore, at which time you'll want to start bombing KSA. Mostly you just support status quo USA policy for the last 70 years. That is, we kill lots of brown and black people so that the public can be buffaloed into giving armaments manufacturers obscene amounts of money. The public would prefer to spend that money on literally anything else; you disagree. You'll probably make a show of declaring that you're actually more against war than I am, but your religious devotion to every lie that the war media has ever tossed off shows where your heart is. Pacifists oppose killing innocents, both through sanctions and through the wars for which sanctions are pretexts. The Middle East is broken for the same reason that Latin America is broken and Southeast Asia was broken for a long time: USA broke it. The best thing we can do for them is the best thing we could have done for them in the 1950s: stop interfering with their governments, stop providing armaments to various parties, and stop killing them.

[0] https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-...

[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/25/opcw-syria-gas-attack-sta...

The US alone has sanctions on Cuba, nearly the entire world (except Putin and Iran and China) has sanctions on Assad. It's a bit different, you see?

Nobody believes the lies regarding the WMD massacres, we know Assad did these (and so much more). It required rebels with no advanced weapons, much less chemical weapons, to attack themselves over and over, while never ever attacking Assad. The Douma massacre in particular wasn't bleach, it was a different chemical agent[0]. The nature of Assad's attacks is well documented[1].

There's nothing 'pacifist' about shilling for mass murder. It's like those 'pacifists' Orwell attacked during WW2 because they were equating the Allies with the Nazis, that is, being 'objectively pro-fascist'.

That's a very cynical position, despite your alleged criticism of Saudi. I bet that as soon as Saudi ignores US and buys weapons from Russia we'll hear a different tune from your likes.

[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-dou...

[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/21/the-open-source-h...

This debate is stupid. No one understands what is going on in modern geopolitics of the middle east -- including policy czars, and especially your or I. Probably not even the US government. These are gigantic state sponsored operations with foreign governments (e.g Russia), militant organizations.

As an example -- consider that ISIS was shipping ~$160 million in crude oil via smuggling routes to China. Even with all our power, it is not trivial to track such things.

What I am saying is that there are interests here that are enormous and impossible to understand.. some not even based upon nation-state and totally a-political.

The fact that you believe you have a definitive assessment regarding the gas attacks reveals your naivete.

Take a look at the history of the Assad regime and how we destabilized the region by funding his opposition. Take a look at the history of Egypt or Libya over the past 40 years. One day Gadaffi was an American hero, the next day we are cheering for his downfall. Sensationalist stories of rape/murder/torture being spread through the media. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Look at the sort of stuff we spread during the Gulf War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

This is all to say -- neither of us really knows what we are talking about. But you seem to have a very "good vs. evil" approach to the world that is naive at best.

No one understands what is going on in modern geopolitics of the middle east...

We in USA don't actually have to understand conditions in other nations. We just have to pay attention to our government and media, and remember what they've done even after they've stopped talking about it. They lied us into war with Spain, which led to decades of murder and oppression of Puerto Ricans and (especially) Filipinos. They lied us into WWI, which led to the Nazis. They lied us into Vietnam, which caused millions of deaths in southeast Asia. They lied us into Kuwait, which caused 9/11. They lied us into Afghanistan, in which USA soldiers are now dying who weren't yet born when the lies were told. They lied us into Iraq, which has seen horrific loss of life oh and also the creation of ISIS. They lied us into Libya, which peaceful prosperous nation was replaced in six months by a smoldering hellscape, complete with slave markets. They lied us somewhat into Syria, where we and our ISIS allies were (thank God) defeated. They tried to lie us into Iran...

(This is not even to mention the dozens of nations whose elected governments we've deposed in favor of authoritarians in spooky ways, at least as long ago as 1953 in Iran, as murderously as 1965-7 in Indonesia, and as recently as last year in Bolivia.)

Gosh, what can we conclude from this fairly consistent history? I submit that when we're fed some pretext for war, we should assume it's a lie and oppose the war for which it is told. If we're ever able to do so consistently (and perhaps the last two entries in the list above are cause for hope?), it will result in a greater global flowering of peace and prosperity than we've ever seen before.

Haha "bellingcat" that's rich. No one conscious pays attention to that spook show. Grayzone has had their number for a long time. [0] They do have good SEO; it's not surprising that a naive google on these topics pulls their emissions out of the bog. And Eliot Higgins is an inspiration! From unemployed college dropout to widely-cited international aviation and weapons expert, through a personally-developed, diligent regimen of playing video games. [1] The joke is certainly on Theodore Postol: he wasted a fifty-year career studying physics, nuclear technology, and weapons systems at Pentagon, Argonne National Labs, and Stanford, only to be overruled by this pasty neckbeard. It's almost as if the way to get quoted in the war media is to say just what the war pigs want said...

[0] https://thegrayzone.com/?s=bellingcat&orderby=relevance&orde...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/business/media/open-sourc...

Postol ended up a loon, denying obvious camera footage (when it comes to Iron dome), and ignoring basic chemistry (regarding the Assad massacres) in favour of conspiracy thoeries. So much of a loon he was resigned from his journal membership once peer review found no basis for his assertions[0]. Ultimately, there's no moral difference between the 'anti-imperialist' US far Left and the caricature they chase. Except this: Even when the US acts badly, it's done by people who were elected to do this, and have to maneuver in the world - the 'anti-imperialist' Left does the supporting genocide biz without being elected, without any consequences, without any scruples and with the approval of their conscience (inasmuch they have one). The C.S. Lewis quote about Robber Barons applies in full here.

[0] https://www.truthorfiction.com/theodore-postol-mit-paper-syr...

Another no-name website quoting bellingcat does not convince anyone to believe bellingcat. It's easy to falsely malign an old man (who doesn't employ a PR firm) online (and especially in wikipedia). Postol's five decades of experience still stacks up pretty well against Higgins's several years playing video games on the basement couch. (British unemployment benefits might be more generous than ours?) It is interesting that he is the authority who will put his name to these zany conspiracy theories. OPCW have enough whistleblowers to form a band, as one can read at Grayzone linked above or from the original sources. [0]

One less charitable than I would wonder just why you're so committed to this exhaustive parroting of trivial military-industrial complex dogma, to the extent that you'd accuse a random pacifist (not "Leftist") of secretly (so secretly he doesn't himself know it!) supporting genocide. USA doesn't fight in wars in order to "stop genocides". (Again, we were ISIS allies in Syria and even sometimes in Iraq. That is not to mention the hell-world we created in Libya; a less powerful nation would certainly have been called before the Hague for that pile of atrocities.) We fight in wars in order to transfer public assets to armaments manufacturers and to their puppets in government and media, and those puppets will employ any pretext in pursuit of that goal. We gave the publicly-admitted portion of our military $750B this year. The citizens of USA (and everyone else) would be safer if we spent a third of that.

[0] https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/document/20190227-Engineeri...

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