Chemical attack in Syria
The New York Times reports that another chemical weapon has been deployed against Syrian civilians, they call it “Worst Chemical Attack in Years in Syria“- you know – the worst since the last one. The New York Times says that the US blames Assad’s government for the attack;
Dozens of people, including children, died — some writhing, choking, gasping or foaming at the mouth — after breathing in poison that possibly contained a nerve agent or other banned chemicals, according to witnesses, doctors and rescue workers. They said the toxic substance spread after warplanes dropped bombs in the early morning hours. Some rescue workers grew ill and collapsed from proximity to the dead.
The opposition-run Health Department in Idlib Province, where the attack took place, said 69 people had died, providing a list of their names. The dead were still being identified, and some humanitarian groups said as many as 100 had died.
[…]
But only the Syrian military had the ability and the motive to carry out an aerial attack like the one that struck the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun.
Russia offered another explanation. A spokesman for its Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Syrian warplanes had struck an insurgent storehouse containing toxic substances to be used in chemical weapons.
I guess who ever is responsible wasn’t impressed by “the red line” established years ago by the Obama Administration. That maverick, John McCain blames President Trump, though;
McCain, a longtime advocate of arming Syrian rebels and removing Assad from power, also barbed Tillerson, who recently said whether Assad will stay in power “will be decided by the Syrian people.” McCain called that remark “one of the more incredible statements I’ve ever heard,” echoing a fiery statement he released previously.
“Syrian people cannot decide the fate of Assad or the future of their country when they are being slaughtered by Assad’s barrel bombs, Putin’s aircraft and Iran’s terrorist proxies,” McCain said Thursday. “U.S. policy must reflect such basic facts.”
Yeah, it the fault of the 2 1/2 month-old Trump Administration. Instead of running to the cameras and getting his face time in, McCain should be working with the Administration to work through this difficult problem, but then he couldn’t be a maverick could he?
Category: Terror War
It is time for him to go out to pasture, he is starting to sound like Harry Reid! Just go away before you shit on your good career.
Juan McPain had a good career?
And for what it was, has he not already shit all over it?
Maybe that’s his plan? To finally leave after turning into Harry Reid?
Someone recently (Maybe here at TAH) suggested that maybe his actions are more driven from TBI or other philological trauma he received during his POW experience that’s really starting to manifest in his older years.
Or maybe he’s just becoming a crotchety irrelevant asshole.
“Or maybe he’s just becoming a crotchety irrelevant asshole”
He is already there.
Bought property and set up shop.
I’ll take Crotchety Irrelevant Assholes for $500. Alex.
I tried to vote him out, but the bastards would only let me vote once.
You should have shown them your Matricula Consular.
I blame Bush.
I blame King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. If they hadn’t funded Columbus’ expedition none of this would have happened.
You young’uns have short memories. It was Nixon’s fault.
I blame Bush also but I think Jeb. Florida’s policy towards Syria under his leadership was a muddled mess and practically non-existent.
His policy of allowing Syrian and foreign fighters to train, organize and resource in Syria to go kill Americans in Iraq resulted in blow back. That was Jeb wasn’t it?
Talk about now-win situation. We have 3 despicable players in this mess. Who to back if any.
Can’t they all lose?
I pretty well discount anything McCain says now. He pretty well has the same credibility level of CNN.
Man it sucks to live in Syria–Europe should really think about doing something about that. Have fun, Europe!
They did. They opened their borders and admitted millions (literally) of those claiming to be “refugees”.
Unfortunately, a fair number of those so-called “refugees” . . . weren’t. They turned out to be ISIS (or other Islamic extremist) operatives and terrorists instead.
So to stop it all, one would think they’d be motivated to cut it off at the source. They’ll come around one of these days. Until then it’s time to put on some popcorn.
Sorry to hear the Syrians are using chem weapons on one another again. Let’s do the humanitarian thing and forward some body bags to them. Aside from that, they can have my well wishes. And that’s all.
Maybe we should move the southern border wall to the perimeter of Syria, and just let them do whatever they want to each other.
Lets not forget to ship over a couple crates of thoughts and prayers.
I actually have no problem believing that the ISIS thugs and other scum-sucking bottom dwellers fighting AGAINST Assad may have done this themselves. hoping to see mass casualties and thus gain a PR coup against the Assad regime.
The leftist media are all too willing to side with, and believe, anything the terrorists say.
I’m all over supporting the good guys as soon as someone can define who they are. Far as I can tell, the key players make the most corrupt South Vietnamese look like choirboys.
Re the above – TBI vs. crotchety irrelevant asshole – I think that requires an apology to anyone with TBI. They don’t deserve being compared to him. Come to think of it, calling him a crotchety irrelevant asshole is being too kind.
Well, the last time the US got involved in a middle eastern country because of chemical weapons, the world lost its collective shit so I guess the finger-wagging moralists who condemned the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 can figure this out on their own.
Good luck with that. Seriously.
This is from CNN: the gas used in the attack was sarin gas, dropped from planes. This isn’t warfare. It is slaughter. Mass murder.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/05/middleeast/idlib-syria-attack/
Pres. Trump is holding a news conference now with King Abdullah of Jordan.
If they’d been murdered with conventional explosives or bullets would they be less dead, though?
Not trying to flame you here, I’m just saying the world is filled with bad people doing bad things and the way we seem to get revolted with certain methods of killing but not others has always bothered me.
Like the fact that buckets and buckets of tears people have shed over the ~ 300,000 people who died or were injured at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs, while there have been considerably fewer for the several hundred thousand killed by conventional firebombs over Tokyo during the 9 – 10 March 1945 raids, or the countless other air raids that took place.
War his hell, “civil war” even more so.
Perhaps our biggest sin is not our failure to intervene, but rather the fact that our feckless politicians seem to keep implying that we WILL intervene after this or that “red line” is crossed, and it is that hope that keeps the “rebels” from surrendering, which would end the war.
The outrage only goes one way too. Islamists are committing some truly horrible shit over there, but here come western selective outrage to the rescue. I don’t believe anything coming from Syria from propaganda white hats, to NGO Islamist sympathizers, to fake news. It’s all in play including the McCain style Islamist sympathizers in our government trying to influence the US to get involved in another police action in the Middle East.
I’ve taken an even uglier view of this and the middle east in general. I don’t give a fuck at all who gets killed there as long as it isn’t Americans. If 4 or 5 million tons of napalm would burn every living thing from Afghanistan to the West Bank wall into a powdery fine ash I’m good to go with that outcome….
5 billion dead muslims versus one dead American seems a fair trade….I’m done caring what happens to these people.
We often act like extinction is a bad thing, it isn’t it’s nature’s way of regulating life forms that fail to adapt and move forward. Some species extinction is required to advance others. We slaughtered the Neanderthals so we wouldn’t have to share resources. It might be time to reconsider what the end game is for all of us.
Give em small pox blankets.
Save the napalm.
Um, no. The world doesn’t need to let that genie back out of the bottle.
No, no flaming. I’m just relaying what was reported by CNN.
Remember back when Saddam Hussein was accused of testing a nerve agent on a Kurdish village?
It’s the same thing, just mass slaughter. No, they would not be less dead if explosive ordinance were used. In this dispersal 72 people so far were affected by it.
Those ‘lines’ seem to be the problem, since they were ‘drawn’ some time ago and then ignored.
What’s the solution here? Civilians always get hit by warfare, period, no matter where it takes place or when it occurs. It has always been that way. How do you stop several millenia of warfare?
The ‘solution’ is to stop thinking that there’s a “solution” that the Western world can magically apply and just let the combatants work it out between themselves.
What’s prolonging the suffering of the Syrian civilians is the “rebels” stubborn insistence on fighting because they think they’re just one atrocity away from getting Western help
(which also, conveniently, gives them a very strong incentive to either embellish or outright fabricate atrocity stories, too. 😉 )
Unless the Western World is ready to go “all in”, with massive troop attacks and a major campaign, we’re not going to stop this war, and our ambivalent, uneven actions so far have just given the rebels enough hope to prolong the agony.
As Heinlein famously said, “it’s no kindness to hang a man slowly.” Maybe we should step back and let this sort itself out.
Getting rid of brutal arab dictators worked so well in Libya. Syria, too, needs to become a chaotic anarchy with 20 or 30 different “governments” each ruling an area the size of Central Park. Of course it may turn out well, like in Iraq and Afghanistan.
McCain seems to have read “The White Man’s Burden” too many times and takes it too seriously.
McCain hires Islamist lobbyists. I don’t know how that guy isn’t under investigation for supporting terrorism but he needs to go like 10 years ago. He is no friend to America.
I know it’s pedantic but am I the only one who is irritated when the term “nerve gas” is used?
It’s not a gas, it’s a liquid agent.
As I said, I know it’s pedantic, but words have meaning. A gas is a gas and a liquid is a liquid. Just like saying an AR-15 is a “machine gun” or that an M-1911 has a “7 round clip” is wrong, referring to nerve agent as “nerve gas” drives me crazy.
And I wasn’t even a 54B. 😉
But if we explain what it really is we can’t have an episode of 24 where Jack just needs to hold his breath in a room full of “military” grade nerve gas.
Do you ruin movies too? Pisses the wife off to no end when I laugh at something that was supposed to be serious…because the portrayal is so factually incorrect I can’t stop laughing….
Movie nights get interesting at D’s Cantina, MRS D is an ER Nurse, so anything medical gets ripped to shreds, while I pick apart the military stuff. Add a bit of Jameson’s and a good time is had by all!
I try to hold back but it’s tough. 😉
And since I’m a lawyer by trade (though not employed as one now) I also ruin movies about legal battles. 😀
Dad use to illuminate us to the incongruities of “Combat!” – the TV show about WWII in Europe. He’d tell us what was wrong, and why, but succinctly so as to not interfere with the storyline.
He would also explain why certain things depicted were true or realistic.
As he was there, in combat, we learned early and often to not believe what we saw on TV or in the movies.
I only know that the report says it’s sarin. How fast does that evaporate and disperse from the liquid state?
This is going to turn into another media feeding frenzy.
PH: Not an “expert” by any means but as an Intel analyst I developed a morbid fascination with chemical and nuclear weapons.
Anyway, those with more knowledge (54b’s?) can chime in but IIRC I believe the agent has to be in liquid form in order to work. Once it evaporates it’s considerably less effective.
We were always taught that the best time to employ liquid agent chemical weapons was on a cool, foggy morning in a climate like that of Europe, i.e. damp and often cloudy. Extreme Winds and heat would disperse and dilute the chemicals and ultimately make them ineffective as a weapon. Similarly, temps too cold cause the liquid agent to freeze, again making it less likely to work.
The only agents that are truly “gas” are the likes of Chlorine and Phosgene which were used during WW1 to great effect.
A partial answer to your question is that Sarin is evidently a liquid delivered in an aerosol vapor form as opposed to a gas because of its high boiling point. The difference is sort of like state changes with water; it can be fog or mist and saturate air at a relative low temperature, but boil it and it technically becomes a gas in the form of steam.
Sarin is also extremely toxic. It has a fatality threshold of 50 percent for two minute inhalation at concentrations as low as 35 parts per billion. Put another way, a container of the liquid the size of a beer can could kill half the people in an area the size of a football field if they were exposed to the dispersed vapor for as little as two minutes.
This is back of the envelope; there are a lot of variables an expert could ‘splain better.
“By the book” a “lethal” dose of nerve agent is extremely small. But remember that attack by that crazy cult group in Tokyo 20 years or so back? They employed a not-insigificant quantity of Sarin (not sure how much but per the guidelines on the amount it takes to be lethal it should have been enough to kill hundreds if not thousands of people.) And remember what the actual number of dead was? I think it was 6 or maybe 8. It was fewer than 10. There were a number of people who were permanently injured but most of the rest of the people affected recovered fairly quickly. And this attack took place in a crowded subway – theoretically, exactly the kind of environment chemical weapons should be most effective in. I think what the Tokyo attack revealed was that while nerve agent can certainly be lethal, it is very dependent on environment, method of delivery, etc. In terms of military usefulness, chemical weapons really have more down sides than up sides. Yes, they are effective as terror weapons against civilians (who of course are unable to retaliate in kind) but against a military force, the only real purpose of chemical weapons is to reduce the effectiveness of the enemy by forcing his soldiers to suit up in MOPP gear. And then the downside is that if you use chemical weapons against an enemy that has the ability to use them on you, you’re right back where you started, or maybe even worse off if the enemy has better weapons and/or better decontamination gear. I know it’s a popular belief that chemical weapons weren’t used by combatants during WWII because of some humanitarian revulsion at them, but that’s ridiculous – countries that dropped firebombs on civilian housing areas or who shot ballistic missiles at the center of populated cities certainly had no moral qualms about weaponry. Rather, their reluctance to use chemical weapons was based on two observations: First that chemical weapons weren’t really all that effective as weapons since every modern army has developed protective clothing and decontamination gear,… Read more »
Zero fucks given here. War is nasty especially when fighting Islamists. Never believe anything reported in that region at face value.
Agreed more dead islamists is a far better outcome than less dead islamists.
But how do you destroy an enemy that is nearly as scattered as the common cockroach? The only way you get rid of the roach is to destroy the nest, the fumigate the building. It seems to me that the ‘nest’ for these bad guys is so broken up, the only solution is to carpet bomb the entire region. I’m not sure that would even work unless it drove them out of hiding somehow. And how would you distinguish the extremists from their human shields?
I don’t have an answer. I’m just asking. I don’t think there is one single answer to it.
Wait, which ‘bad guys’ are we talking about here? The Assad regime? The “rebels?” Isis? Al Quaeda? The Popular Front of Judea (or is it the Judean People’s Front?)
Even the ‘good guys’ in Syria are only ‘good’ in a relativistic way, by being marginally less-bad that the ‘bad’ guys.
“Fumigating the nest” seems to be exactly what Assad is doing, not in a metaphorical sense but in a literal one.
Of course, all of that is ASS-uming that this “news” coming out of Syria is accurate and is not itself just a propaganda ploy coming out of a region that is known for exactly this type of propaganda ploy.
I think the supporters of the Syrian rebels – the aforementioned purportedly “good guys” – have gone to the Western World Sympathy Bank one time to many.
Sorry, “rebels”, but that account’s been overdrawn since about 2004.
The guy who departed the White House in January left a mess all over the world. He liked to smile and talk shit, forgetting (if he ever knew) that the speeches come after the enemy is vanquished. He used words in a fashion that defied the reality of what he was describing. He gave us the red line and the Arab spring. He called for Assad to step down. He disrupted an entire region that never operated and never will operate by standards of decency, tolerance, and all of the wonderful cornerstones of western democracies. Individually, you may know exceptions, swell folks who just want to go about wiping their asses with their bare hand and to otherwise be left alone. The exceptions do not obviate the rule. The showdown has to come one day, but it’s not now and it is certainly not Syria.
The world has always been a mess. Politicians may stir it around a little, but it’s still a mess. Talking about it is probably the least harmful thing a politician can do.
Trump did make the point that the ‘previous administration’ drew that so-called red line and then did nothing, so he’s essentially in a clean-up stage. That way, all of the blame for bad PR falls on him. But what if the real solution is to ignore the consequences, which will always be there, and turn the place to rubble?
I can’t even keep track of who is who and what is what over there any more.
I do know that these idiot conflicts go so far into the past that writing hadn’t even been invented, and I have to ask why. It’s too easy to become obsessed with that.
Obviously, the ISers want history destroyed, because they’ve blown up or bulldozed everything that says ‘history’ and bragged about it, looted and sold every scrap of history that they can find, and they do it for cash and because they know it pisses people off. Poking the bear, so to speak.
Pres. Trump did make the point that it isn’t just ISIS, but also other extremist groups, so what do you do?Lump them all together and turn the place into rubble? Disperse some message on their internet web that lures all their nasty asses back to their point of origin and then vaporize them?
I can get nastier than that. War is hell. There is always collateral damage. Limpwristed hand wringing and whimpering won’t stop the bad guys.
Blaming the previous guy is a chickenshit move no matter who does it.
Remember how livid folks were here when Obama was blaming Bush for all the problems in the middle east? How is this different?
Furthermore, to echo the losing presidential candidate, what difference, at this point, does it make whose “fault” it is? This isn’t an episode of “The Apprentice” where somebody gets fired and thus has an incentive to point the finger at the other guy.
Instead of quibbling over whose “fault” it is, Trump should be stating what his position is WRT Syria. And if his position is “not our fight” (and I think that’s what it is) then that’s all he needs to say.
Blaming his predecessor doesn’t pile shame on Obama nor does it deflect responsibility onto Obama, it just makes Trump look weak.
GEN Mattis needs to remind his boss that the Maximum Effective Range of an excuse is ZERO.
I’ve had to clean up other people’s messes myself and move ahead.
But that’s a good point. Thanks for the heads up.
I entertained the thought of not replying to your outlandish comments but what the hell. Trump has been in office for 10 weeks or so and, although he hit the ground running with a few important matters, is quite new to the job. How many years were we kept in the dark regarding his predecessor’s foreign policy? I still cannot articulate it. Can you? The issues arising from the ME and No Afr are not Trump’s making and much of the mess traces directly to his immediate predecessor in office. That’s the way it is. Or are we to wipe the slate clean and let bygones be bygones the moment a president becomes a former president? Years after Bush left office, Trump’s immediate predecessor and that clown’s punks were still blaming Bush. Blaming that POS (Trump’s immediate predecessor) weeks after he left office following eight years of f’n things up is just not similar, let alone the same. Trump will develop policy, I am confident, and I am equally certain we will actually be able to articulate it, one to another.
If anyone wants to know what senility looks like, take a look a John McCain.
That’s awfully kind of you, TOW. I thought it was closer to just being a complete jackass, and more of it as each week goes by.
I believe that Assad’s version is as least as likely as the “official” UN version. He said the airstrike was on rebel held areas and one of the bombs exploded a chemical weapons dump held by the radical Muzzies.
Like Assad or not he provides stability in the region that others do not. Remember what happened after Hillary crowed about removing the dictator in Libya? It’s still a shithold of Islamist Terrorists
Listening to the radio on the way home, I heard someone say that was the Syrian government line and then immediately the news reader said “but that theory was debunked by Western experts.”
And all I could think was “Ummmmmmm….so would those be the same ‘experts’ who assured us that Saddam had huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2003?” 😉
Until somebody comes up with a plausible plan for what comes after Assad, I say leave it alone! We don’t have enough troops to garrison the place and anything less is a waste of time and blood.