Of Robert Fish

Source: Comedonchisciotte
The hypocrisy of it all. These ignoble intentions. The carelessness. The shameful lies and excuses.
I'm not talking about the US president with hasty and impulsive tweets and his desires to escape police raids on his lawyer's office - obviously there is a connection with Russia.
And I'm not talking about his latest scandal. It's possible that life with Melania isn't going swimmingly at the moment. Better to talk about this than to sit with generals and ex-generals and seriously discuss Russia and Syria.
I'm not talking about Theresa May, who wants to avoid the Brexit discussion through every type of distraction possible: the Salisbury attacks, Douma -also Trump. So when the poor lady thought she had gotten the consent of the US President, Trump called Macron. What is all this nonsense?
Macron has now joined the Saudis against the so-called Syrian "expansionism".- and it is certain that there are no links with the sale of French weapons to the Saudi regime. The great desire of young French people to be like Napoleon is truly sad (I can think of a few others), which is to be understood that they are dedicated to uniting for war, rather than to avoid it.
Now we have our spokesmen and ministers clamoring about the need to avoid the “normalisation” of chemical warfare, of its becoming ordinariness in the war, back to the terrible days of the First World War.
All this means zero excuses for the Syrian government – ​​although I have some doubts, having seen Russia's involvement in Syria with my own eyes, when Putin might have become impatient to end the war and eliminate those hiding in the Douma tunnels rather than wait a few more weeks. Remember the cruelty of Grozny.
But we all know the problems in proving the real use of chemical weapons and gas. Like depleted uranium - which is usually used in the ammunition of Western armies - it leaves no trace of metal with the address written on it, exactly like a fragment of a shell or a bomb. When all this began with the first gas attack in Damascus, the Russians identified the ammunition produced in the Soviet Union, but sent to Libya, not in Syria.
But it's a different war that I'm mentioning today. It's the war between Iran and Iraq between 1980 and the 1988, when Saddam invaded Iran. Then when the Iranians crossed the border again and invaded Iraq years later, Saddam used gas against thousands of Iranian soldiers, and as many civilians, which is why many nurses and doctors were present on the war front.
Funny how we've forgotten all that now. Let's not talk about it now. We forgot about everything. And now you talk about “normalizing” chemical warfare – wonderful!
But in our desire to focus on Syria, we are not mentioning Iran's gas attacks – Iran is another of our enemies today, Obviously- and this may be the cause of our lack of official memory.
More likely, this was due to Saddam's institutionalization of chemical warfare and his use of chemical weapons., who at the time was an ally of the West and of all the Sunni states of the Gulf - our Sunni hero at the front. Thousands of Iranian soldiers expected to die were declared on Iraqi radio after they crossed the border. “Persian insects” have crossed the border, they announced. And this is how they were treated.
The chemical precursors to Iraq's weapons came largely from the United States - one from New Jersey - and US personnel who later visited the front made no comment on the use of the chemical weapons we had sold to the Iraqi regime., Obviously, for “agricultural purposes”. It had to do with insects, Right?
Nowadays no one mentions this terrible war which was fought with our total compliance. It is almost an "exclusive" to mention the whole story about this conflict, that we have so religiously forgotten. This was the real “normalization” and we allowed it to happen. Albeit religious, for it was the first battle of the Shia-Sunni war of our time. But it was real.
Of the thousands of Iranians who were asphyxiated, some survivors were also sent to British hospitals to receive special treatment. I traveled with other people on a military train through the desert to Tehran, the train compartment full of sad young men spitting snot and bleeding from bandages as they read the miniature Koran.
They had blisters on their skin and, terrifying, more blisters on top of the blisters. I wrote a series of articles on these obscenities for the Times, for whom I later worked. The Foreign Office later told my publishers that my articles were “unhelpful”.
No discretion today. No fear of standing outside alongside Saddam then – because in those days, Obviously, the good guys were using chemical weapons. We do not remember the Kurds of Halabja who were poisoned with gas by Saddam and that the CIA told its officers to declare that that gas was used by the Iranians?
For this war crime, Saddam should have been put on trial. He really was a “gas killing animal”. But he was hanged for a minor massacre with conventional weapons – because, as I always suspected, we never wanted to openly show his partners selling him chemical weapons.
Let's go back to the present. Theresa May held a War Council, for God's sake, as if our losses at the front were increasing as on the Somme River in 1916, or as if Dorniers warplanes were departing occupied France to bomb London in 1940.
What is this childish prime minister doing? Older and wiser Conservatives will note the immaturity of this nonsense, and they will want a debate in Parliament. How could May follow a president who the whole world recognizes as crazy, chronically unstable, but whose childish messages – about missiles being “beautiful, new and intelligent” -are taken seriously by many of my colleagues in the U.S.? Maybe they should be more worried about what will happen if Trump withdraws from the nuclear deal with Iran.
It is truly a bad time for the history of the Middle East – and, as usual, it will be the Palestinians who will suffer, and their tragedy completely forgotten amidst this madness. So we will go to war? And how will we get out of this war once it starts? Someone has a plan? If there's all this gigantic mess, what wars it will tend to produce? What will happen?
Of course Russia will come to the rescue, as it did with Obama when chemical weapons were first used in the war in Syria.
Source: www.counterpunch.org
Link: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/13/chemical-weapons-hypocrisy/
Translation for www.comedonchisciotte.org edited by A.B.