If one were to listen to all the conflicting stories being held as “gospel” coming out of Syria, that person might be confused at best and at worst saying someone is not being forthcoming with the truth. The President has used a “red line” to draw in the sand and now he wants to use a big stick. Obama insists, using Sec.of State John Kerry as the new Colin Powell, that Bashar al-Assad has used poison gas his own people.
Now, in an article called Who’s Lying? Brennan, Obama or Both?, author Ray McGovern has discovered a memorandum sent to the President Obama by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). The VIPS suggests that there has been some recent Intel that the rebels want the U.S. involved in war, “that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21.”
The VIPS are asking if Syria is a Trap. They tell President Obama, “you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity commonly known as ‘plausible denial.’” “We have been down this road before,” they write, “– with President George W. Bush, to whom we addressed our first VIPS memorandum immediately after Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003 U.N. speech, in which he peddled fraudulent ‘intelligence’ to support attacking Iraq.”
The “rap,” the VIPS suggest, is two-fold. First, that CIA Director John Brennan,was not truthful with Congress and that he, Brennan, “is perpetrating a pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress.” The VIPs continued, “Our sources confirm that a chemical incident of some sort did cause fatalities and injuries on August 21 in a suburb of Damascus.” They insist, however, that “the incident was not the result of an attack by the Syrian Army. . using military-grade chemical weapons . . according to CIA officers working on the Syria issue.”
This attack on August 21 was to provide “a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters.” What they really wanted was do something that would “bring the United States into the war.” Here we have circumstantial evidence pointing to Assad and supposedly carried out by the Syrian Army that they used gas on their own people. Then, regardless of our own CIA officers crying fraud, their boss, CIA Director John Brennan, is providing support for circumstantial allegations.
What the VIPS are suggesting is that the rebels could have staged the whole thing to bring the United States into war.
The Second part of this two-fold trap, explain the VIPS, “Until now, it has not been quite as clear that the Netanyahu government in Israel has equally powerful incentive to get Washington more deeply engaged in another war.” Moreover, “coming from Israel and those Americans who lobby for Israeli interests, this priority Israeli objective is becoming crystal clear.”
So, what exactly is it that Israel wants? Reporter Jodi Rudoren, writing from Jerusalem for the New York Times addresses Israeli motivation. Rudoren notes “that the Israelis have argued, quietly, that the best outcome for Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war. . . is no outcome.”
Could Israel be the elephant in the room that no one wants to admit is even in the room, and least of all, playing the game. Is Netanyahu the unwilling participant needed to close the trap?
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York commented, “this is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie. ‘Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.’” So let the U.S. do everybody’s dirty-work, once more. After so much Middle-East misery and economic loss, let us police the world.
Richard Andrew is a guest blogger for Ring of Fire.
