Phillip Frazer
Three weeks ago videos were broadcast around the world of men, women and children gasping for life, or dying, from breathing in poison gas in the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun.
Within 24 hours the Trump administration released several pages of photos, maps, and charts claiming to prove that this was a bombing by Syrian air forces. Trump ordered 59 missiles to hit a Syrian military airport, giving Russia time to evacuate the base before their attack.
People who usually accept the word of the White House mostly agreed with Trump’s analysis of the gas event and approved of his retaliatory attack.
There has been no independent investigation of the gas event, neither of the ‘evidence’ presented by the US, which was mostly supplied by Islamic militias fighting the government of Syrian president Assad.
Over the seven years of the carnage in Syria, US military and intelligence have twice before blamed Assad for gassing his citizens, both times failing to convince then president Obama that Assad’s regime was responsible. Theodore Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specialises in munitions, examined the new Trump White House documents and dismissed them as ‘obviously false, misleading and amateurish’.
The billions spent by the CIA on the Syrian war since 2014 have allegedly targeted Daesh and Al Qaeda, but Trump’s missiles, which some reports say he launched at his daughter Ivanka’s urging, were aimed at Syrian government property, which is clearly an act of war.
In Australia, PM Turnbull said the US is ‘not seeking to overthrow the Assad regime’, even though it clearly is. Labor leader Bill Shorten called Trump’s missiles ‘appropriate and proportionate’ while Greens acting leader Scott Ludlam said: ‘The horror of the chemical weapons attack … requires a credible, independent investigation, not a random barrage of missiles ordered by a clueless president.’
You’d have to be dense to not be sceptical. On the long list of invasions launched by the US since the end of WWII, many have been justified by evidence that subsequently proved to be phoney, prime examples being the Gulf of Tonkin incident used to launch the war on North Vietnam, and the false claim that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction, used to justify the still-raging war in Iraq.
Then, last week North Korea threatened to launch missiles with nuclear weapons on if Trump doesn’t stop threatening to ‘take out his nuclear program’ as our foreign minister Julie Bishop so nonchalantly put it.
North Korea is run by a family dynasty that is beyond parody, but it has agreed in the past to decommission its nukes in exchange for alternative energy resources that essentially the US failed to deliver.
So now we have, in Syria, a huge and hideous war of multiple local militias, with funding and weaponry from the US, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran and a few fleas on lapdogs such as Australia, all blaming each other for being more inhumane and disgusting in their chosen methods of committing mass murder. And in Korea, Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump are threatening to nuke the other if he/it doesn’t back down first.
And what does our prime minister say to Trump’s latest mega-threat – threats being his favourite and possibly only tactic in making deals?
He told ABC’s 7:30 ‘I trust the judgment, the wisdom of the American government, the president and the vice-president.’ Really? Think about that. Our prime minister trusts the wisdom and judgment of Donald Trump.
Bill Shorten, who last year called Trump ‘barking mad’ has fallen into line, so once again the only sense among national political leaders comes from Greens’ Scott Ludlam. ‘A guy who loses his mind at a tweet is facing off with a guy who called a movie an act of war, and they’re doing it with nuclear weapons,’ he said, referring to the satirical farce movie about Kim Jong-Il made by silly Americans.
In our mainstream media, Fairfax’s conservative commentator Peter Harcher quotes Allan Gyngell, former head of the top intelligence body, the Office of National Assessments, with approval: ‘The natural tendency of Australian foreign policy advisers faced with change is to suggest going along for the ride [with America]… It is sometimes excellent advice. But not this time.’
These grey-suits don’t often say stuff like that, but then it’s not often the fate of the planet and every living thing on it rests in the tiny hands of two preposterous brickheads each with hair heavier than the brains beneath.
As Lily Tomlin said, ‘No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.’
n Phillip Frazer considers New Zealand from coorabellridge.com.
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