Juan Cole: Assad troops got the mixture wrong
US intelligence agencies released an intercept on Wednesday showing that after the attack, a ministry of defense official made outraged inquiries from a local commander as to what in the world he had done.
The intercept would be consistent with local Baath chem warfare units routinely mixing a little deadly sarin gas into crowd control gas, killing small numbers of rebels with each deployment, but in this case making an error and getting the mix wrong. Thus, around a thousand were killed instead of dozens. British intelligence seems to have come to a similar conclusion
The intercept does not prove that Bashar al-Assad knew about or ordered the chemical weapons attack. It does not, however, disprove that the Baath regime has a systematic policy of low level use of chemical weapons. It does put paid to the crackpot conspiracy theory, advanced by the regime and the Russians, that the rebels gassed themselves.
President Obama has probably boxed himself into rather uselessly tossing a couple of cruise missiles onto Damascus next week. For a thoughtful man he often seems to lock himself into undesirable courses of action by ill-considered and hasty public remarks. But whatever he does, it seems clear that it won’t have the kind of multilateral framework he prefers, and he’ll have to cowboy it.
http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/western-strike-stall.html
This is a Cole post from before Obama's referral of the issue to congress.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Please. Have we forgotten this:
The "intelligence services" lie reflexively to create whatever propaganda suits the latest narrative for increasing profits for the MIC and war creds for politicians.
Such skilled rhetoric undoubtedly will change many minds.
