Is Syria the target of Washington’s planned military action, allegedly for its use of chemical weapons, or is the target elsewhere? For Spain’s El Seminal, columnist Eduardo Arroyo writes that it is actually Iran in America’s sights, and that even if Assad used chemical weapons, after Washington armed Saddam Hussein and helped him launch sarin gas attacks against those very same Iranians a mere 25 years ago, the United States lacks the standing to act on its own to force Syria to stop.
For El Seminal, Eduardo Arroyo starts off this way:
It seems we are on the verge of entering one of the most idiotic wars that the West has ever waged – but is that really it? No, because the “Tomahawk” missiles are really aimed at Iran, not Syria. Syria is Iran’s only ally in the region and Iran is very much involved in the Syrian conflict in support of the Syrian government; and it is a conflict Bashar al-Assad’s army appears to be winning. Consequently, a victory for Assad would be a victory for Iran – and that is intolerable.
No question – the use of chemical weapons is repugnant to any normal sense of conscience, but I am old enough to remember when Iraq, then an ally of the United States, employed gas against the Kurds in Hallabja, no one attacked Bagdad. That attack would have to wait until 2003, when there was no gas nor any other so-called “weapons of mass destruction.”
I also remember that around 1988, the CIA had the nerve to propagate the theory that it was Iran that had used chemical weapons. In that regard, journalist Robert Fisk has on many occasions recounted the journey he took on a Iranian military train with soldiers who were victims of gas attack and who suffered terrible injuries. At the time, Fisk says, and despite far more convincing evidence than we have today which was provided by U.N. inspectors, Western reporters spoke only of “alleged” gas victims. But of course, Saddam was “our ally,” the ally of the West, which today is full throatedly opting for the shadowy path into an unpredictable war.
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