So did you all work out what Assad’s strategic goals were for this ridiculously reckless and entirely unnecessary attack?
And you know it was, in Assad’s estimation, an ‘entirely unnecessary attack’ based on…what? Hindsight and unicorn wishes? His strategic goals? Oh, I’d go with ‘to win the civil war in as quick and total a fashion as possible, regardless of the cost’ would be a good approximation. Since nothing happened to him any of the other times he used chemical weapons, and since he knew Trump wouldn’t do anything (based on the fact that Trump for years has said that), and since he knew Russia had his back and all…why WOULDN’T he use the things, based on those assessments? Oh, that’s right…in hindsight it didn’t work out that way. And he should have known all of that, right? 
Jez, did you really come back to the thread just for this drive by on something that’s been discussed multiple times in this thread already? :smack:
Have you figured out why ISIL bombs mosques and marketplaces? Maybe the answers are related. I await your mature and reasoned thoughts on the matter. Less so your reflexive, sneering, brainless antiestablishment thoughts.
Can I take that as a ‘no’.
You could almost think it might have to do with a party that had something to gain. Except on here.
Chomsky implies through a quote from the state department that the U.S. has had interest in the Gulf/middle east region since the mid 1950’s.
In the last 50 years the allies we have accumulated
-Saudi Arabia (large nation and oil rich)
-Kuwait (small but oil rich)
-the united arab emirates (small but oil rich)
-Iraq (oil rich and once rebuilt will be capitalism friendly)
-Jordan (with u.s./capitalist or neutral)
-Turkey (with u.s./ or neutral)
-Egypt (neutral)
and Israel.
Against the U.S. is
-Syria (sided with russia)
-Iran (who’s leaders we tried to overthrow decades ago, also sided with russia)
-Palestine
-Yemen
Trump and Obama cannot stop the wheels on an operation decades long in motion
P.S. If you’re not missile rich its much more affordable to be chemical weapons rich! Only you get looked down on for using chemical weapons. Ban chemical weapons and you’ve potentially just weakened your opposition.
p.s. Wow! so many NATO/trade deal countries side with the U.S. Its kind of like we give them our jobs for their allegiance and cooperation while we make middle and lower class Americans poor. Costs of doing business!
No, you can’t.
Back to the question then:
What have you got after 12 pages?
He wants to kill his enemies, and is prepared to do just about anything to hold onto power.
Some people have this idea that he’s won the civil war, but it is still raging.
Right, a chemical attack killing 90 civilians, children included, was obv. the way to go then. Worth every cent.
As he was losing territory in this very geographic area and the consistent strategy of the Regime Assad since the peaceful protests began has been to sow terror - and the killing of the children has been indeed an explicit strategy of the regime (the cold blooded -disappearance and torture-assasination of the young boys who wrote the anti-Assad slogans in early 2011 was a trigger of the protests to begin with), yes it has been worth every cent to him.
the idea your statement is some kind of refutation of the Assad motivations shows only ignorance of the history of this regime and its practices.
Sure, that must be it. Thank goodness the internet has you.
Have you read about the torture chambers he runs in military hospitals? It’s ghastly. Why would he do such things? Because that’s who he is.
*Enhanced interrogation wards.
Why don’t you lose the condescending tone and enlighten us with your brilliant insight?
I’m pretty sure his only point is, “If it doesn’t make sense to my ethical compass, it isn’t plausible that it happened.”
That is exactly his ‘point’. Look at his posts in this thread. When asked for evidence or even to simply go into more detail about his assertions he backs of, waits until he thinks things have died down, then tosses out another drive by meant to show how nothing makes sense (to him) about Syria and Assad using gas so must not have happened.
Me, I wonder whether he’s with Assad (There Is No Spoon!) or Putin (magically combining precursor chemicals in an ISIS warehouse or ISIS/AQ false flag to frame Assad), though if I were to guess he might be down a different rabbit hole…it was a false flag, but it was the US who dun it, obviously!
So we’re ignoring the fact we intercepted regime communications talking exactly about the gas attack before it happened too, right?
a. this has nothing to do with this thread, and
b. it just puts him in the same ball park as the USA, except he doesn’t kidnap people off the streets and disappear them to third party countries for enhanced interrogation
You have got to love American’s claiming moral high ground - it’s almost as amusing as when the US President chastises China for its human rights record. That’s a cracker; it takes the rest of the world a couple of days to stop rolling around on the floor.
It only is funny if one is truly ignorant…as you seem to want to display with every post. Take China’s human rights record. If you knew anything about it (which clearly you don’t), you’d see how monumentally stupid it is to try and compare it to the US. You’d have been better off comparing the US to Europe or Canada. China? While it’s true the US locks up a lot of people, often based on color and socio-economics, China locks up a lot of people based on their beliefs, political thought or, you know, just for being Uighur or Tibetan…or just pissed off the CCP or local party types. And when I say ‘locked up’ wrt I’m saying ‘well, could be execute and have their body parts harvested because that’s a thing in China’. But then, those sorts of distinctions are meaningless to you since, well, you are ignorant of them for a start, and secondly you don’t care to know the subject instead you simply want to flail about with drive by posts that snipe at the US.
It’s hilarious, since someone with any sort of understanding could easily make any number of good, valid comparisons that set the US in a poor light for said comparison, and all it would take on your part is simply knowing enough to make them. Instead you compare the US and China’s human rights record and the fact that a US president had the nerve to criticise them on it. And the funny thing? You have already dismissed my post as some sort of pro-American propaganda and that I almost certainly made up all that about China because USA is bad, and you knows what you knows.
Well, he does have people kidnapped off the streets in many cases, but no, Assad doesn’t just take them for enhanced interrogation then endless internment at places like Gitmo…he often just kills them. Men, women and children. In many cases after rape and reportedly very brutal torture. So, it’s only in the same ballpark if one sort of widens the ballpark a lot. Again, you should stick to comparing the US to places in Europe or most of the western world. It only shows how sadly ignorant you are on the subject when you try and compare the US to Assad and assert that they are really the same (or imply the US is worse).