Parliament reconvenes on Monday, so this is clearly coincidental:
(@jim man-rag compliant emoji)
I doubt Corbyn will even mention it during PMQs. May will probably have murdered some Syrians by then so the flag waiving brigade will be too ecstatic to give a shit.
Probably, because bombing a country for using the precursors you sold to them to make gas to slaughter their own citizens makes so much sense.
I really do wonder if she will do this as head of a minority government. It only takes one hospital/school/cemetary full of collateral damage to really make her position untenable. It’ll be human shields ahoy over there so it is high risk to fire away, particularly when there is clearly no plan for the aftermath.
May’s been left in the lurch a bit. The Donald’s attention span re Syria has run out & he’s on to slagging off James Comey & trying to put out the fires that the new book will set off. Perhaps brave Theresa, believing as strongly as she does in the rightness of her cause, will set about punishing Syria & Russia on her own.
(Trump may also have realised that this campaign at this time is likely to be disastrous)
She’s a fucking joke that’s for sure. I just hope they don’t bomb, have we fucking learnt nothing about the futility of this kind of action.
Do you truly believe that he has the will or capacity to think about consequences ?
I do think that if Hillary had won that election the missiles would be in the air by now.
YAMaxFlinnAICMFP.
This would be fucking pointless unless there is a massive intervention. There was an cruise missile attack last year which achieved nothing in the wake of a previous chemical attack by Assad.
This thread by a labour MP is quite informative (before the trolls and loons added loads of crap to it):
https://twitter.com/lloyd_rm/status/984780213077925888?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
I tend to agree with his statement:
I have sympathy with the desire to act; to try and enforce both international law and to show Syria that it cannot continue to poison its citizens. But there is no way to bomb Syria into the country we want it to be.
Expanded
There used to be a list somewhere of countries that the US had tried to bomb into ‘democracy’ or the ‘American Way’ or some such shite i will see if i can find it.
Here’s a list, compiled by historian William Blum, of countries which the US bombed since the end of WW2
Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-2015
Afghanistan 2001-2015
Pakistan 2007-2015
Somalia 2007-8, 2011
Yemen 2009, 2011
Libya 2011, 2015
Syria 2014-2016
In how many of these instances did a stable democratic society, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result?
Choose one of the following:
(a) 0
(b) zero
© none
(d) not one
“A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force”
The real problem is that foreign relations are unbelievably complex. But there are hawks who would point out that Germany and Japan were not good countries in 1940 but are better now. I agree though that bombing Syria isn’t going to make any difference to the long-term outcome of the war there. But if it would discourage others from using chemical weapons then perhaps there’s a case for it.
VB
Mustn’t go off message
Ha, I watched that earlier today. Incredible.
Embarrassingly poor performance by Sky. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an answer to the question he was trying to put. What if Assad sees using chemical weapons as a way to dislodge a particularly stubborn group of opponents ? And, perhaps, to convey the message to the next lot that he will stop at nothing to defeat them ? That could shorten the war for him. There is disquiet in Iran about the continued cost of the Syrian war and I could imagine the same is true in Russia. The Americans were winning the war in the Pacific in 1945 and would have defeated Japan eventually. But they decided to hasten the end by using a much more powerful weapon. I’m not sure that in that case shortening the war was the main reason to drop the bomb. But the fact is that they did drop it. The argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been staged by the Japanese because the Americans were going to win anyway isn’t the general consensus, I think.
VB
Indeed. There is a very strong school of thought that suggests at last part of the A-bomb deployment in 1945 was aimed at dissuading Stalin from pushing his luck. The cost of an invasion of Japan were the obvious driving force though.
Why would Assad use chemical weapons for that though? I don’t really understand why he would use them at this stage.
I’m not getting all conspiracy about this - I strongly suspect that they were used, and I think it most likely that he used them, but I’d like some process, inspection and evidence before we bomb the fuck out of them.
Its RT so feel free to ignore it. This is a more plausible explanation of what happened in Douma imho.
From a medic who was actually working in the hospital.
As I understand it the Syrians are holding several members of the British Special Forces. They are in an interesting position as Britain isn’t supposed to be at war with Syria. If true, it could be somewhat embarrassing.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the OPCW inspectors can find any poisoned victims of this event or any trace of chlorine or nerve agent in the vicinity.