Truthdig
Donald Trumps Wag the Dog Moment in Syria
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/trumps_wag_the_dog_moment_20170409/
Posted on Apr 9, 2017
By Robert Parry / Consortiumnews
(https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/07/trumps-wag-the-dog-moment/)
The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter conducts strike operations in the
Mediterranean Sea on Friday. (Petty Officer 3rd Class Ford Williams / U.S.
Navy)
Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern
Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence
analysts doubting the Syrian regimes guilt and launched a lethal
retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.
Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from
neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign
policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after
his surprise victory on Nov. 8.
There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night,
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community
assessed with a high degree of confidence that the Syrian government had
dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.
But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments,
saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that al-Qaida-affiliated
rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a
chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas
that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.
One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged
event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced
only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek regime
change in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic
terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.
The source said the Trump national security team split between the
Presidents close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve
Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who
have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army
general who was a protégé of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.
White House Infighting
In this telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as
national security adviser and this weeks removal of Bannon from the
National Security Council were key steps in the reassertion of neocon
influence inside the Trump presidency. The strange personalities and
ideological extremism of Flynn and Bannon made their ousters easier, but
they were obstacles that the neocons wanted removed.
Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said,
they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria,
revealing the Obama administrations CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas
attack
(https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/06/nyt-retreats-on-2013-syria-sarin-clai
ms/) in 2013 was a false-flag operation intended to sucker President Obama
into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels and the
intelligence analysts similar beliefs about Tuesdays incident.
Instead, Trump went along with the idea of embracing the initial rush to
judgment
(https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/05/another-dangerous-rush-to-judgment-in
-syria/) blaming Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added
that Trump saw Thursday nights missile assault as a way to change the
conversation in Washington, where his administration has been under fierce
attack from Democrats claiming that his election resulted from a Russian
covert operation
(https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/29/the-sleazy-origins-of-russia-gate/) .
If changing the narrative was Trumps goal, it achieved some initial success
with several of Trumps fiercest neocon critics, such as neocon Senators
John McCain and Lindsey Graham, praising the missile strike, as did Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The neocons and Israel have long sought
regime change
(https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/30/deciphering-the-mideast-chaos/) in
Damascus even if the ouster of Assad might lead to a victory by Islamic
extremists associated with al-Qaida and/or the Islamic State.
Wagging the Dog
Trump employing a wag the dog strategy, in which he highlights his
leadership on an international crisis to divert attention from domestic
political problems, is reminiscent of President Bill Clintons decision to
attack Serbia in 1999 as impeachment clouds were building around his sexual
relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky.
Trumps advisers, in briefing the press on Thursday night, went to great
lengths to highlight Trumps compassion toward the victims of the poison gas
and his decisiveness in bombing Assads military in contrast to Obamas
willingness to allow the intelligence community to conduct a serious review
of the evidence surrounding the 2013 sarin-gas case.
Ultimately, Obama listened to his intelligence advisers who told him there
was no slam-dunk evidence
(https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/10/neocons-red-faced-over-red-line/)
implicating Assads regime and he pulled back from a military strike at the
last minute while publicly maintaining the fiction
(https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/24/obamas-foreign-policy-self-enslavemen
t/) that the U.S. government was certain of Assads guilt.
In both cases 2013 and 2017 there were strong reasons to doubt Assads
responsibility. In 2013, he had just invited United Nations inspectors into
Syria
(https://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/07/the-collapsing-syria-sarin-case/) to
investigate cases of alleged rebel use of chemical weapons and thus it made
no sense that he would launch a sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs,
guaranteeing that the U.N. inspectors would be diverted to that case.
Similarly, now, Assads military has gained a decisive advantage over the
rebels and he had just scored a major diplomatic victory with the Trump
administrations announcement that the U.S. was no longer seeking regime
change in Syria. The savvy Assad would know that a chemical weapon attack
now would likely result in U.S. retaliation and jeopardize the gains that
his military has achieved with Russian and Iranian help.
The counter-argument to this logic made by The New York Times and other
neocon-oriented news outlets essentially maintains that Assad is a crazed
barbarian who was testing out his newfound position of strength by baiting
President Trump. Of course, if that were the case, it would have made sense
that Assad would have boasted of his act, rather than deny it.
But logic and respect for facts no longer prevail inside Official
Washington, nor inside the mainstream U.S. news media.
Intelligence Uprising
Alarm within the U.S. intelligence community about Trumps hasty decision to
attack Syria reverberated from the Middle East back to Washington, where
former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported hearing from his intelligence
contacts in the field that they were shocked at how the new poison-gas story
was being distorted by Trump and the mainstream U.S. news media.
Giraldi told Scott Hortons Webcast
(https://www.libertarianinstitute.org/scotthortonshow/4617-philip-giraldi-sa
ys-ic-military-doubt-assad-gas-narrative/) : Im hearing from sources on
the ground in the Middle East, people who are intimately familiar with the
intelligence that is available who are saying that the essential narrative
that were all hearing about the Syrian government or the Russians using
chemical weapons on innocent civilians is a sham.
Giraldi said his sources were more in line with an analysis postulating an
accidental release of the poison gas after an al-Qaida arms depot was hit by
a Russian airstrike.
The intelligence confirms pretty much the account that the Russians have
been giving
which is that they hit a warehouse where the rebels now
these are rebels that are, of course, connected with al-Qaida where the
rebels were storing chemicals of their own and it basically caused an
explosion that resulted in the casualties. Apparently the intelligence on
this is very clear.
Giraldi said the anger within the intelligence community over the distortion
of intelligence to justify Trumps military retaliation was so great that
some covert officers were considering going public.
People in both the agency [the CIA] and in the military who are aware of
the intelligence are freaking out about this because essentially Trump
completely misrepresented what he already should have known but maybe he
didnt and theyre afraid that this is moving toward a situation that
could easily turn into an armed conflict, Giraldi said before Thursday
nights missile strike. They are astonished by how this is being played by
the administration and by the U.S. media.
One-Sided Coverage
The mainstream U.S. media has presented the current crisis with the same
profound neocon bias that has infected the coverage of Syria and the larger
Middle East for decades. For instance, The New York Times on Friday
published a lead story
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/world/middleeast/us-said-to-weigh-milita
ry-responses-to-syrian-chemical-attack.html?_r=1) by Michael R. Gordon and
Michael D. Shear that treated the Syrian governments responsibility for the
poison-gas incident as flat-fact. The lengthy story did not even deign to
include the denials from Syria and Russia that they were responsible for any
intentional deployment of poison gas.
The article also fit with Trumps desire that he be portrayed as a decisive
and forceful leader. He is depicted as presiding over intense deliberations
of war or peace and displaying a deep humanitarianism regarding the
poison-gas victims, one of the rare moments when the Times, which has become
a reliable neocon propaganda sheet, has written anything favorable about
Trump at all.
According to Syrian reports on Friday, the U.S. attack killed 13 people,
including five soldiers at the airbase.
Gordon, whose service to the neocon cause is notorious, was the lead author
(https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/05/another-dangerous-rush-to-judgment-in
-syria/) with Judith Miller of the Times bogus aluminum tube story in
2002 which falsely claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was
reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program, an article that was then cited by
President George W. Bushs aides as a key argument for invading Iraq in
2003.
Regarding this weeks events, Trumps desperation to reverse his negative
media coverage and the dubious evidence blaming Assad for the Idlib incident
could fit with the Wag the Dog movie from 1997 in which an embattled
president creates a phony foreign crisis in Albania.
In the movie, the White House operation is a cynical psychological operation
(https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/25/how-us-flooded-the-world-with-psyops/
) to convince the American people that innocent Albanian children,
including an attractive girl carrying a cat, are in danger when, In reality,
the girl was an actor posing before a green screen that allowed scenes of
fiery ruins to be inserted as background.
Today, because Trump and his administration are now committed to convincing
Americans that Assad really was responsible for Tuesdays poison-gas
tragedy, the prospects for a full and open investigation are effectively
ended. We may never know if there is truth to those allegations or whether
we are being manipulated by another wag the dog psyop.
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