The US Navy got ready yesterday to pound targets in Syria with cruise missiles. Secretary of State John Kerry pontificated about “moral obscenity” on Syria’s part. (I meant that word. Pope Urban IX didn’t issue a more ringing call-to-arms to launch the First Crusade.) But American citizens will gain nothing from making war in Syria. They will gain even less if they go to avenge a crime that someone else committed. Recent evidence suggests precisely that.

Syria: the latest

Two destroyed tanks in front of a mosque in Azaz, Syria. From March 6 to July 23, a battle between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Syrian government was fought for control over the city of Azaz, north of Aleppo, during the Syrian civil war. The FSA won the 2012 Battle of Azaz, saying the destroyed 17 government tanks. (The photographer counted 7.) Photo: Christiaan Triebert, CC BY 2.0 Generic License

Last week, someone dropped sarin gas on a suburb of Damascus. Everyone, including Israeli military intelligence, assumed Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, ordered that strike. Assad denied the charge and still denies it.

Nevertheless, as this week began, the US Navy sent several cruise-missile destroyers to the eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of Syria. And yesterday afternoon, John Kerry, Secretary of State, told the world what America, in his person, thought. He spoke of “clear evidence” that Assad did it, though he said little about what evidence he had. He called the act “indiscriminate slaughter of civilians,” “a cowardly crime,” and “a moral obscenity.”

The UN got a team of weapons inspectors in-country yesterday. When they started to drive out to the hot zone, someone shot holes into their truck. Obviously someone – we don’t really know who, yet – does not want those UN inspectors to get close. And today the UN inspectors decided to stay in their hotels in Damascus and not drive out to the site.

Blaming Bashar Assad’s government has been ridiculously easy for everyone. Israeli military intelligence insists Assad is to blame. (They say they have radio intercepts to prove that. This report at a German site has the details.)

Nor is the US Navy the only navy ready to hit Syria. The British Royal Navy is also getting ready.

John Hayward at Human Events insists that Assad did it, and that America must hit Syria, or no one in the world will believe anything we say.

But is everyone moving too fast?

From WND: the rebels did it

Jerome Corsi at WorldNetDaily dropped this bombshell last night. Says he: the rebels did it.

With the assistance of former PLO member and native Arabic-speaker Walid Shoebat, WND has assembled evidence from various Middle Eastern sources that cast[s] doubt on Obama administration claims the Assad government is responsible for last week’s attack.

The evidence consists of four videos, several “screencaps” from them, and this interview that LiveLeak hosts of a rebel-connected terrorist boasting that the rebels did it. (WND did not furnish embedding scripts suitable for WordPress. Click through to the article; you can play them there.)

Who’s lying?

The obvious question is: who’s lying? Some of WND’s sources come from Russia. And Russia, for whatever reason, is in the game on the Syrian side. But the Russians are not their sole source. They have other sources on the ground in the region.

That Mossad, or Unit 8200 of the IDF, would say the Syrian government launched that gas attack, suggests three things:

1. The Syrians did it after all,
2. Mossad and/or the IDF are laying a disinformation trick on Western media, or
3. Mossad got snookered, too.

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The people living in Israel are buying gas masks, three times as many every day as they usually buy. They’re afraid that if US missiles land in Syria, Syrian missiles, maybe with chemical tips, will land in Israel. It hasn’t happened before, but no Israeli will take that kind of chance.

Could the rebels pull off such a disinformation trick, even on the Israelis? That might not be as hard as one might think. Even a seasoned spymaster will “play the percentages,” or more often, play the narrative. We all see what we think we see, or what we think makes sense to see. That applies to spymasters as well as to ordinary citizens and residents.

And the rebels might have more powerful friends than “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” or whatever Osama bin Laden’s former “Base” call themselves today. Why did at least 400 missiles go missing on the day America lost an ambassador in Benghazi? And: who benefits from making people believe that Syria launched poison gas against their own people, even if they didn’t? The Syrian government does not. This isn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d brag about. Does Israel? If they had an ambition to take land beyond the Golan Heights, then yes. But all they’ve ever done is call a few airstrikes. And they’re not likely to do so without knowing, for real, that the Syrians are ready to launch chemical missiles at them.

But maybe one other person does benefit from a “false flag” in Syria: de facto President Barack Obama himself. This is Wag the Dog made real. Scandal dogs nearly every step he, and his administration, take today. What better distraction could he ask for, than another war in the Middle East?

Nor might that be his only motive. Obama bombed Libya without even a by-your-leave to Congress. He engineered the downfall of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. In all this he has always taken the side of Islamists – and more particularly, Sunni Islamists. The Syrians, and their Iranian and Hizbullah allies, are Shi’ite.

The two sides deserve each other

Nor is that the only reason to stay out of this war. That we would get into yet another war, this time on misprision of war crimes, is bad enough. But even without that: how bad is Bashar al-Assad as a dictator, anyway? Would the rebel forces, if they win, govern any more gently? Almost certainly not. In fact they might do worse by certain minorities, especially Christians.

The Bible does speak of a “Doom of Damascus.” But this doom need not befall that city now. Nor have Americans any warrant, in Scripture or out of it, to visit that doom on Syria today.

http://youtu.be/UpcbGU4bd5g

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