With its recent public statement on Syria, the U.S. government has gone full 1984:
The US has seized on Syrian air force strikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) stronghold of Raqqa to denounce Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and push for his government’s removal. For the past three years, the Obama administration has backed anti-Assad militias in Syria. The main aim of its new Middle Eastern war remains regime-change in Damascus.
US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Wednesday said the US was “horrified” by reports that Syrian air strikes the previous day killed scores of civilians. She condemned the Syrian regime’s “continued slaughter of Syria civilians” and “callous disregard for human life,” declaring that “Assad long ago lost all legitimacy to govern.”
According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 95 people were killed in the air strikes on Tuesday, including 52 civilians. A Raqqa activist with the Syrian opposition network—the Local Co-ordination Committees—told the BBC that further deaths were likely because only one hospital was operating normally in the city and “a lot of people [are] dying from their wounds.” Both organisations are aligned with the pro-Western opposition in Syria that is hostile to both Assad and ISIS.
Meanwhile:
Although the US-led coalition has conducted about 300 air strikes in Syria since September, it has evidently failed to weaken the Islamic State, stated Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem. “All the indications say that (Islamic State) today, after two months of coalition air strikes, is not weaker,” Walid al-Moualem emphasized in an interview with the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen TV broadcast, as quoted by Reuters.
It’s like a very bad, very dark joke. Washington is denouncing Syrian air strikes on the Islamic State while simultaneously launching 300 of its own air strikes on the Islamic State in Syrian territory.
Do you still seriously question the obvious fact that the US government are the bad guys here? Do good guys ever behave in a manner indistinguishable from Orwell’s fictional monsters? Do you still wonder why fewer and fewer people believe a single word coming out of the U.S. federal government? Perhaps the biggest irony is that Washington is decrying Syrian air strikes that caused LESS collateral damage, in percentage terms, than the AVERAGE U.S. air strike.
If Assad’s government is said to have lost its legitimacy to govern on the basis of a single day’s air strikes, has not the U.S. government also lost its legitimacy on the basis of the hundreds of air strikes it launched over the course of three months? I also note that this further supports William S. Lind’s statement about the effectiveness of air power:
“Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who
weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow
tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as
useful as 420mm siege mortars.”
– from “Incapable of Learning”, ON WAR