Why US Bullies Syria While Admitting It Has No Clue Who's Using Chemical Weapons

The heads of the Pentagon and the CIA have admitted that they have no conclusive evidence to prove that the Syrian government has used chlorine gas in militant-held areas in Eastern Ghouta. Russian security analysts explain why the US is continuing its threats of military intervention against Damascus even though it has no casus belli for doing so.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis stopped just short of threatening Syria with new airstrikes on Sunday following unconfirmed reports of another chlorine gas attack in Eastern Ghouta, admitting that he had no proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack. "I don't have evidence right now of it," the Pentagon chief said, while insisting that the administration would not tolerate the use of weapons of mass destruction by Damascus.

The same day, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said that the US intelligence community didn't know what happened in the militant-held territory, and that it was "working diligently to verify what happened there."

Pompeo, who was appointed secretary of state on Tuesday, admitted that President Trump had been asking him "nearly every day what it is the intelligence community knows about the Syrian regime's use of chemical weapons and who else, the Russians or the Iranians might be responsible for them," with the CIA "still trying to figure out precisely what had happened in each of these cases."

Unfortunately, as some observers have pointed out, the lack of evidence has not always stopped Washington from acting. Last April, days after an alleged chemical weapons attack on the Idlib region town of Khan Sheikhoun, Trump ordered a cruise missile strike against the Syrian military's Shayrat Airbase, later bragging about it to Chinese President Xi Jinping over "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake."

Before that, in 2013, President Obama nearly launched a military intervention in Syria over militant claims that Damascus had used chemical weapons, also in Ghouta. Moscow helped to defuse that crisis, striking a deal with Washington to assist Syria in the liquidation of its chemical weapons stockpile, which the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed had been completed in 2014.

According to Evgeny Minchenko, director of the International Institute of Political Analysis, Washington's tendency to steer itself straight into a confrontation with Damascus over alleged chemical weapons' use may be more philosophical than anything else.

"The situation is the same as that in Ivan Krylov's fable," the observer explained, recalling the story of the Wolf and the Lamb, where an exasperated lamb asking what he had done to deserve being eaten receives a callous response from the wolf of 'You're guilty because I'm hungry.'

"If the White House believes that Assad must go at any price, it will continue to push forward with this agenda regardless of whether or not there are facts to back it up. If not, too bad for the facts," Minchenko said.
For his part, Vladimir Yevseyev, military expert and deputy director of the CIS Institute, says that the chemical weapons "trump card" has long been used by Western policymakers to solve problems in no way connected to the protection of civilians.

"Russia has repeatedly demonstrated that in Syrian territories liberated by government forces…significant arsenals of chemical weapons have been found. But in the US, [officials] have pretended that they do not notice this," the journalist noted.

And the incontrovertible argument long made by military experts – that no army in the world uses chemical weapons during an offensive, because it inevitably leads to the deaths of its own personnel, are met with similar silence, Yevseyev added.

The latter argument seems all the more relevant amid militant claims about Syrian government chemical attacks in Eastern Ghouta, where forces loyal to Damascus are engaged in a major military operation to free the territory of militant control. With Syria's long, grueling war against militants and terrorists nearing its end, Damascus would have to be extremely incompetent to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by using gas and provoking Washington.

Ultimately, Yevseyev believes that Washington's seemingly "maniacal tenacity" to find ways to intervene in Syria is a project of the State Department, not the Pentagon or the CIA. Notwithstanding the fact that its "Assad must go" line is no longer realistic, the State Department continues to pursue it out of inertia, using the same "old tools."

In this way, not much has changed since the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq, when Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence to the UN about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which, as it turned out, also never existed.

© AP PHOTO/ ELISE AMENDOLA The image seen round the world of Secretary of State Colin Powell and his mock vial of anthrax,which he held up during a presentation before the UN on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, February 5, 2003.

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