Why Obama's 'red line' in Syria has turned pink

Back in August 2012, things were a lot different in Washington DC and in the White House.

The Obama administration was brandishing a confident swagger
back then, heading into the elections against a hobbling GOP
opponent, and Benghazi had yet to unfold in all of its
ugliness.

As Hillary Clinton was jetting around on the US State Department
budget promoting her ‘Friends of Syria’ Middle East and European
tours, and as the CIA were busy like bees working in the gray
shadows of Benghazi, Washington and London were laying the
groundwork for their new WMD case is Syria.

As last summer drew to a close, President Barack Obama
confidently announced he was drawing a ‘Red Line’ in Syria
regarding the use of chemical weapons, meaning that any evidence of
their use on either side of that conflict would lead to
consequences, the obvious inference being automatic US military
intervention.

Fast forward to the present, and Washington appears to have been
caught in the vortex of its own spin machine, with White House
Press Secretary Jay Carney recently forced to ‘clarify’ the
President’s infamous ‘Red Line’ decree with what can only be
described as desperate political cover. Here Carney attempted to
explain away the previous ultimatum and re-explain the President’s
position:

“What the president made clear is that it was a red line, and
that it was unacceptable, and that it would change his calculus…
What he never did – and it is simplistic to do so is to say that
‘if X happens, Y will happen’. He has never said what reaction he
would take.”

It’s hard to run a global empire and still pander to sensitive
liberal concerns at home. The White House seems to be at pains
coming to terms with what the Neoconservative Bush government
already knew a decade ago – that there really is no good, safe way
to do a military intervention. In the end, the façade of political
spin cannot provide ethical cover for invading and toppling another
sovereign state. You can’t finesse your way into it, you have to
just go for it in full view – lie if you have to, fabricate
evidence if need be, and be damned with the political fallout.

This approach sort of worked in the past for the US and Britain
with Iraq. Granted, the WMD case was knocked down eventually, but
the lie was good enough to achieve lift off for an attack, invasion
and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and to a lesser degree the same
system netted a result – with the help of a NATO smokescreen in
Libya in 2011. The Obama Administration believed it would merely
follow the already existing template for ‘humanitarian
intervention’.

The case

Thus far we can point to three concerted attempts in 2013 by the
US and its NATO allies to fabricate a case for chemical weapons in
Syria. The first was a plan allegedly hatched by the British with
the help of Qatar, through the use of a safe proxy to
provide‘deniability’ – in this case, a UK defense contractor
named Britam. The plan was simple and would have gone unnoticed if
not for the inconvenience of it being prematurely exposed in the
“Britam Leaks” from an anonymous hack back in January. The
plan was to take old Gadaffi era chemical weapons stocks from
Libya, transfer them out via Benghazi, and then plant them in Syria
in order to blame the Assad government and thus open to door for
western military intervention. The leaked emails also indicated
clearly that Qatar would be paying a substantive sum for the
operation to be coordinated through Britam. The UK’s Daily Mail had
initially run the Britam Leaks story, but then suddenly pulled in
down from their website within 24 hours of the story running.

The second attempt to make a chemical weapons charge stick in
Syria came in March, following reports of a deadly chlorine attack
in the northern region of Aleppo, with both sides claiming the
other was responsible. With Washington openly touting its agenda of
regime change and the Obama ‘Red Line’ promising intervention in
Syria if either side was found to use chemical weapons, the obvious
motive would fall on in the rebel opposition camp. The Aleppo case
that was quickly knocked down by a number of alternative media
outlets including 21st Century Wire, who outlined a detailed and
compelling case to illustrate how manufactured chlorine munitions
were not used in Aleppo by the Syria government forces, but rather,
makeshift chlorine ‘dirty bombs’ were assembled and likely
detonated by a Saudi-linked Islamic rebel confab originating out of
Iraq, who coincidentally, had a track record of exploding the same
devices before in Iraq.

The third attempt was led by British scientists who claimed they
had found evidence of chemical weapons that were used in Syria in
relation to two incidents in the Damascus area around March 19th.
Critics rightly pointed out the inherent problems with their case,
including the obvious chain of custody issue that meant the
‘evidence’ brought from Syria to a British lab could easily
have been contaminated, or even fabricated in order to come to a
conclusion which the British government wanted in order to get a
green light for military intervention.

The UN’s own investigation into chemical weapons claims, led by
Carla Del Ponte, has concluded that that witness and victim
testimonies clearly show that Western and Gulf-backed Syrian rebels
used chemical weapons such as the nerve gas sarin. This is at odds
with US Secretary of State John Kerry who claims to having seen
himself “strong evidence” that the Assad regime has used
chemical weapons. Turkey has also entered the fray this week,
themselves claiming to have seen evidence of Assad’s use of
chemical weapons.

Seeking truth

So who is telling the truth? From a common sense point of view,
there is no motive, not does it make any real sense for the Syrian
army to deploy chemical weapons in there fight, especially since
the ‘Red Line’ has been laid down already. The rebels on the other
hand have a motive, as does Washington, London and its NATO allies
like Turkey – who have all been actively facilitating and aiding
the rebel factions in Syria since the conflict began two years ago.
They have a vested interest in any outcome which involves Western
military intervention.

Meanwhile, in Washington the confusion has already begun to set
in with the true believers and war hawks insisting that the UN
investigation has reached the wrong conclusions.

In an attempt to control the political damage, Jay Carney
swiftly moved to derail any UN findings that Syria’s rebels – and
not President Bashar Assad’s forces, used chemical weapons. The
White House Press Secretary attempts to re-spin the argument,
trying in vain to hold Obama’s ‘Red Line’:

“We find it incredible, not credible, that the opposition has
used chemical weapons,” he said. “We think that any use of
chemical weapons in Syria is almost certain to have been done by
the Assad regime.”

Already painted in a corner, President Obama is left to watch
his ‘Red Line’ on chemical weapons – turn pink. It was a
fatal mistake by President Obama to take such an illogical line so
early on, but his statement was merely a reflection of Washington’s
own schizophrenic and irrational foreign policy which has chosen to
openly side with known al Qaeda Islamist guerrilla fighters in both
Libya and in Syria.

The ‘Red Line’ was a historical first, in the sense that
this ultimatum was woven to insure a case for intervention either
way and would mean that the US would be free to attack the Assad
government militarily even if the foreign terrorist confab were the
guilty party. It was an attempt to essentially widen the definition
of a case for intervention, essentially rewriting the language of
international law and replacing it with language more suitable for
a global police force who could act out under the guise of
‘keeping the peace’. An extraordinary first in global
diplomacy for sure, and a very difficult line to enforce in view of
an international community cannot see the sense in such an insane
equation put forth by a US President. 

Another reason for Obama’s fading ‘Pink Line’ in Syria is
the Benghazi Hearings. Events of this week have finally begun to
expose the inadequacy in US intelligence circles, as well as the
institutional corruption that allows political gain to trump
American lives in Washington. Rival factions within the US power
structure, including those of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have
been implicated in both using and covering-up what happened in
Benghazi.

Much more damaging than this however, is that Benghazi links the
White House directly to the Syrian proxy war. The hearings have
already begun to open the lid on how the US covert
‘national-wrecking’ road show were facilitating both the transfer
of both weapons and foreign al Qaeda fighters from Libya in order
to help destabilize the sovereign nation of Syria. Ambassador Chris
Stevens and the others who died when Washington was forced to pull
the plug on their operation there, are now known to be mere
expendable cannon fodder – a revelation that has disgusted many
American voters who would have previously turned a blind eye to any
similar covert and underhanded US operations overseas.

On Wednesday Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul(R) weighed in on the
Benghazi debacle, in a direct challenge to the President and
Hillary Clinton, inferring that the Sept. 11, 2012 attack unfolded
as a result of a secret arms trade, and rubbishing the previous
government line put forward by Susan Rice and the US Intelligence
community that the attack was a result of a YouTube film, “The
Innocence of Muslims”. During a recent CNN interview Paul
explains:

“I’ve actually always suspected that, although I have no
evidence, that maybe we were facilitating arms leaving Libya going
through Turkey into Syria,” he said.

“Were they trying to obscure that there was an arms operation
going on at the CIA annex?” 

Additional heat has been put on Washington with regards to Syria
last week, as Israel’s unprovoked bombing raids inside Syria have
appeared to have thrown a spanner into the works of Washington’s
carefully woven public relations plan, with many critics believing
that Israel’s raid on Damascus was sanctioned by Washington – in
effect, using Israel to help soften-up the Assad forces for a
sharper blow later on.

Obama’s fading ‘pink line’ also means that both
neo-conservatives and those in Washington who are guided by Israeli
influence have been forced to declare their wider intentions in
arguing that attacking Syria is important right now – because Iran
would not take future US threats seriously unless Obama follows
through with his ‘red line’. Such a  political force
majeure means that those once covert plans to take down both Syria
and Iran have now been forced into the open.

Russian-led diplomacy efforts have proposed an international
conference on Syria, but the major powers may not be ready until
the end of June, which will put more stress on the Western agenda
and their foreign guerrilla fighter factions who are currently
engaged in a dead lock in Syria. In light of the UN’s guilty
chemical weapons findings against the rebel opposition, US desires
to ship arms directly to those same rebel proxies – no matter how
insistent Senator hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham might
be -  will no longer play so well in the public arena.

On top of all this, Washington and London have been accused of
steering Syria’s ‘government in exile’ who, along with
western-supported opposition groups  inside Syria have refused
to engage in any dialogue with the government of Syria, an outsider
engineered move which has completely smashed any diplomatic or
political solution from the onset.

The chemical weapons crowd in Washington and London are now on
very shaky ground indeed.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.