Linux Beach: After Trump drops "Assad removal" from US goals, Assad drops sarin again

There has been another chemical weapons attack in Syria today, and again many children died. This attack happened a few days after Trump officials announced that Assad need no longer concern himself with US efforts to topple him.

This latest attack took place in Idlib. Idlib is the place the survivors of the brutal assault on Aleppo were evaluated to. Now Idlib has been coming under attack by the same Russian/Iranian/Assadist forces that massacred Aleppo. According the Aleppo Media Center, now in Idlib, 70 have died so far and about 500 have been injured. The hospital where many were being treated was also attacked.

#Syria Chaos in front of #WhiteHelmets headquarter in Khan Sheikun #Idlib after airstrike Sarin toxic gas. pic.twitter.com/Ss5dlsZPWH
— Muhamed Al-khamis (@janatulnaeem02) April 4, 2017

NEVER AGAIN*

* Rules & conditions apply pic.twitter.com/TUePtRnedJ
— Weddady (@weddady) April 4, 2017

New footage from Khan Sheikhoun of the hospital bombed while it was treating chemical weapon attack victimshttps://t.co/VHFCrl1Kz0 pic.twitter.com/FhnHN2zZSn
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 4, 2017

Victims of today's chemical attack entering Turkey at Bab al-Hawa border crossing https://t.co/kMFKmfFQgw pic.twitter.com/MNbXh83vpk
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 4, 2017

A playlist of videos from the Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack can be found here, let me know if I've missed any https://t.co/6hcomhOkHP
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 4, 2017

On 21 August 2013 Assad's forces killed more than 1400, including including more than 300 children with sarin. Although the Assad regime vigorously denied responsibility for that attack or any CW attack in Syria, it agreed to give up most of its chemical weapons capabilities. [Later it was found to have cheated and held some back.] Since then there have been dozens of attacks using chlorine gas as a weapon. At least 3 have been investigated and blamed on Assad by the United Nations.

Early reports indicate that this attack is difference. It was not chlorine, which has a very distinct odor and color and typically only kills people caught in enclosed spaces. This was something new and far more deadly. Most investigators have already concluded that it was sarin or some similar nerve agent.

While chemical weapons have been proven to be largely ineffective on the battlefield against troops equip and trained to defend against them. They also proved to be a very effective weapons against rebellions because they could be quite efficient at killing an unprepared civilian population, especially children, the old, and infirmed, while keeping property damage to a minimum, and this is how they were widely used before World War I. The horror at their use in that war enabled a worldwide campaign that forced their ban in 1925.

Surprisingly, that ban had largely stood the test of time before the Syrian conflict. Although there was Saddam Hussein's use of CW against the Kurds at Halabja in 1988, it was one of a very few mass casualty attacks since World War II - until the Syrian conflict. Now it is in danger of becoming normalized. It is also now being used in the Sudan.

Chemical weapons use is making a come back and it is entirely against people in rebellion. Assad had already been using tanks, artillery, rockets, napalm, cluster bombs, barrel bombs and small amounts of chemical weapons to massacre his people before Obama's proclamation. Exactly, a year before the massive sarin attack, US President Barack Obama acknowledge his acceptance of all that when he drew his famous "red-line" and said Assad would cross it only by using "a whole bunch of chemical weapons."

Clearly a "a whole bunch of chemical weapons" had been used on 21 August 2013, and in the refugee camps and the cities besieged by Assad, they were calling upon Obama to honor his pledge. Now he needed a way to weasel out of it.

The US peace and justice movement became active on the Syrian conflict in a big way for the first time. It opposed any military response to the use of sarin in Syria. Many questioned the evidence that Assad was behind the massacre. They addressed themselves only to representatives of their own bourgeoisie, while ignoring the complaints and evidence presented by the Syrians under attack.

Assad started using chemicals again within months of the US failure to enforce Obama's year-old "red-line" prohibition against them, and he has been quietly using them ever since. Quietly, because he has largely stuck with low level chlorine attacks, and quietly because the world's media and the world's governments have seen fit not to make too big a fuss about them.

When the UN scientists compared the sarin used in the attack with the sarin surrendered by Assad, they concluded that the sarin that killed the children came from Assad's arsenal. That didn't stop Assad supporters on the "Left" from denying Assad complicity or even treating it as a real tragedy. They treat it like it never even happened. Listen to the off-handed way Mike Whitney referred to this massive and tragic loss of life recently in counterpunch, when he still thought Clinton was going to win in spite of his best efforts, 8 Nov 2016 [my bold]:

The public probably feels equal contempt for the Loretta Lynch Justice Department which is loaded with Clinton toadies that have done their best to quash any investigation into the illicit pay-to-play machinations at the Clinton Foundation. And, let’s not forget the media which has lost whatever shred of credibility it managed to salvage after its myriad of war-promoting lies about WMD, mobile weapons labs, aluminum tubes and Assad’s imaginary chemical weapons attacks, attacks that were invented from whole cloth at one of Washington’s many neocon think tanks where these fake ideas are typically hatched.

The WMD, mobile weapons labs, and aluminum tubes used to justify war on Iraq were fake. Lumping Assad's very real sarin attack on East Ghouta into that list is a crime.