Monday, July 3, 2017

Red Line Fever

I had every intention of taking this week off and reserving my creative juices for barbecue and blowing up mail boxes, you know, patriotic shit. But a couple of very peculiar and very disturbing things popped up in the news last week and the idea of not putting my thoughts out on paper in regards to these events feels like a heavier burden on my anxiety ridden skull than cranking out another post during my vacation so, fuck it, here we go.

The first story to stick in my brain like an errant popcorn kernel was Seymour Hersh's brilliant piece on the Kan Sheikhoun gas attacks in Syria and the bombing that our petulant president, Donald Trump, launched against the Syrian airbase in Shayrat in response. The only thing more shocking than the lies old Seymour debunked with this top notch piece of investigative journalism is the fact that he had to go to fucking Germany to get it published.

 Long since banished from the land of fake news that has become this sad country, Hersh's piece was originally commissioned to be released by the London Review of Books who had published his equally incendiary piece on the equally facacta Ghouta chemical attacks of 2013 (we'll circle back  to this later). But the Limey twits chickened out like those bitches across the pond, forcing America's greatest living journalist to go to the Germans (the goddamn Germans!?!) for freedom of the press. Thank god for Die Welt. If it wasn't for those wonderful Krauts, we, the few woke Americans, would have to once again go to Russia Today to find out that our life is a lie.

What Hersh revealed with this piece is basically what the Russians have been trying to tell us all along: Khan Sheikhoun wasn't a sarin gas attack, it was a standard bombing of a known jihadist meeting sight that contained dangerous chemicals in the basement, where said jihadists stashed their weapons and sundry loot. This isn't particularly shocking to anyone who actually took the time to read into the story. The shocking part was that the Russians had informed the US Military of this attack days before hand in order to give our spooks a chance to pull out any double agents we may have had working out of the target. Trump was repeatedly informed of this fact and pulled the fucking trigger on the illegal bombing of a Russian occupied airbase anyway.

Hersh and his sources theorize that the cloud of toxic fumes that happened as a result of the Kan Sheikhoun bombing were the product of chlorine and manure stored at the sight. Very possible, but the paranoid side of me can't seem to shake the sneaking suspicion that this site was intentionally loaded with toxic chemicals by one of the CIA's al-Nusra rats, who had been tipped off indirectly by those poor over trusting Russians themselves, in order to deliver the Donald the red line crossing tragedy that would goad him into embracing the Agency's beloved regime change schemes and wiping his ass with the last shred of hope left for detente with Russia. Sunrise. Sunset.

The second news story that ruined my holiday coincided, perhaps not uncoincidentally with the dropping of Hersh's story. Early last week a number of weird threats began to emanate from the White House. Sean Spicer, Washington's second finest drag king after Lindsey Graham, made cryptic claims that unidentified sources had identified plans for "another" Syrian chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime and that, if this happened, The Syrian president would pay a heavy price. Neither the Pentagon nor the State department backed up this narrative but that didn't stop Snarling Nikki Haley from stoking the flames of war before congress the next day: speaking of the necessity for sending not only Assad but his allies in Russia and Iran a message. After another day passed with no telltale chemical attack, Secretary of Defense and Tobin Bell stunt double, Mad Dog Mattis made the absurd assertion to reporters that the only reason the Syrians didn't launch the attack was because of the White House's mercurial threats. "That showed them!" What the fuck, right?

The whole weird affair seemed like a failed reenactment of Obama's 2013 red flag fiasco, when the then-president nearly went to war with Syria over another chemical attack that Seymour Hersh revealed to be a jihadist false flag in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. I have long posited the unpopular theory that Barack Obama had actually set the red line on chemical attacks as a kind of dare, knowing full well that his minions in al-Nusra were the only ones with both the means and the motive to cross it thus giving Obama the green light to finally destroy Assad with the international support necessary to please his pseudo-liberal base. The only reason this didn't work out was because  Trump's former man-crush, Vladimir Putin stole Obama's thunder with a peace deal that made his NPR friendly dream war impossible.

Last week's red line drawing threats feel like a characteristically clumsy attempt by Trump's regime who couldn't shoot straight to goad another false flag attack. As Hersh proved in Die Welt, the administration has full knowledge that Assad isn't in the business of committing these kind of attacks  and it's practically common knowledge that the floundering jihadists of al-Nusra have the goods. So what does this mean? In the wake of the Russian witch trials and his plummeting approval ratings, President Trump has a bad case of red line fever, and aside from an increasingly unlikely Russian miracle, there is only one known cure for this disease: all out war.

Go ahead, dearest motherfuckers, call me paranoid and I hope you're right, but I couldn't bomb my neighbors private property with a clean conscience if I didn't at least warn you of my suspicions.


Happy Fourth.


Peace, Love and Empathy- CH




Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

* Fourth Of July By X
* Your Life Is A Lie By MGMT
* Townie By Mitski
* Flagpole Sitta By Harvey Danger
* Oblivion By Grimes
* Saints By The Breeders
* Human Behavior By Bjork
* Where Is My Mind By The Pixies


No comments:

Post a Comment