As noted last weekend, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is “a bull in a China shop” – and that’s just fine with Donald Trump who “allows her to” say whatever she wants, whenever she wants to say it.
Now that was just great for the alt-Right when Haley was saying that the US would no longer make removing Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria a foreign policy priority. But when, in the wake of the chemical attack in Idlib, she abruptly reversed course with regard to her position on regime change in Damascus, she was suddenly no longer a “friend-o-alt-Right-blogs.”
I’ve written a lot in these pages about what happened in Khan Sheikhoun and to be sure, I’ve expressed what I think is an appropriate level of skepticism. Simply put: the Assad regime was almost surely responsible but I’ve been careful to use “almost” because in a conflict like Syria’s six-year-old civil war, there’s no way to be sure about anything.
Well, that’s not true. One thing we can be “sure” about is that more than a few Russia-linked alt-Right propaganda outlets are engaged in a shameless (and patently absurd) attempt to posit and perpetuate an Alex Jones-ish conspiracy theory about the attacks having not actually occurred.
Now it’s one thing to speculate on what motives the West (which has of course provided arms and training to any number of Sunni rebel groups in Syria) may have for wanting to see the Assad regime toppled.
And it’s one thing to suggest that maybe – especially in light of the fact that the attack in Idlib came just in time to deflect from an increasingly aggressive investigation into Trump’s ties to Moscow – we’re not getting the whole story.
Relatedly, it’s entirely appropriate (indeed it’s the duty of any good commentator on geopolitics) to point out the inherent hypocrisy in Washington supporting Sunni rebel groups with ties to the very same extremists the US is supposed to be fighting while simultaneously demonizing Iran and the Alawite government in Syria.
It’s entirely another however, to posit wild theories that, when stripped of the gerrymandering, amount to an attempt to suggest that in reality, the attack in Idlib didn’t happen and that no one was actually killed. You can find that fairy tale papered all over clickbait alt-Right and Russian-linked websites. Of course you’ll also note when you read those stories that they typically (and accidentally) always speak for themselves in terms of betraying their own silliness. Have a look, for instance, at this screengrab from Sputnik:
Yes, the town is “living its live“, “an” the impact zone is unidentified.
See what I mean?
Well for what it’s worth, the French government (who the alt-Right and Marine Le Pen will tell you is complicit in some global conspiracy to frame Assad and by extension, Vladimir Putin) now says they will unveil proof that the Assad regime was indeed behind the massacre in question. Here’s Reuters (out today):
French intelligence services will provide proof in the coming days that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons in an attack on April 4, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Wednesday.
“There is an investigation underway (by) the French intelligence services and military intelligence … it’s a question of days and we will provide proof that the regime carried out these strikes,” Ayrault told LCP television.
“We have elements that will enable us to show that the regime knowingly used chemical weapons,” he said.
As you ponder all of this and draw your own conclusions, do consider the following CNN Op-Ed by Nikki Haley published today.
Via CNN
Imagine you are the parent of a boy — a teenager. Policemen come to your home in the middle of the night and take your boy away. He is held without explanation for weeks. And when he finally comes home, your boy has all the marks of having been tortured. Bruises from being beaten. Red, open wounds from being burned. Then you look at his hands and the worst is confirmed. Where his fingernails once were, there are only raw, bloody, exposed nerves. Grown men with pliers, he tells you, ripped his fingernails off in prison.
For a group of parents in Syria in 2011, this was not an exercise in imagination but a horrifying reality. Their boys were arrested and tortured for the crime of writing anti-government graffiti on the wall of a school. When the parents marched in protest to demand their children’s release, security services opened fire on them. When more people came out to protest the killings, the government fired on them again. Soon, the point of no return was reached.
“We were asking in a peaceful way to release the children but their reply was bullets,” a relative of one of the boys told a reporter. “Now we can have no compromise with any security branches.”
The Syrian war is just one example of how human rights violations can become a vicious cycle of violence and instability that quickly spirals into all-out war. What began as an act of free expression of the kind Americans take for granted has become a conflict responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of desperate refugees. Nations thousands of miles away have been impacted.
As the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, I’ve looked at how we can do more to respond to human rights violations before they reach the level of conflict. Traditionally, the United Nations Security Council has been considered the place where peace and security are debated, not human rights. But Tuesday, at the insistence of the United States, for the first time the Security Council took up the connection between human rights and conflict. We debated how widespread human rights violations are a warning sign — a loud, blaring siren — that a breakdown in peace and security is coming.
Syria is not alone. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo today, it is no coincidence that reports of government soldiers and armed groups committing extrajudicial executions of civilians in the Kasais region are occurring at the same time that the security situation appears to be quickly spiraling out of control.
These sorts of allegations demand answers from independent investigations. And when violations are found to occur, the United Nations cannot turn a blind eye. We must engage these violators early and often, in the statements we make and the measures we impose. Human rights violations and abuses suffered by civilians rarely have a happy ending. At best, they drive desperate people from their homes and from their countries. At worst, they radicalize them to take up arms themselves.
In other cases, human rights violations and abuses don’t lead to violence down the road, they exist side-by-side with threats to peace and security. In fact, the world’s most brutal regimes are also the most ruthless violators of human rights.
In the case of North Korea, human rights abuses literally finance the government’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Political prisoners work themselves to death in coal mines to finance the regime’s military. Starvation, sexual violence and slave labor in the prison camps help supply the North Korean nuclear program.
In Burundi, the government is using human rights violations to stifle dissent. The Burundian government services use torture to crack down on protestors. This has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee to neighboring countries and caused massive regional disruption. A U.N. report detailed 17 types of torture used by the government, including driving sharpened steel rods into the legs of victims and dripping melted plastic on them.
In fact, there is hardly an issue on the agenda of the Security Council that does not in some way involve human rights. As president of the Council, I’ve had great support from U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres in driving home the connection between threats to human dignity and threats to peace. I’m grateful as well to my colleagues on the Security Council, who agreed to take this unprecedented step.
The next international crisis could very well come from places in which human rights are widely disregarded. Perhaps it will be in North Korea or Iran or Cuba. We don’t know when the next group of desperate people will rise up or when the next gang of violent extremists will exploit human suffering to further their cause. But we know from history that it will happen. And when it does, the United Nations will be called upon to act. We are much better off acting before abuse turns to conflict.
Imagine if we had acted six years ago in Syria. If we learn nothing else from the torture of children, let it be this: Evil is an inescapable fact of life, but the violence that results from human rights violations and abuses is not inevitable. We can choose to learn from history, not doom ourselves to repeat it.
OK, here we go again. “Imagine if we had acted six years ago in Syria”, I am “IMAGINING” quite a bit right now and the mess would PROBABLY be far worse, maybe for everyone. We are the ENEMY to everyone even OUR (so called) friends, please tell me you get that Ms. Ambassador. Our enemies and our friends would love to have the US military to blame for all the problems and misery in their lives, it’s simple the “infidels” are not Muslims.
Anyone who does not understand the secular war that rages between Sunni and Shia only topped by Jihad against the infidels (that would be us) is a fool. It’s Oil $$$ or Secular War or Infidels Out. Sometimes in different order but that’s it.
Most of the leaders in the Middle East don’t give a sh*t about their people especially if their power is threatened in any way. Religion and Jihad are used as diversions (sound familiar) and excuses for settling sometimes “old” sometimes “new” tribal disputes again and again. Just ask God, Allah, Buddha sh*t ask the Sun, we are all guilty of something.
Stay the Fu*k out of Syria.