Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Attacking Syria Will Make U.S. Military ‘Al-Qaeda’s Air Force’

Even a blind squirrel finds an occasional nut and Dennis Kucinich has found a bonanza:

Former congressman Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) said today that striking Syria would turn the United States military into “al-Qaeda’s air force.”
 Kucinich, who voted against the Iraq War and campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004 and 2008, lambasted the idea that Obama could act without congressional authorization, which he said would be a violation of the Constitution. He also warned that intervening in Syria would entangle the United States in another war in the Middle East and encourage Islamists who are fighting the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad.

“So what, we’re about to become al-Qaeda’s air force now?” Kucinich sarcastically asked The Hill.

Still, I have to give Fairy Prince Obama credit. He found the WMD that Saddam moved to Syria:
The fact of Syrian use of chemical weapons should call the conventional wisdom about Iraq into question. The two countries were linked by their ruling Baathist parties and, as neighbors, engaged in trade, both legal and illegal, before the war. In 2006, Georges Sada, a former general of Saddam’s air force, detailed in his book, “Saddam’s Secrets,” how Saddam had secretly moved much of his WMD material to Syria before the U.S.-led invasion under the cover of providing relief to Syrian earthquake victims. Sada’s claims were detailed in Examiner in 2011. Sada’s claim was be supported by other sources as well. In 2004, a Syrian defector, Nizar Nayouf claimed that Iraqi WMDs had been hidden at three sites in Syria. Nayouf’s story appeared the Dutch paper Der Telegraaf and is summarized on WorldThreats.com. Satellite reconnaissance photos from 2010 published in Israel’s Haaretz show Syrian military facilities in the same areas that Nayouf fingered. The same sites were identified in the 2004 book “End Game” by General Thomas McInerney and Paul Vallely as well as another former Iraqi general, Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti. If the U.S. launches airstrikes against Syria, these facilities are likely to be targeted.

The lack of large stockpiles in post-Saddam Iraq led to the myth that Saddam’s WMDs were nonexistent. In reality, Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurdish minority was documented by the BBC in 1988. Saddam also used chemical weapons in his war against Iran and after the Persian Gulf War while combating the Shiite uprising of 1991. The destruction of an Iraqi munitions plant that produced the nerve gas sarin may be responsible for Gulf War Syndrome, a neurological affliction that affects as many as 30 percent of veterans from the Persian Gulf War in 1991 according to USA Today. In 2010, Wired Magazine detailed how classified military documents released by Wikileaks revealed the discovery of many small caches of chemical weapons by coalition forces during the occupation of Iraq. 

Of course, Barack Obama is a blind squirrel too.