{"id":14269,"date":"2013-08-29T13:35:23","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T17:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=14269"},"modified":"2013-08-29T13:56:57","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T17:56:57","slug":"the-rush-to-judgment-on-syria-is-a-catastrophic-and-deadly-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2013\/08\/29\/the-rush-to-judgment-on-syria-is-a-catastrophic-and-deadly-error\/","title":{"rendered":"The rush to judgment on Syria is a catastrophic and deadly error"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <em>UK Telegraph<\/em> has the story <a title=\"Telegraph story\" href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/worldnews\/middleeast\/syria\/10271248\/The-rush-to-judgment-on-Syria-is-a-catastrophic-and-deadly-error.html\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>The rush to judgment on Syria is a catastrophic and deadly error<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>His [British Prime Minister Cameron] problem is that the British and American foreign policy, intelligence and military establishments have made a series of dreadful mistakes over the past 15 years. It can be stated with complete fairness that the Stop the War Coalition (a miscellaneous collection of mainly far-Left political organisations, by no means all of them reputable, which marches through London this Saturday in protest) has consistently shown far more mature judgment on these great issues of war and peace than Downing Street, the White House or the CIA.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\nMore surprising still, the Stop the War Coalition has often proved better informed than these centres of Western power, coolly warning against the diet of propaganda masquerading as bona fide intelligence.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\nThe rush to judgment by Britain and the US looks premature, especially in view of the record of our intelligence agencies in providing misleading and fabricated evidence as a justification for war before 2003. (This time it is said that they have been convinced by intercept evidence, but this too can prove seriously misleading.)<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\n.<br \/>\nThe moral authority of Britain and America in the Middle East is shaky, as an article published in Foreign Policy magazine last week reminds us. It provides documentary evidence that the US helped Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq launch a series of chemical weapons attacks upon Iran in the late 1980s, an offensive that killed approximately 20,000 Iranian troops \u2013 which dwarfs the number of victims of the Syrian attack. Iran, of course, is Assad\u2019s closest ally. Our moral indignation over chemical weapons looks selective.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>One of the comments on this story pointed to some videos of questionable authenticity showing the rebels launching sarin gas attacks.\u00a0 More about that in the next blog post <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2013\/08\/29\/evidence-syria-gas-attack-work-of-u-s-allies\/\" title=\"Subsequent blog post\" target=\"_blank\">Evidence: Syria gas attack work of U.S. allies<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The UK Telegraph has the story The rush to judgment on Syria is a catastrophic and deadly error. His [British Prime Minister Cameron] problem is that the British and American foreign policy, intelligence and military establishments have made a series of dreadful mistakes over the past 15 years. It can be stated with complete fairness [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14269","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14269"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14274,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14269\/revisions\/14274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}