Chemical Weapons Abuser Deplores Use Of Chemical Weapons
By Jason Hirthler
21 May, 2013
Countercurrents.org
The administration’s behavior on chemical weapons is morally absurd
Sometimes obvious duplicity can be hard to fathom. Why would someone tell a bald-faced lie when everyone knows it’s a lie? Perhaps because not everyone does know it’s a lie. This must be the case with our venerable White House, from which we hear daily pronouncements that are swiftly undermined by a tranche of WikiLeaks cables, a closer look at the Excel spreadsheet, or a cursory inspection of recent history. And yet the difference is simply that President Obama’s bully pulpit is incomparable in scope and reach, while the riposte from truthdiggers usually has the auditory power of a whisper, reaching a sliver of the voluminous masses that have already ingested the official narrative. We can only hope that by continuing to beat the drum in ever-greater numbers, we can bring the beast into the light, and expose it.
In that spirit, let’s consider President Obama’s famed “red line” across which Syria would face dire consequences, ostensibly from the global community, but in actuality from the United States and a diminutive contingent of allies it drags into the fray kicking and screaming. The red line is chemical weapons use. Should the Syrian government engage in this unspeakably barbarian behavior—as it surely is—the U.S. would be compelled by its newfound Responsibility to Protect (RTP) to annihilate the Assad government, sweeping into power a rogue assemblage of disaffected Islamists with western assault rifles slung over their shoulders and a dog-eared copy of Sharia law in their back pockets. Hopefully for the White House and Pentagon, this loose confederation of militant terrorist cells would be mostly Sunni and thus predisposed to despise Iran and its Shiite ‘hordes’. A divide and conquer strategy worthy of the British Empire, that infamous hegemon with a gift for social amputation.
The Benefit of the Doubt—Experiments in Credulity
But for a moment let’s suspend our collective disbelief at the idea of creating a power vacuum and then filling it with mercenaries. Could it be that the president really cannot countenance the use of chemical weapons anywhere in the civilized world? Does this position stand the test of investigation? Let’s look.
The first stumbling block on the path to credulity is Fallujah. American forces used radioactive depleted uranium, white phosphorous ‘shake-n-bake’ bombs, as well as napalm and “mark 77 firebombs,” a mix of kerosene and polystyrene similar to napalm. Thanks to this almost indiscriminate deployment of chemical weaponry, the Fallujah population has suffered an irruption of congenital malformations that Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail suggests exceeds even those seen among the nuked survivors of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Afghanistan isn’t much different. Researchers have discovered evidence of uranium isotopes in the bodies of Afghans (compositionally slightly different from depleted uranium). They’ve witnessed alarming conditions—sudden death, cancers, skin lesions, deformities—especially in Pashtun villages, consistent with the use of depleted uranium weapons. The curse of chemical weaponry, and a significant reason there are international conventions against their use, is that unlike conventional arms, which might kill you, chemical weapons threaten to kill your unborn children, too. Genetic deformities can result from the ingestion of uranium particulate matter. Some might arguably call this a kind of slow-motion genocide, aimed at a particular ethnicity, but spaced over generations.
Most recently, and in the most absurd contradiction of Obama’s professed concern for the population of Syria, the Israelis bombed a weapons depot with depleted uranium shells. Here is America’s closest ally, regional proxy, and the fourth largest military on earth—using chemical weapons to weaken a rogue state it suspects of using chemical weapons. In other words, we’ll annihilate you by the very acts for which we condemn you.
If depleted or non-depleted uranium is such a common feature of the U.S. arsenal, it is no surprise that America voted against a 2007 United Nations General Assembly resolution to debate the effects of depleted uranium armaments. A year later it again voted against a resolution for three UN agencies to update their research on the effects of the chemical—this despite an overwhelming plurality of states that voted in favor of more research on the subject.
Purveyor of Chaos and Deceit
If this brief outline of hypocrisy doesn’t rattle your faith in America’s goodwill abroad, perhaps the horrifying consequences of its recent military invasions will. The U.S. track record in the twentieth century is dismal. In twenty instances—one per decade—of attempting to install prefabricated democracies in foreign nations, it failed seventeen times. But forget democracy, what about simply avoiding mass slaughter? Iraq is rapidly threatening to unwind itself into three ethnic enclaves, each one intensely hostile to the other two. Likewise, Libya’s collapse has left hundreds of towns presided over by virulent militias, with the nominal federal authority in a permanently defensive posture. Afghanistan, a pot-boiling stew of graft and frayed alliances is neither consolidating nor democratizing. All this begs the question: how can the State Department conceivably justify its position on Syria?
Sadly, one can imagine the Department of Justice (DOJ) cobbling together some wickedly disingenuous defense of its behavior. Beginning with the bizarre fact that the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) outlaws neither depleted uranium nor white phosphorus. Phosphorous, despite its deadly effect on the human body, is legal as an effective smoke screen that can scramble radar. Depleted uranium, also deadly and with the potential to generate genetic deformities, is highly valued for its armor-piercing capacities, being heavier than steel. Once these jaw-dropping nuances are instanced, the DOJ might then note that Syria itself is one of the few non-signatories to the CWC. Various suppositions about the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime can be tabled, seeding further doubt in the minds of the half-attentive American public and within important ideological segments of the global elite. Thus, having extracted itself from notional culpability and heaped further calumny on Syria’s international standing, the administration could move swiftly into action—aggressive, brutal, and destabilizing—under the auspices of NATO and beneath the casuist legal cover of the DOJ. In the modern imperial model, just two tools are needed: a cache of guns and a battery of lawyers. Which is more lethal is up for debate.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, strategist, and 17-year veteran of the communications industry. He is a periodic political commentator for CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and Open Democracy, among other left publications. He lives and works in New York City and can be reached at [email protected]
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