Special to WorldTribune.com
In August 1995, Western governments, and particularly the Bill Clinton White House, were in great quandary.
The
negotiations with the Serbs were going well as President Slobodan
Milosevic was demonstrating unprecedented flexibility and accepting
virtually all the demands put forward by the West.
Bodies said to have been killed by nerve gas in the Ghouta area of Damascus, Aug. 21. /Reuters
Hence,
it was becoming politically and legally impossible for the U.S.-led
West to launch the NATO military intervention which President Clinton
had promised Bosnia-Herzegovina leader Alija Izetbegovic the U.S. would
launch in order to quickly win the war for the Bosnian-Muslims.
Then, on Aug. 28, 1995, at around 11:00 hrs local, a mortar shell appeared to hit the Markale market place in Sarajevo, killing
38 people and wounding another 90. Russian Col. Andrei Demurenko, then
the commander of UN Forces in Sarajevo, immediately rushed with an
UNPROFOR team to the supposed Bosnian-Serb mortar positions and
ascertained that none of them could have been used to fire the mortar
rounds.
Demurenko’s report stated that the Bosnian-Serb forces were falsely blamed for the attack on the Markale.
Nevertheless,
ostensibly in response to the massacre, NATO launched the air campaign
against Bosnian-Serb forces and shortly afterwards decided the war in
favor of the Bosnian-Muslims.
On Aug. 31, 1995, Jean Daniel,
then Editor of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, wrote an article
titled “No more lies about Bosnia”. In the article, Daniel recounted an
exchange he had just had with French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur
about the NATO air campaign and the motivations for it. “They [the
Muslims] have committed this carnage on their own people?” Daniel asked.
“Yes,” confirmed Balladur without hesitation, “but at least they forced
NATO to intervene.”
The Aug. 21, 2013, chemical attack in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, might become the Markale of the Syrian war.
On
Aug. 19, a UN expert delegation arrived in Damascus to study reports
and evidence of earlier use of chemical weapons. The next day, they were
presented with detailed scientific, technical, and military data about
the alleged chemical attacks, soil contamination and why the Syrian
Armed Forces could not have carried out these attacks.
Russian and other foreign experts who studied the data separately found it compelling.
The
Syrian military also presented the UN team with detailed intelligence
evidence about chemical weapons and production labs affiliated with the
opposition discovered in Syria, Turkey and Iraq.
On Aug. 21, the
Syrian opposition announced a massive chemical attack in Ghouta which
allegedly inflicted about 1,300 fatalities including hundreds of
children. As in previous chemical attacks blamed on the Assad
administration, the attackers used the ubiquitous Sarin nerve gas.
Immediately, the opposition flooded Western media with pictures of the
dead, but provided no conclusive evidence about the attack and the
perpetrators.
Moreover, initial opposition reports claimed the
attack was conducted by a barrage of rockets. Subsequently, in the
context of renewed outcries for a No Fly Zone, the opposition claimed
that the chemical attack was a part of a massive bombing by the Syrian
Air Force. Yet, the opposition’s pictures show no casualties suffering
shrapnel wounds associated with aerial bombing. Stern denials by the
Syrian Government of any involvement in the attack were largely ignored
by the West. At the time of writing, the UN expert delegation and
foreign diplomats were denied access to the attack site by the
opposition forces ostensibly because of fear for their safety.
The context of the attack is of great significance.
Starting
Aug. 17 and 18, nominally Free Syrian Army (FSA) units — in reality a
separate Syrian and Arab army trained and equipped by the CIA as well as
Jordanian and other intelligence services — attempted to penetrate
southern Syria from northern Jordan and start a march on Damascus. The
U.S.-sponsored war plan was based on the Autumn 2011 march on Tripoli,
Libya, by CIA-sponsored army from Tunisia which decided the Libyan war
and empowered the Islamists.
Two units, one 250-strong and one
300-strong, crossed into Syria and began advancing parallel to the Golan
Heights border. Their aim was to break east and reach Daraa quickly in
order to prepare the ground for the declaration of Daraa as the capital
of a “Free Syria”. However, the CIA’s FSA forces met fierce resistance
by the unlikely coalition of the Syrian Army, local jihadist forces
(mainly the locally-raised Yarmuk Brigades), and even tribal units who
fear the encroachment by outside forces on their domain. By Aug. 19 and
20, the FSA units were surrounded in three villages not far from the
Israeli border.
An attempt to use an Indian UNDOF patrol as
human shield failed. The FSA commanders were now (ie: as of late Aug.
21) pleading for massive reinforcements and an air campaign to prevent
their decimation.
Meanwhile, on Aug. 19, in Ghouta, more than 50
local opposition fighters and their commanders laid down their arms and
switched sides. A few prominent local leaders widely associated with
the opposition went on Syrian TV. They denounced the jihadists and their
crimes against the local population, and stressed that the Assad
administration was the real guardian of the people and their interests.
More than a dozen ex-rebels joined the Syrian Government forces.
Hence,
the last thing the Assad administration would do is commit atrocities
against the Ghouta area and the local population which had just changed
sides so dramatically. For the opposition, fiercely avenging such a
betrayal and petrifying other would-be traitors is a must. Furthermore,
in view of the failure of the march on Daraa and Damascus by the CIA’s
FSA forces, there was an urgent imperative for the opposition to provoke
a Western military intervention before the rebellion collapsed
completely, and Assad consolidated victory.
In Obama’s Washington, there has been a growing opposition to intervention.
Chairman
of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who had just
been to the Jordan and Israel on an inspection tour of the Syrian
crisis, publicly doubted the expediency of an armed intervention,
because supporting the opposition would not serve the U.S. national and
security interests. Dempsey wrote to Congress that while the U.S. “can
destroy the Syrian Air Force”, such a step would “escalate and
potentially further commit the United States to the conflict”.
There
was no compelling strategic reason for such an undertaking. “Syria
today is not about choosing between two sides but rather about choosing
one among many sides,” Dempsey wrote. “It is my belief that the side we
choose must be ready to promote their interests and ours when the
balance shifts in their favor. Today, they are not.”
However,
President Obama’s own inner-most circle has made it clear that it is
committed to “humanitarian interventionism” of the kind exercised in
Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya.
Absent legitimate national interests,
a U.S.-led intervention must be based on humanitarian reasons such in
retaliation to atrocities and chemical attacks.
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