While everyone else was distracted by Miley doing the dirty at the VMAs, Syrian civilians suffered a totally different kind of dirty — chemical weapons.
Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, according to several news sources. Reports from Syria told a gruesome tale of civilians arriving to hospitals foaming at the mouth, suffering from what is assumed to be a sarin gas attack.
“Let me be clear: The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity,” Secretary of State John Kerry said of the apparent use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Let me be clear: The United States has killed between 407 and 926 civilians in the covert drone war in the Middle East. Even worse, “double tap” strikes are used, which are meant to instill fear by killing first responders to a strike site, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
In Syria, the United Nations has yet to finish its investigation about whether chemical weapons were used in the first place. While reports from the country all but confirm this, it’s unclear who is using the chemical weapons. Just because John Kerry and President Obama say it’s coming from the Syrian government doesn’t make it so.
In fact, testimonials from victims to a senior UN official in May after previous chemical weapons attacks suggested it was the rebels, not the Syrian regime, who were using the outlawed weapons.
So here we are, about to intervene in yet another autonomous Middle Eastern state before we have all the facts. Conveniently, the U.S. has four destroyers in the Mediterranean armed with Tomahawk missiles ready to strike.
Earlier this week, Foreign Policy broke a story from an old CIA document showing that the U.S. helped Saddam Hussein in 1988, when Iraq was at war with Iran. The CIA helped Iraq by sharing satellite imagery showing a major Iranian offensive move, with full knowledge that Hussein was going to gas his enemies with sarin — the same agent reported to have been used in Syria.
Obviously, it’s not the chemical weapons we’re worried about — historically, the West has only intervened in the East when there’s something to gain.
The Syrian people directly affected by the conflict don’t desire intervention from the West, according to an NPR article written by a Syrian author. They don’t believe it would change anything.
Syrians aren’t the only ones who want the West to mind its own business. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, only 9 percent of people think the U.S. should intervene. This being a democracy, such a move is unacceptable, as it is obviously and directly against the will of the people.
What you may see in the coming months is the same that we’re used to in the post-9/11 world: another regime toppled, another “democratic” nation established by a Western state.
A Syrian quoted in the NPR article sums it up well: The Americans “did it to Iraq, then to Libya. Then Syria and Egypt followed because ‘they’ encouraged a so-called uprising for so-called freedom. And now, they want to strike us to weaken Syria even more. It’s all mere theater, and we are the puppets. And who benefits? Only Israel.”
The Obama administration could at least pretend to listen.
Justin Jones is a journalism senior. His column appears on Thursdays. A version of this column ran on page 6 on 8/29/2013 under the headline "Syrians, Americans agree: Stay out, U.S."
