Bombing Syria.

I have a few questions regarding the choice made by the US, the UK, and France to bomb Syria on Friday night.

Why would al Assad gas his own people a mere couple of days after Trump announced he wanted to pull all US troops out of Syria?  It makes no sense, unless Assad has a death wish and wanted more bombs raining down on his country.

Syria joined the Chemical Warfare Convention and gave up its chemical weapons in 2013.  It has since been inspected numerous times by the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons), which has verified Syria’s compliance.  Why are we so sure that Syria has reneged on its participation in the Convention?  Which is not to say it is impossible that Assad has entered into chemical weapons production again and has simply evaded the inspectors, but it seems unlikely.

The “proof” that Assad gassed his own people is based entirely on video evidence provided by the White Helmets.  This group is funded by the UK and is affiliated with al Qaeda, al Nusra Front and ISIS.  Just like the CIA weaponry, funds, and training offered to these terrorist groups, the idea is to strengthen the anti-Assad “rebels” in an effort to get rid of Assad (who was elected, one might remember) and partition Syria.  Given that we know who the White Helmets are, and given that some of their videos have been proven to be completely staged events – i.e., false flags – why does the media continue to use them as a source of supposedly reliable information?  The US generals admit that their assessment of the situation was based on the White Helmet video and on “social media”.  This would be the same social media that is supposedly infected with Russian trolls spewing fake news in an effort to ruin our democracy, but which has apparently turned the corner as of last week and redeemed itself.

The OPCW was scheduled to inspect the area of Assad’s reported chemical weapons attack against civilians in Douma on Saturday, the day after Trump, et al dropped the bombs.  Why would the US, UK, and France decide to blow things up before the investigation took place?  They didn’t even wait for the inspection, much less any report on the findings.  That is peculiar.

We bombed and obliterated some military areas, a science research center and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities, all near the environs of Damascus.  Damascus is one of the largest cities in Syria and is a heavily populated area, with over a million civilians living there.  If we believed that these facilities were used to store and/or create chemical weapons, why on earth would we drop bombs and risk dispersing the chemicals into the surrounding area?  The fumes and explosions of the burning chemicals would have outright killed or seriously harmed tens of thousands of people. Why would we do that?  Either we knew there were no chemicals in those buildings, or we didn’t care if we gassed all those people during the bombing.  Since reporters were allowed to go into the buildings immediately after the bombs were dropped and walk around to film the results, without protective gear and without any physical harm to themselves, I suspect we knew all along that there were no weapons, chemical or otherwise, present.

Which all raises the final question: what the hell are we doing and why the hell are we doing it?