Del Ponte Says Syrian Rebels Likely Used Sarin

The canard coming out of Israel is that yesterday's airstrike on military installations in Damascus is not an Israeli insertion into Syria's civil war but a message to Iran and Hezbollah. In other words, those huge bombs that killed your soldiers and terrorized you in the dark, they're not really about you. This from Jodi Rudoren and Isabel Kershner's story, "Airstrikes Tied to Israel May Be Message to Iranians":

Analysts said they did not see the airstrikes as the opening of a new war front, or as an attempt to prop up the Syrian rebels against the Syrian government of Mr. Assad. Rather, they tended to see it more as an extension of the long-running “shadow war” against Iran and Hezbollah, a tit-for-tat of terror attacks and assassinations that has stretched over decades and around the world. 

“This shouldn’t be seen as Israel intervening on behalf of the rebels or against Bashar,” said Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzilya. “This is an escalation in a conflict we know about, and that is the conflict between Israel and Iran.”

This is the official cover story. It's absurd. Yesterday's airstrikes are most definitely an Israeli/U.S. attempt to bolster the jihadists who took a drubbing last week. In none of the commentary can one find mention of the story coming out of Geneva that United Nations investigators have evidence of the use of sarin gas by the rebels, not the Assad government. This from a Reuters story, "Syrian Rebels May Have Used Sarin":

United Nations human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical workers indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces using chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said Carla Del Ponte, a commission member.

“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals,” Ms. Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television. “According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.” 

“This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,” she added, speaking in Italian.

This is going to queer the pitch for the U.S. How do you justify an illegal intervention based on non-existent proof of Assad using poison gas on his own people when there is proof that the people you are intervening on behalf of have used said poison gas? You can't. So expect an effort to hush it up or discredit the UN commission of inquiry (possibly similar to the smear campaign against Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq).

For a particularly shameful example of greasing the wheels of war, read Bill Keller's piece, "Syria Is Not Iraq," in the Opinion page this morning. Keller implores us to suspend our hard won disbelief, coming so soon after our disastrous experience in Iraq, in the efficacy of military force in resolving issues of state. He maintains the false hypothesis (based on bald assertion) that Syria will certainly disintegrate unless we do something, leading him to the nonsensical conclusion that in order to prevent Syria's disintegration we must first hasten it by military intervention:

For starters, President Obama articulates — as he has not done — how the disintegration of Syria represents a serious danger to America’s interests and ideals. The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels — funneling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiating an orderly transition to a nonsectarian Syria. We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.

All of this must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by a symphony of diplomacy to keep our allies with us and our adversaries at bay. The aim would be to eventually have a transition government, stabilized for a while by an international peacekeeping force drawn mostly from neighboring states like Turkey.

I don’t mean to make this sound easy. It might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals. But that outcome is virtually inevitable if we stay out.

But one could plausibly argue just the opposite: that popular support for the jihadi rebels is rapidly waning (doesn't Keller read his own newspaper?); that the Syrian military was racking up victory after victory the last couple of weeks; that barring outside intervention Assad was looking to restore control of his territory.

Once again the elites are leading us into war. There is no popular support for this; that, and direct Western military intervention can only make things worse. But none of this matters. War is how rulers rule.