Craig Murray's "The Rush to War"

Trump of course has a way out of his self-imposed deadline to attack Syria. He could declare the chemical attack in Douma a fraud staged by Jaysh al-Islam. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a reliably anti-Assad intelligence bureau headquartered in the UK, sees no evidence of chemical attack in Douma; rather "the suffocations were the result of shelters collapsing on people inside them."

Trump will make no such bold declaration. It's a near certainty that he will order an attack. The question now is one of scale, as Peter Baker notes in "After Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria, Trump Weighs Retaliation":

The president now faces a challenge in creating a response to the chemical attack that will be more effective than the missile strike he ordered last year after a similar assault on civilians that he attributed to the Assad government. While only days ago Mr. Trump said he wanted to pull American troops out of Syria and “let the other people take care of it now,” which would effectively mean Russia and Iran, his comments on Monday suggested that he was prepared to take them on.

For a bird's-eye view of the insanity unfolding there is yesterday's post by Craig Murray, "The Rush to War":

I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in Salisbury, amongst other possibilities. But I do rule out the possibility that Assad is dropping chemical weapons in Ghouta. In this extraordinary war, where Saudi-funded jihadist head choppers have Israeli air support and US and UK military “advisers”, every time the Syrian army is about to take complete control of a major jihadist enclave, at the last moment when victory is in their grasp, the Syrian Army allegedly attacks children with chemical weapons, for no military reason at all. We have been fed this narrative again and again and again.

We then face a propaganda onslaught from neo-con politicians, think tanks and “charities” urging a great rain of Western bombs and missiles, and are accused of callousness towards suffering children if we demur. This despite the certain knowledge that Western military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have had consequences which remain to this day utterly disastrous.

I fear that the massive orchestration of Russophobia over the last two years is intended to prepare public opinion for a wider military conflict centred on the Middle East, but likely to spread, and that we are approaching that endgame. The dislocation of the political and media class from the general population is such, that the levers for people of goodwill to prevent this are, as with Iraq, extremely few as politicians quake in the face of media jingoism. These feel like extremely dangerous times.