{"id":33283,"date":"2018-04-10T06:56:15","date_gmt":"2018-04-10T11:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33283"},"modified":"2018-04-10T06:56:15","modified_gmt":"2018-04-10T11:56:15","slug":"the-media-never-ever-gives-peace-a-chance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33283","title":{"rendered":"The Media Never, Ever Gives Peace a Chance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Media Never, Ever Gives Peace a Chance<\/a><\/h3>\n
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At this writing, President Trump is considering \u201cthe possibility of retaliation in Syria in response to a suspected chemical attack on young children and families in the Syrian city of Douma,\u201d reported CBS News. \u201cIf it\u2019s the Russians, if it\u2019s Syria, if it\u2019s Iran, if it\u2019s all of them together, we\u2019ll figure it out,\u201d Trump said. \u201cNothing\u2019s off the table,\u201d including a military attack by the United States.<\/p>\n

Whether that possibility involves a cruise missile strike, drone attacks or conventional bombing raids by fighter jets, this is deadly serious business. People, mostly innocent civilians and Syrian grunts who had nothing to do with the \u201csuspected\u201d chemical attack, will die. People will be injured. Survivors will be traumatized. An attack could escalate and expand the current conflict, leading to more death and destruction.<\/p>\n

The stakes are high, but U.S. policymakers are as glibly insouciant as if they were choosing between Hulu and Netflix. This is not new or Trumpian. It\u2019s always been like this. American leaders don\u2019t take these life-and-death decisions seriously.<\/p>\n

If the United States were a sane country populated by rational, civically-engaged citizens, Americans would pour derision and ridicule on anyone who seriously considered raining bombs over a \u201csuspected\u201d anything. And the skepticism in this case ought to be exponentially greater considering that this is Syria.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve already been down this \u201cSyria\u2019s Assad regime used chemical weapons against their own people so we should bomb his forces\u201d road. It happened under Obama. What is certain here is uncertainty: maybe it\u2019s true, maybe it\u2019s not. As legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh pointed out in 2014, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) believed that at least one major faction of the Syrian opposition, the al-Nusra Front, possessed significant manufacturing facilities and stockpiles of sarin nerve agent and other proscribed toxic chemicals.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Media Never, Ever Gives Peace a Chance At this writing, President Trump is considering \u201cthe possibility of retaliation in Syria in response to a suspected chemical attack on young children and families in the Syrian city of Douma,\u201d reported CBS News. \u201cIf it\u2019s the Russians, if it\u2019s Syria, if it\u2019s Iran, if it\u2019s all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[3932,3218,5493,442,512,1921,3391,776,19746,827,862],"class_list":["post-33283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-al-nusra","tag-bashar-al-assad","tag-counterpunch","tag-iraq","tag-media","tag-new-york-times","tag-peace","tag-syria","tag-ted-rall","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33284,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33283\/revisions\/33284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}