assad has only a tiny army of his own, there isnt much left for him. almost all of "his" current army is made up by Shiite mercenaries and russian troops. without his allies, he does NOT have the resources to finish the reconquering of his country. without his allies, there is no guarantee that he would be able to withstand another public uprising that could take place some years from now.

and deliberately committing a crime to put pressure on his allies (and not himself) sounds illogical to the max.

it was false flag

First, The right nationalist governement in Israel exists for more than 20 years. Netanyahu himself as a PM for 8 years. I doubt that they will start to support those sorts of action all of a sudden.
Second, Syria is in complete rubble. They are not a threat at anyone at the moment. As far as i know, everyone are trying to push themselfs as far as possible from that mess.
And finally, I really dont know much about iraq so i cant tell about the rest of the stuff you wrote.

This post was edited by WhiteSouned on Apr 6 2017 12:09pm

Israel is not remotely threatened by Assad. He's not even as much aligned as a shiite threat as Iran/Hezbollah. They'd be happy to have Assad in power and keeping his sunni population crushed under heel



We're fighting Iran's war by directing the kurds right now. Remember when Obama changed the balance of powers by working with Iran?
We're no longer dealing in black and white middle east policy. We leverage our support for Iran to put pressure on the Saudis and stay pragmatic about it, we don't blindly attack anything Iranian anymore.



Good for us, the more pressure we can put on Erdogan the better. Theres a reason we're making sure turkey doesn't get to move on raqqa even though the kurds have zero intention of occupying it



Assad is a rational actor who will act in his own self interests as best he can. He's not a cardboard 2 dimensional villain twirling a snidely whiplash moustache. He is a strongman dictator and he knows it. He learned his lessons from dear papa in Hama- he's only as cruel as he is calculating

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 6 2017 12:16pm

So how many of its children has the Syrian government murdered today?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-weighing-military-options-following-chemical-weapons-attack-in-syria/2017/04/06/0c59603a-1ae8-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_syria-315pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.b7a1d0bc9955


Looks like the hawks will get what they want. This is so cold war, South America esque. Manufacture some reason ( the chemical attack) and use that as the catalyst to overthrow someone. Our resident hawks i'm sure are very happy that we're on the eve of more dying and escalation. Skinned you might finally get what you want, Assad overthrown, more refugees flooding and maybe even a little bit of Alawite genocide.

Anyway as far as conspiracy theories go, whatcha all think about the 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' equivalents here? Particularly people noting the amount of rescuers at the scene wearing no gloves and handling the victims

well, the rescuers at the time didnt know what hit them, they didnt know if it was a dangerous substance that requires being handled with protection. they saw their neighbors, friends, children being sick, so they rushed there to help them. I wouldnt read too much into it.

Link dead children or i call fake news

Sarin absorbs through the skin rapidly, killing within minutes. The rescuers would be dying on the videos if the victims were 'fresh'. If people were actually hit by chemical weapons, handling their corpses in the immediate aftermath would kill you pretty darn quickly