New chemical attack in Syria, I am confused...

[bellavite1]

I am happy to admit that I don't know much about chemical weapons, but I cannot quite understand:
In all the videos from the aftermath that I have seen you can see emergency personnel washing the faces of the victims with hoses etc.
I would expect that a victim's clothing would absorb a lot of these chemicals when exposure occurs and I would want to shed such clothes ASAP so that I don't keep breathing the fumes, and yet that does not seem to be the case...

[DenverGP]

It's definitely true that clothes can hold onto the gas.... In my air force days, we'd go thru chem training every year where they tear-gas us in the "confidence chamber". We'd stand around in the tear gas with our mask on, then one by one step to the door, remove the mask, take a breath and give our name/rank/serial number before they'd let us out. Right afterwards, we had someone in my barracks wash their uniform in hot water, and everyone on that floor was coughing and eyes watering.

[fitz19d]

I don't know about this one, but the same way it's happened with palenstinians, in syria you have had instances of them caught faking injuries etc to make a big media show. Same "victims" used over and over, people supposedly shot/bombed getting picked up by crews in 30 seconds. Look up the white hats or white helmets or whatever. (Where they have gotten photo's of members posing with ISIS types and being armed when they shouldn't.) Been a while since I was looking at that stuff so don't have a link or anything more specific.

[Martinjmpr]

Depends on the chemical. Some chemical agents are aerosols and evaporate quickly. Most are liquid in some form (which is why it annoys me to hear the term "nerve gas" - it's not a gas.)

Nerve agents typically kill by paralyzing the muscles which causes victims to stop breathing so restoring breathing is the first priority, decontamination is a secondary concern.

As far as the whole pearl-clutching about chemical weapons, I wonder if the people who are demanding that we ZOMG DO SOMETHING!!!!!!1!!!! have stopped to consider that when they say we have to 'DO SOMETHING' about chemical weapons (only) what they are essentially saying is this: "Hey, third-world dictators, it's totally cool to massacre your own citizens as long as you use bullets, bombs and artillery, but chemical weapons are a no-go!"

[MrAK]

[CS1983]

Jihadists lie? Staged war crimes? Say it ain't so!

[Martinjmpr]

I honestly wouldn't care if Assad stood up in front of cameras and admitted that he used chemical weapons.

After decades of hearing about the horrors of Saddam's Iraq, the US and a few of its allies finally took the bull by the horns and took the sadistic son-of-a-bitch out.

And the furrowed brows and talking heads who consider themselves the "conscience of the world" lost their collective shit, accused us of war crimes, etc, etc etc.

Now the EXACT SAME PEOPLE are demanding that we DO SOMETHING!!!!!! about Syria because a brutal dictator is massacring his own people?



Nope. To hell with them. We've already been down that road and instead of earning the gratitude of the people who demanded that we DO SOMETHING!!!! about Saddam, all it did was cost us a lot of blood and treasure.

Lesson learned: When "the world" demands that you "DO SOMETHING", tell "the world" to do it themselves.

Tell the self-appointed consciences of the world that the US is no longer in the dictator-removing business.

If they want Assad removed, let them do it themselves.

[MrAK]

[CS1983]

Prior to the sanctions, Iraq was actually not bad. In the 1970's, the Iraqi dinar was worth 3 US dollars. Europeans were going to Iraq for graduate and doctoral programs. The Iran-Iraq war didn't help anything.

In general, pre-Invasion Iraq was a simple process: don't go against the regime and you live a relatively normal life. Iraq was much more Western in the cities before US involvement, as was Iran before our assistance in overthrowing the Shah. Not an American ideal, but let's be honest about our present situation as well as the reality of the alternative in the Middle East: Sharia law.

Iraq was never going to recover from sanctions, no matter what Saddam did. It would have been a death sentence to his power to comply in full. He was screwed regardless of what he did, and he knew it.

Who cares/cared if Saddam was a dictator?

Look at Saudi Arabia. An awful place. If freedom of the Western variety were really the goal, we'd have invaded them 5 times over. If 9/11 was the excuse -- where did the money, hijackers, and the brand of Islam which did the attack come from? Saudi. CERTAINLY not Iraq. The Kurds, for us, are a puppet and an excuse. We DO NOT care about the Kurds. It would end all diplomatic relations with Turkey to overtly support them. We left them out to dry in 1991 and we left them out to dry in 2003-present. We also left the Shi'a out to dry in 1991. WE encouraged them to rise up and then provided no assistance. I cannot recall if it was in Jon Lee Anderson's "The Fall of Baghdad" or another book about the invasion, but there was a Marine unit bogged down in maybe Basra or another town, can't recall which one -- either way, a Shi'a town. One of the Marine officers asked one of the elders why they were fighting them since they were going to overthrow their mortal enemy. The elder replied along the lines of, "You abandoned us in 1991. If you had helped and we still lost, we would have greeted you with flowers. You betrayed us, so we greet you with guns."

We are simply repeating in Syria the mistakes of Iraq. Assad is not necessarily a good guy in a Western sense. He is fully willing to massacre enemies, fellow citizens though they may be. What's wrong with that, exactly? Particularly when those enemies would remove a secular boot from a certain subset of the population, and place a mohammedan sandle on the necks of all.

I ask, who does this agenda serve? It's not the US. Leaders like Saddam and Assad would be great allies to have. At least their pragmatism is more trustworthy than the taqqiya of dedicated Islamists.

Only one outcome can come from a destabilized, purely Islamist Middle East: hot regional war, Israel pulling out all stops, and either ww3 exploding from beneath the surface crust of regional proxies or a global entity taking away the necessity of national sovereignty.

Either way, both the people of the region and the US do not benefit.

[Martinjmpr]

In general, pre-Invasion Iraq was a simple process: don't go against the regime and you live a relatively normal life. Iraq was much more Western in the cities before US involvement, as was Iran before our assistance in overthrowing the Shah. Not an American ideal, but let's be honest about our present situation as well as the reality of the alternative in the Middle East: Sharia law.

Well, there was that whole "invading Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia" thing, too.