The Marmot’s Hole

Paul H.

Somewhere on US cable TV news I heard (maybe yesterday Wed US time, or maybe it was Tues) that commercial satellite operators are scrambling to take fresh pictures of this site, to see what’s going on.

The idea being that there’s a report that the Syrians are busy completely leveling out the site of whatever it was that the Israelis hit (though yesterday a Syrian spokesman was on US TV in English, I think it was PBS news hour, I think it was their UN ambassador or maybe their foreign minister visiting the UN). Anyway — he repeated the official Syrian govt story that the Israeli aircraft were driven off by Syrian air defenses — forced to drop their ordnance and their external fuel tanks and flee from the righteous wrath of the aroused Syrian people.

One of my “points”: if brand new commercial satellite pictures (obtained independently of US, Israeli, or any other govt) show this particular site to be leveled (or in the process of being leveled) — will that suffice as “proof” to you that there was indeed something “sinister” going on there? I really don’t think you’re going to get some sort of “independent” international inspection, if that is going to be your standard.

Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA, has evidently huffed that if the Israelis and/or the US thought there was something there, they should have reported it to him so as to allow his agency to go check it out. I guess that like you, someguy, he considers that the “failure to find WMD” by the US in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, following his agency’s efforts in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s there, completely validates for all time the idea that international “inspections” of thuggish dictatorships (Arab or otherwise) are now the absolute “gold standard” for “proof”.

Which in turn has become a standard “meme” worldwide and in the US, amongst Bush administration critics (sorry Pyotr, where-ever you are). Someguy, you completely choose to overlook (because it doesn’t suit your theme) that the pre-Iraq invasion inspections for WMD’s turned out to be “successful” because they took place under the cover of US aircraft overhead. And that the IAEA (and western intelligence agencies) had earlier completely missed the extent of Saddam’s pre-1991 WMD programs, of which there is extensively documented proof.

If this Syrian site had actually been a “fish-processing” plant, I reckon the Syrians would have had the world press in there by now to document the fact, the same way the Iraqi Press ministry did for targets in Iraq hit by the US bombing in the six week aerial campaign that preceded the Feb 91 coalition ground campaign to retake Kuwait.

By that point worldwide skepticism of Saddam was pretty widespread; I don’t know if we ever did determine what those sites actually were in retrospect. Probably if there was anything sinister there, all evidence of it was removed prior to the foreign journalists visit, just as the Syrians are evidently now busily engaged in erasing all evidence of whatever was at the site the Israelis hit.

My second “point” is to reference that 1991 memory, which maybe you either don’t remember or have chosen to overlook; some of those bombed-out installations were newly labeled with hand-written signs in English proclaiming them “baby milk” or “baby food” factories.I’m personally grateful that the Israelis and the US have so far kept their evidence (and their sources) mum, since I’m naturally disposed to take their word for it as to what was there. But if you want to take a “hard-headed skeptic” approach, why go ahead and feel free to indulge yourself.

Though I’d prefer a little less disingenousness on your part. If you think the Syrians and North Koreans are perfectly entitled to get together and collude on various long-range missile, chemical, and nuclear weapons schemes, why not just say so? After all, it’s not really a “violation” of any sort of international law, if you want to adopt the standard UN outlook that all the nations of the world are morally equivalent “colleagues” in the General Assembly and therefore entitled to total freedom of action under the classical definition of national sovereignty, without any regard as to their previous national patterns of behavior.