6/14/13

Pres. Obama to Arm Rebels, P.M. Cameron Claims Syria Used Sarin & Killed 150

Though Germany invented Sarin gas in 1938 the United States and Britain developed large stocks and perhaps the first casualty was a British test subject at Porton Down. Sarin is about 500 times more powerful than cyanide and can kill  in a minute. Sarin is a nerve agent and messes up neuro-chemicals. The administrations of the U.S., Britain and France claim the Assad government used Sarin on the rebels and killed 150 of them. We are a little skeptical because it is a potential excuse for U.S. intervention on the side of the rebels.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/14/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE95C16L20130614

If the Assad government used a chemical weapon it would be quite bad (it was outlawed by the U.N. in the 1990's). We wonder though why Assad would use such a politically dangerous weapon to kill just one-hundred people instead of conventional yet effective weapons of which he has plenty. We wonder if the claim is another Gulf of Tonkin resolution or W.M.D. in Saddam Hussein's Iraq quanta of political flim flam? Twice-burned once shy.  With defense outlays for Afghanistan winding down in 2014 the military-industrial complex may be searching for new places to drop munitions for profit (defense contractors need to resupply the U.S. military for profit).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22908836#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

Senator McCain has already called for U.S. intervention to ground the Syrian Air Force. Cratering explosives on airfields and maybe Stinger should-launched missiles for Al Qaeda visiting rebels might do the trick. One wonders if the Syrian Air Force was used to kill just one-hundred rebels with Sarin by air drops of bombs?

In 2004 Iraqi rebels used an artillery shell with two-part Sarin precursors to attack a U.S. convoy ineffectively because the shell needed to rotate at high speed to mix the Sarin and an I.E.D. wouldn't do it. Syria has artillery and tanks to launch Sarin-precursor filled shells (not like creme-filled donuts) if they wanted to, so where is the effectiveness of a no-fly zone for controlling a possible Sarin attack from the air? It seems possible that former Iraqi rebels have a store of Sarin-precursor filled artillery shells that they might be able to use as guest-rebels for Team Sunni in Syria. We are skeptical about the Sarin fog of war, and hope for restraint from the Condor legion wing of the U.S. Government lusting for no-fly zones abroad until use of chemical weapons becomes a solidly witnessed and documented fact. 

A substantive approach to verification of quanta of contemporary history requires a probability curve of use consistent with military objectives in the given political environment. The allegation of technical use of Sarin gas by the Assad government of Syria thus far is not convincing. It seems to be a managed political level akin to claiming the unemployment rate was 7.9% before the Nov. 2012 Presidential election rather than 8.0. True or not there were still 30 million souls out of work in the U.S.A.

File:Sarin test rabbit.jpg
Image credit of Rocky Mountain Arsenal 1970 Sarin dtest rabbit-Library of Congress photo taken by U.S. Forest Service employee.

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