Seymour Hersh exposes US government lies on Syrian sarin attack
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published an article demonstrating that the US government and President Barack Obama knowingly lied when they claimed that the Syrian government had carried out a sarin gas attack on insurgent-held areas last August.
Hersh’s detailed account, based on information provided by current and former US intelligence and military officials, was published Sunday in the London Review of Books. The article, entitled “Whose sarin?,” exposes as a calculated fraud the propaganda churned out day after day by the administration and uncritically repeated by the media for a period of several weeks to provide a pretext for a military attack on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The article also reveals sharp differences within the state apparatus over the launching of an air war that one high-level special operations adviser said would have been “like providing close air support for [Al Qaeda-affiliated] al-Nusra.”
In the end, internal differences over the launching of direct military action, compounded by massive popular opposition to another unprovoked war in the Middle East, led the administration to pull back and accept a Russian plan for the dismantling of Syrian chemical weapons. This was followed by the opening of talks with Syria’s main ally in the region, Iran.
Hersh’s account of systematic manipulation of intelligence aimed at dragging the American people into yet another war based on lies underscores the fact that Obama’s retreat in Syria by no means signaled a turn away from militarism. Rather, it reflected a provisional change in tactics in relation to US hegemonic aims in the oil-rich Middle East, and a decision to focus more diplomatic and military resources on Washington’s drive to isolate and contain what it considers more critical antagonists: Russia and, above all, China.