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Vol. 77/No. 32      September 9, 2013

 
Washington threatens
missile strike on Syria
 
BY SUSAN LAMONT  
In the wake of an Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack killing hundreds of civilians in a rebel-held Damascus neighborhood, President Barack Obama’s administration — along with London and Paris — is seeking to build support to launch a military assault on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Doctors Without Borders, which operates hospitals in the few Damascus suburbs the Assad regime does not control, reported that these facilities had treated 3,600 victims of poison gas, 355 of whom died. Assad claims the Syrian opposition forces fighting to oust him carried out the attack to discredit his government.

The civil war in Syria, which began in early 2011, is a conflict between the armed forces of Assad’s brutal regime and those of a disparate bourgeois opposition, which includes Islamist jihadist groups. The devastating war is taking a mounting toll on working people in Syria, with widening ramifications in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and elsewhere in the region. More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed in the war. Hundreds of thousands have been made refugees, most forced to flee into neighboring countries.

Since the Aug. 21 attack, Obama administration officials have pushed toward a U.S. military strike against Syria, hinting at cruise missile attacks on selected targets. “We are ready to go,” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told the media, referring to four U.S. destroyers currently deployed in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as multiple warplanes.

Many reporters and commentators cited Obama’s statement last year that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized” by the Syrian government. Up to now, however, Washington has not taken direct military action against the Syrian regime, despite earlier reports of chemical weapons’ use by Assad’s forces.

The British government of Prime Minister David Cameron, which is also calling for a military response, has indicated it will wait for a report by the United Nations team dispatched to Syria to investigate the Aug. 21 attack before taking action. U.N. officials said the report would be submitted the last weekend in August.

Obama administration officials told the New York Times Aug. 29 that it hasn’t backed off moving ahead with a strike on Syria, even without British support and endorsement by the U.N. Security Council.

Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin, who backs Assad, announced Aug. 29 that Russia was sending two warships to the eastern Mediterranean.
 
 
Related article:
US hands off Syria!
 
 
 
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