Can’t Blame This One On Bush

I figured when Patrick Smith’s piece was the lead article at Salon, there may be real news to read.

And indeed there is.

Smith, for those not familiar with him, is perhaps the best source these days for objectivity on foreign affairs.

Smith’s piece, Barack Obama pulls a George W. Bush: Lies, misinformation and chemical weapons, actually was a report on a long article by Seymour Hersh (yes, that Seymour Hersh), The Red Line and the Rat Line.

The bottom line: Those chemical weapons from last August in Syria weren’t Assad’s weapons after all. And, by all appearances, Obama had a good idea they weren’t. Smith:

The trail into what happened begins with a sample of the gas used near Damascus given to Porton Down, the British military’s laboratory not far from London. The sample came via a Russian military intelligence operative, and the British found it did not match the Syrian army’s known stocks.

British intel quickly advised Washington that the case against Assad would not bear scrutiny. Revelation No. 1: Now we know why Obama abruptly asked for congressional support for his plan to shell Assad’s military. He wanted to pull a George W.: offloading some of the blame if it came out Assad was not the perp on Aug. 21. Bush had done the same when the WMD case against Saddam Hussein came undone a decade earlier.

Hersh tell us that it had long been known in American defense and intelligence circles that Syrian rebels, notably the jihadist al–Nusra Front, had been developing chemical-weapons capabilities. There had been attacks in the spring of 2013 that the U.N. subsequently investigated. American media never reported the conclusion.

There’s more. A lot more. Hersh, if you remember, broke the news on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the torture at Abu Ghraib. This latest bombshell may be  right up there with his other ones.

This one’s too important to summarize — you need to follow the links and read the whole thing.