Voice of Russia
September 11, 2013
Obama’s empty claims against Syria “imperial hubris” – Rick Rozoff
The president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, called Obama’s claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons “unimaginable nonsense” and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a liar, and these statements mildly characterize what the United States is attempting to get away with another crime against peace. The way the United States is attempting to attack another nation based on lies and empty rhetoric as they continue their geopolitical remapping of the world, is a sign of imperial hubris. Voice of Russia contributor Rick Rozoff, from Stop NATO, gave his candid reaction to the latest war speech by the US’ “omniscient” commander in chief.
AUDIO
Hello! This is John Robles, I’m speaking with regular Voice of Russia contributor Rick Rozoff.
Robles: Hello Sir.
Rozoff: Hello John. It’s good to be on your show again.
Robles: Thank you very much for speaking with us again. Your reaction to U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech on Syria?
Rozoff: It was short, there was no new information, to be honest with you, but what was, I think, most disturbing, aside from the almost diabolically self-assured and omniscient demeanor of the commander in chief of, again to use his expression, the world’s sole military superpower was the fact that he spoke repeatedly about, “as everyone knows,” “there are indisputable facts” and so forth in relation to the putative or the alleged poison gas or chemical weapons use in Syria on August of 21st .
His actual terms, if I can bring them up here, suggest that he has privy information that the rest of the world doesn’t have, which is a typical characteristic of imperial hubris, and we certainly saw that come across in his presentation, statements that “all sides agree” on the need for action (that is military action against Syria) when, in fact, that’s not the case. This is from the text of his address to the nation and, of course, to the world.
I’m reading quotes from the address; “No one disputes” that there was a chemical attack in Syria, that’s a quote.
Another quote: “Moreover, we know that the Assad regime was responsible.”
He alone, evidently, knows that, because the United Nations inspection team has not filed their report yet. So, we don’t have that to go on.
We have the head of state of Russia, Vladimir Putin referring to that claim as being, and I quote him, “unimaginable nonsense,. but somehow Obama and his colleagues in the U.S. government know everything.
Robles: They keep saying “we know, we know, we know”, I mean Kerry said it 23 times in a recent speech. But they haven’t offered any concrete evidence. Have you seen any of this concrete evidence?
I have a friend in England who said that Kerry recently made a reference to the material that was supposed to be on the U.S. State Department’s website and he could not find it, anywhere. This was supposedly some real evidence. Have you seen any real evidence? and then please continue.
Rozoff: No, of course not. And moreover, Obama himself, when spending a disproportionate amount of his address talking about atrocity stories of course, because he knows that’s his trump card for egging on a war, and again it’s the equivalent of the so-called Račak massacre in Yugoslavia, in Kosovo, in January of 1999, which was the pretext for the war against that nation, but Obama is simply reiterating, or parroting, the sort of information we’ve heard from the State Department spokesman, from Kerry himself, as you alluded to. You know, the statement that “an intercepted telephone call” – I mean, please. This makes the George W. Bush administration look credible, doesn’t it? When a supposed intercepted telephone call and the trajectory of the rockets that were fired into areas and such like – this is hardly evidence. Much less incontrovertible or irrefutable evidence; this is instead a hastily concocted pretence.
But nevertheless, in the course of his talk he dealt at great length trying to conjure up in the minds of his listeners and viewers, I suppose, the image of corpses, particularly those of children, in the suburbs of Damascus in the incident, whatever the true nature of it proves to be, of August of 21st.
He was pulling on every conceivable heartstring: dead children laid out in rows. “If this can happen to Syrian children, it can happen to American children” and such like. I mean, it was really low demagoguery. And it wasn’t even terribly creative.
Robles: He said this could happen to American children too?
Rozoff: He made a statement of that effect, you know, “if we don’t stop chemical weapons use against the children of Syria, this could someday be American children.”
Robles: So, is he trying to imply that Syria is somehow a threat to America?
Rozoff: It is a very tortured logic, of course, but we have to be able to kind of read the code language of the White House and the State Department.
And what we are hearing is: although the Syrian rebels, those who cut out people’s livers and eat them and videotape it because they are so proud of what they’ve done, or people who kidnap Christian bishops and hold them if they haven’t tortured them to death and such like are responsible democratic Jeffersonian advocates of liberty, which is basically what Obama asserted, and although there may be the rare extremists mixed with them…
And we know that the President of Russia Vladimir Putin called John Kerry what he was – a liar – for repeatedly claiming there were no extremists amongst the rebel factions in Syria.
But what the U.S. has done is reserved the right to claim (talk about this being interesting, John) that if the government of Syria has chemical weapons, they could fall into the hands of extremist rebel groups who could then use them.
The US should know something about that having armed terrorist outfits in Afghanistan and the Balkans and Libya and so forth. They know that’s exactly what is going to happen.
Robles: There is evidence that they were supplied by the U.S. to these so-called “cannibal rebels”, that’s what I want to call them, and…
Rozoff: That’s a fit designation for them. I mean that sums them up perfectly.
And the same sort of Libyan Islamic Fighting Group-types that killed the US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi. But the U.S. acts like the model of outraged innocence when one of their own terrorist clients occasionally turns against them.
It is occurring incidentally in Afghanistan right now, with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who were two of the major recipients of U.S. military aid during the war against the Soviets and the Afghan government in the 1980s. So, this is nothing new. This is an old scenario.
But at any rate what the U.S. is doing is once again is playing on both sides of the street. On the one hand, they will accuse the Syrian government of deliberately and seemingly capriciously, just gratuitously, killing their own citizens.
This is what Russian President Vladimir Putin took issue with, when he referred to the fact that as the Syrian government is scoring pretty substantial and even definitive military victory on the ground, why would they use chemical weapons at this point? And moreover, when there is a UN inspection team in the country, why do it then?
So, the U.S. on the one hand will try to, “as we all know”, as Mr. Obama said again today about the fact that supposedly the Syrian government…“the facts cannot be denied” – that’s a quote actually from his presentation in regard to the Syrian government, the Syrian regime.
Robles: What are those facts?
Rozoff: Again, we know there are no such facts. But then what happens is they turn around and state: “Well, if there are chemical weapons in control of the government and the rebels might be able to wrest those weapons away from the government and use them.”
This is disingenuous to the lowest degree. And it is simply one or another casus belli, one or another alleged justification for going to war.
Robles: Okay, Rick unfortunately we are out of time. Thank you very much.
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