Thousands of people are reported to have been killed and many others injured in a poison gas attack on a Kurdish city in northern Iraq.
Up to 20 aircraft, said to include Iraqi Migs and Mirages, were seen overhead at around 1100 local time in Halabja.
According to experts, the chemicals dropped by the planes may have included mustard gas, the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX and possibly cyanide.
It may well be that the United States will go to war with Iraq. But if so, it should be because we have to — not because we want to. For the American people to accept the legitimacy of this conflict and give their consent to it, the Bush administration must first present detailed evidence of the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and then prove that all other avenues of protecting our nation’s security interests have been exhausted.
So I also want to underscore that while investigators are gathering additional evidence on the ground, our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts, informed by conscience and guided by common sense. The reported number of victims, the reported symptoms of those who were killed or injured, the firsthand accounts from humanitarian organizations on the ground, like Doctors Without Borders and the Syria Human Rights Commission — these all strongly indicate that everything these images are already screaming at us is real, that chemical weapons were used in Syria.
They were also used in Iraq, Secretary Kerry – not that this was an issue at all in 2002, when you fought like an ineffectual parakeet to keep us from finally excising the Hussein regime from history. But, hey: maybe the Syrians used up their entire stock on their own subjects, and thus don’t have any more. As I recall, that was a favorite argument of the antiwar Left when people asked them why they only cared about saving non-Westerners when a Democrat could take credit from it.
Moe Lane
PS: That John Kerry makes a horrible neocon is a judgement on him, not on neoconservatives. Not that I feel any particular pride at being a better person than John Kerry, of course. Nor should I, either.
*Via
Who was just asking me about Kerry’s oped? http://t.co/6P93ZzcczV
— David Freddoso (@freddoso) August 27, 2013
Biden as VP, Hillary’s disaster of a term as SoS and now Kerry as SoS, Holder, Rice, etc, if Obama was a Republican, we’d probably hear about how not a single person in his administration is competent.