The SYRIAN WAR Thread

It'll make an excellent training exercise. How often do they get the chance to track each other's navies on this scale?

I think 4 of the five US destroyers may actually be the Aldridge class frigates - which were supposed to be the vessels carrying out the tomahawk cruise missile attacks on Syria. The Russians do seem to really have quite a few amphibious landing ships there. I wonder what's up with that?

It's uncommon for the US to NOT have a carrier group stationed in the MED, but I believe they have one or two in the Arabian/Red Sea region. I also believe they are being kept out of the MED (out of range) for safety reasons.

The Tomahawk long range variant has a range of 1,700 km, so if it was fired it could not have been fired from Spain, at least with any chance of hitting Syria.

Mostly to evacuate citizens in case the situation gets pretty bad.

I can't find any corroboration on this intriguing story so I'm discounting the shoot down story. Not that stranger things haven't happened.

And another reminder of how glad everyone should be that we're not bombing away in Syria right now (as we would be -- these things always take longer than they're supposed to);
From Seymour Hersh of all people:
"But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

Gist is that it was known that Al-Nusra had capacity to make Sarin. Note also Samantha Power (Ms Humanitarian Intervention herself) really pushed the "only Assad regime has Sarin" line.

I've had the feeling that something was fishy about this all [the August 21st sarin attack] since day one but I've been cautious as to not make any assumptions. Now more pieces of the puzzle appear to be coming together though, but I remain somewhat on the fence still. What Mr. Hersh highlights above doesn't come as a surprise to me however...

Two OSINT blogs worth reading are Brown Moses and Who Ghouta. They both claim to be non-partial but IMO they both show a slight bias, albeit in two opposite directions. Judging from what I've read, the research done at the Who Ghouta blog appears somewhat less biased though, and in terms of culpability it points to the rebels (though it is only inferred, not explicitly stated).