Scott Adams: Syrian Gas Attack Is Pure Persuasion

Scott Adams
Scott Adams' Blog
Thu, 06 Apr 2017 17:52 UTC

Let's hose down that nerve agent

According to the mainstream media - that has been wrong about almost everything for a solid 18 months in a row - the Syrian government allegedly bombed its own people with a nerve agent.

The reason the Assad government would bomb its own people with a nerve agent right now is obvious. Syrian President Assad - who has been fighting for his life for several years, and is only lately feeling safer - suddenly decided to commit suicide-by-Trump. Because the best way to make that happen is to commit a war crime against your own people in exactly the way that would force President Trump to respond or else suffer humiliation at the hands of the mainstream media.

And how about those pictures coming in about the tragedy. Lots of visual imagery. Dead babies. It is almost as if someone designed this "tragedy" to be camera-ready for President Trump's consumption. It pushed every one of his buttons. Hard. And right when things in Syria were heading in a positive direction.

• Interesting timing.
• Super-powerful visual persuasion designed for Trump in particular.
• Suspiciously well-documented event for a place with no real press.
• No motive for Assad to use gas to kill a few dozen people at the cost of his entire regime. It wouldn't be a popular move with Putin either.
• The type of attack no U.S. president can ignore and come away intact.
• A setup that looks suspiciously similar to the false WMD stories that sparked the Iraq war.

I'm going to call bullshit on the gas attack. It's too "on-the-nose," as Hollywood script-writers sometimes say, meaning a little too perfect to be natural. This has the look of a manufactured event.

My guess is that President Trump knows this smells fishy, but he has to talk tough anyway. However, keep in mind that he has made a brand out of not discussing military options. He likes to keep people guessing. He reminded us of that again yesterday, in case we forgot.

So how does a Master Persuader respond to a fake war crime?

He does it with a fake response, if he's smart.

Watch now as the world tries to guess where Trump is moving military assets, and what he might do to respond. The longer he drags things out, the less power the story will have on the public. We'll be wondering for weeks when those bombs will start hitting Damascus, and Trump will continue to remind us that he doesn't talk about military options.

Then he waits for something bad to happen to Assad's family, or his generals, in the normal course of chaos over there. When that happens on its own, the media will wonder if it was Trump sending a strong message to Assad in a measured way. Confirmation bias will do the rest.

There is also a non-zero chance that Putin just asked Assad to frame one of his less-effective Syrian generals for going rogue with chemical weapons, and executing him just to calm things down.

I don't think we'll ever know what's going on over there. But I think we can rule out the idea that Assad decided to commit suicide-by-Trump.

Comment: See also: Idlib "chemical weapons attack" reality: Syria bombed REBEL chemical weapons storehouse, Russia says military support will continue, vetoes U.S./UK/France UN resolution. Marko Marjanovic highlights just how dumb Assad would have to be by provoking a suicide-by-Trump:

In August-September 2013 Syria came within inches of being bombed by the US. The reason? The alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government.

Obama only pulled back when his intelligence services told him the idea sarin poison gas was deployed by Assad was "not a slam dunk".

Next Russia brokered a deal whereby Syria would give up its entire weapons stockpile. Damascus was freaked out enough by how close it got to being bombed that it agreed.

By June 2014 all declared chemical weapons were destroyed in a program supervised by US and Russia.

So then in 2017, with the battlefield situation looking far better than in mid 2013, in fact better than at any time since then, Assad pulled out some chemicals he had hid away to do the one thing virtually guaranteed to land him in a world of trouble? The one thing that very nearly got him bombed four years ago?
...
So yeah maybe in 2013 Assad kept some sarin around in case if he wanted to set himself up for a nice bombing years later. Hey, it's possible.

Or maybe the opposition, which was already accusing the army of using poison gas every Wednesday, finally figured out that to make it stick they needed it to be sarin and they needed a video. Then as luck would have it, the very first time since 2013 when sarin, rather than chlorine, has been deployed opposition cameras are there to capture it. The very first Syria gas attack in Syria to be caught on film! (Albeit the very video from the opposition raises doubt about sarin allegations.)

Meanwhile months after the 2013 sarin attack Seymour Hersh discovered the nerve agent, which originated in Turkey, was actually deployed by rebels and made to look like a government attack. That was a year after Obama had stated to the world that if Syrian government deployed chemical weapons he would intervene against it militarily.

Wonder what we will know about this one months from now.