printA few independent-minded, mainstream politicians are questioning “whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was responsible for last week’s chemical weapons attack on civilians that prompted US missile strikes.” Like Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, they actually want evidence other than Nikki Haley waving a picture of a kid and Ivanka weeping.
One is Independent Australian MP Andrew Wilkie, also a former senior intelligence analyst. Wilkie “was ‘skeptical’ about who was responsible for the April 4 attack. ‘I’m actually skeptical about some of these claims,’ he told ABC radio on Tuesday. His comments come after US Defence Secretary James Mattis said ‘there is no doubt’ the Assad regime was responsible for planning and orchestrating the deadly attack.”
Wilkie has a history of showing good sense. Via ABC.Net.Au: He “resigned from the intelligence agency Office of National Assessments in 2003 in protest over Australia’s role in the Iraq War, said the Federal Government should have ‘learned from the past.'”
“I think we should be very cautious in Australia and not be too quick to automatically endorse what the US is saying,” said Wilkie.
You’d think!
Hard to believe that after Iraq, against which I railed in columns for years (“Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture”), starting in September of 2002, American leaders are back to doing the same.
When you quote truth disgorged by a liberal, GOPers pounce. But truth is truth no matter who says it.
Princeton’s Joyce Carol Oates captured the US’s appetite for destruction:
“[T]ravel to any foreign country,” Oates wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in November 2007, “and the consensus is: The American idea has become a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose bodybuilder luridly bulked up on steroids … deranged and myopic, dangerous.”