two of the three whale casualties came by way of missiles torpedoes excuse me fired from anti-submarine for it with the fitting name of the h.m.s. brilliant the third whale was taken out by the ship's helicopter the british ministry of defense explained what the whale of a mistake was by saying the sooner sonar equipment at the time was not very advanced and was often mistaken by whale signals captain ahab each your heart out and i'll do it i'm sacked see you back here at eight pm. syria in barack obama's calm blue towards the american administration is determined to punish the assad regime's alleged use of chemical weapons other than members of mainstream media many are skeptical of the president's claims and the necessity to attack syria so what is obama's plan and does it make any sense. to.

me. could you take three. more chargers. arrangement three. three. three. moseley braun video for your media project free radio down to r t dot com.

hello and welcome to cross talk where all things are considered i'm peter all of l. syria and barack obama's convoluted path to war the american administration is determined to punish the assad regime's alleged use of chemical weapons other than members of mainstream media many are skeptical of the president's claims and the necessity to attack syria so what is obama's plan and does it make any sense. to cross talk the war in syria i'm joined by phyllis bennis in washington she is director of the new internationalism project at the institute for policy studies

also in washington we have cynthia snyder she is a professor at georgetown university and a senior nonresident fellow with the brookings institution and in new york we cross to jason hurst lawyer he is a writer political commentator and contributor to counterpunch dissident voice and other political communities cross talk rules and i think that means you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it tell us one go to you first in washington a lot of people would say that obama's approach to syria doesn't even pass the laugh test these days i mean he's going to congress someone has to be punished and irrespective what congress says he can do what he wants so explain his plan to me if you understand it. i don't think it's a laughing matter this the consequences are very very severe and i think we have to take it very seriously i think that what's going on here is that president obama was broadsided by the decision in britain of the house of commons to vote against the possibility of going to war in syria and unlike the presidency in

a prime minister's situation the prime minister made the decision that he was not going to go ahead in the face of strong opposition from the british parliament facing that facing the lack of any possible support in the united nations security council which is the only way a military strike could be legal no support from nato no support from the arab league i think that the obama administration said you know what we're too isolated here let's go to congress and get them on board the problem is congress right now is not in the mood to be supporting military strikes for a host of different reasons not all of which are good healthy reasons i would say but for a variety of reasons the possibility of president obama winning support for his plan which calls for in his words a very small narrow light small small small use of of cruise missiles against syria which of course doesn't take into account what happens the day after what happens if syria retaliates because it may not see an attack by

cruise missiles as such a small step none of that is being talked about so it becomes a very dangerous possibility very dangerous in terms of expanding the level of violence both within syria and in the region as a whole illegal whether or not there is congressional approval because the u.n. security council require is required if the if an action is going to be legal saying that we have a coalition it doesn't matter what we should really do it sounds like loud and international it sounds like obama wants a coalition with the united states. which there was i decided you agree or disagree with her. well i agree with her but i would put less emphasis. on the importance of first of all u.n. approval we've acted without u.n. approval before and as long as russia and china are going to automatically veto this is the whole thing becomes you know irrelevant and hopeless i think president obama unfortunately becomes a little snatch defeat from the jaws of victory you know he made a strong case for

a response i think he managed to alienate potential supporters by then qualifying it one hundred times over and basically sending an evil eye to assad with all the details of the response but he nonetheless made a strong case for a response and then by now going. to put on what is the strong case in your mind a lot of people are very is that he has used chemical weapons and there is really no doubt about that despite what the russians are saying and president obama himself said this was a red line he has no choice but to enforce that and you know this is some such a violation of human rights of international law i think you know it depends on what you have you experienced it's very. like you know. don't you think you need evidence jason wayne. plenty of evidence ok.

history should win. right ahead and jump in. yeah absolutely the first the first priority is to establish the veracity of the claim and the white house hasn't done that have we so quickly forgotten the iraq war the buildup to the iraq war where there were all of the evidence was found to be false and here we are in a situation where the white house is claiming one thing the international community is claiming another and we've got. a war in which the president wanted to prevent the you in the gate of team from actually assessing this site because it was so anxious to get its missile attacks sanctioned i just think we're repeating the iraq war build up again it's a four step process you know you ignore. the voice of your own people right now

only nine percent of people support any intervention in syria you ignore the united nations normally you ignore congress but i think obama caught some flak for the way he approached the libyan attack in which he called up the department of justice and said scrabble together some legal casuistry that i can use to justify this war and in that instance the department of justice said well the supply of arms the supply of missiles drone attacks do not collectively amount to hostilities therefore there is no war therefore there's no reason to go to congress i think he's learned his lesson on that and it's the right thing to do to go to congress but i think well even if ok jason if. yeah because we have to listen this is this is just trickery this is put this is legal trickery something we don't head. we need to look at a couple of different issues here one is how solid is the evidence and i think that

simply i'm sorry but it isn't only the russians who are questioning the veracity of the evidence of who did it the us position itself the formal four page release of the unclassified version said that there is high confidence that the regime did it without evidence of what it was but their conclusion is high confidence and that the possibility that the attack was carried out by the rebel forces is very unlikely ok that's a far cry from absolute certainty and if you're asking people to go to war on that basis you need absolute certainty that's number one number two more important in my way of thinking is that even if position the use of chemical weapons is a huge crime against humanity it needs an international response what about the obligations on the u.s. and russia and every other country who is a signatory to the chemical weapons treaty the treaty says that if there is a violation by any one state who is a signatory or anyone who is not

a signatory the first thing that should happen is that all those signatories should meet and decide collectively what to do about it the issue isn't that you either want to go to war or let them get away with it this was the george bush line after nine eleven you either let him get away with it or go to war that's the only option the option is forced diplomacy the option is convene the chemical weapons treaty the option is strengthen the international criminal court the option is send international human rights monitors there's a host of of important things we should be doing that are not military that are not illegal what we're being told is that the choice is either military force or nothing and that's a false dichotomy that pushing people to support military force who even know that it's already illegal because it doesn't have u.n. security council authority ok so you want to jump in there were employed and well i agree. i absolutely agree with you that there should be

a lot more being said besides simply the use of military force i totally agree with you and the international but it is an excellent statement out and for sizing the importance of diplomacy hard tough diplomacy accompanying this wes clark made so i'm going to give the military side some kind of way out but i think with all due respect i used to serve in the hague where the chemical weapons treaty was to go shaded where that body sits i think it's a wonderful idea for them to meet and deliberate i think it's a wonderful idea to strengthen the i.c.c. perhaps the united states should join first but all of these things will take an extremely extremely long time and what is not the same as the iraq war with all due respect are the dead the dead children and people that we have seen so this isn't some mustard gas.

you're going to. go to jail is the option just to kill more people i mean it's not syria. well advantage of all we're not talking about going to war or that's not what's under g. so you don't mean to tell me what it is a surgical strikes will do so we do so well with a series of surgical strikes actually eliminate the threat of chemical warfare i mean what what exactly are those supposed to achieve we've got we've got four or five different conflicts emerging in syria right now you've got a proxy conflict with the us arms could flow into the rebel groups you've got a sectarian conflict merging between the sunni the shia and the alawite you've got an ethnic conflict now you have the old news we're front driving kurds into iraq and you've got. probably was the beginning of the civil uprising so go civic

conflict going on as well and i don't know that a couple of limited strikes is going to produce the kind of change or stablished the kind of safety for the population that we're looking for since he was going to address that i mean what's a strike for going to mean here is where you have the dispute and you know i am i am not a military expert i am simply going to report what i have read here here you have the dispute of you know how surgical is surgical if you take out sides air capability that makes a huge huge difference and that's that's why for example senator mccain is arguing for and i you know i would agree that doesn't make sense not to do that something is so surgical that it basically has no impact on the other hand i simply don't see how it's possible for the united states not to respond militarily at all people who advocate that it's a different view of the united states and basically takes a backseat as any kind of world leader i was actually in great britain

a week ago and i heard directly i was going to i'm going to have a job we're going to go to a short break and then they were not sure break will. continue our discussion on syria stay with r.t. . the place where. science technology innovation all the least of melamine from around russia we've got the future are covered. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought

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welcome back to cross talk where all things are considered i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing the war in syria. ok phyllis right before the break you were very much are in disagreement with you would you like you're talking about the use usefulness of violence committed by the united states against syria go ahead well i think there's two points one is that what the president has proposed is a small surgical limited how many adjectives can we come up with to say it's going to be a really tiny military strike which is not designed to take out any capacity will kill people according to the pentagon because they admit that the cruise missiles are not very are now. very controllable in terms of hitting their target so what are we really talking about here we're talking about killing people to punish their government for using the illegal weapon the point is not when we talk about the

leadership of the united states i think that cynthia is right that u.s. leadership has been defined solely as military in recent years and right now we're seeing a huge crisis of the militarization of u.s. foreign policy the militarization of diplomacy what we need is a return to real diplomacy forceful diplomacy that includes for example an arms embargo on all sides in syria so that we get the russians to stop sending arms to the regime and get the iranians to do the same thing while we get our partners in saudi arabia and qatar and jordan and turkey to stop arming the other side without that kind of an arms embargo but that's that's i can't predict here but how could we ever get anyone to do said to the table. go ahead i don't i don't think i don't think there's really no longer the saudis won't cooperate that's for sure send weapons to the saudis we tell the saudis we're not going to send them any more weapons and we're not going to send them any more spare parts we start telling boeing that we're going to treat them the way the way the agriculture department

treats farmers pay them not to produce weapons pay them to retool their factory to build solar panels instead of military equipment we go a lot farther to go to jason and. then go to jason and let's go to jamie or do that jason that sounds like a great idea but it's never going to happen there's no political will for that absolutely have to last ten years i think we let it go well we're we're in a great position we're in a great position to bring both the rebels and assad to the table the last thing assad wants is a full scale military intervention the last thing the rebels want is to deny all of us support if we take our support away the rebel movement i think will collapse and assad will roll roll right over it and. reinstall his power but i think we are in a position to bring him to the table but as you say it's never going to happen because i think we're executing is that old donald rumsfeld and seven nations in

five years really were you know the schedules a little bit off we're going a little slowly but we are i think ultimately trying to isolate iran here and getting rid of the assad regime which is an iranian ally potentially then hizbullah and lead with. totally isolate iran and would allow us to clear the field for a build up of an attack against iran's nuclear power capabilities philip said dubnyk the possibility of an essential return to your mind you just transitionary. just heard this scenario from j. sadat is going to pick up on it tell us go ahead it does it does make it does make the possibility even greater if this is partly because israel has only recently come into the equation supporting a strike against syria which they have not been supporting earlier largely because the regime of both hafez al assad and bashar al assad despite all the rhetoric about resistance and this and that have actually been very useful to israel kept

the occupied golan heights quiet kept the border secured and kept the palestinians in syria under very tight control so this has been a very useful regime for israel as a neighbor and only now when there is this threat because of the language of so-called red lines that israel has weighed in saying you can't not respond militarily to a red line being crossed in syria because if you do it wrong you get the idea that a red line can be crossed on their side and we won't respond militarily the problem is again it comes back to what's going to happen the day after syria or iran have enormous possibilities for retaliation against the united states against israel against u.s. allies in the region and there's no talk in washington about what comes next we can talk all we want about this being a small scale limited. war a limited attack but when and if syria or iran or somebody else retaliates the next day then what happens that's what you start hearing about. intervention and boots

on the ground. well i seriously seriously doubt anything about boots on the ground and it's absolutely correct that syria is a quagmire and we're not going to try to whatever action we take but what we what is unfortunate is that i'd like to come back the situation in the united states what is unfortunate is that president obama has laws i think the advantage he had of acting quickly which an action which had to be followed and accompanied indeed by a strong diplomatic pressure and we wouldn't have acted alone we france was willing to act with us and turkey now by taking this much time and not even calling the congress back i think the chances of congress supporting this are slim i can guarantee that when they're and you've already said nine percent among the american public when they're out talking in the public there's not going to be support of this this is a case which really requires international leadership and gets also strong

international diplomacy and president obama is trying to have it all ways you know trying to please everyone and by losing time he gives us plenty of time to prepare for whatever is coming as well as iran and so i fear he may have lost whatever advantage whatever strength may have come from this had he acted earlier jason what do you think of that it gives us time to fight against the possibility of the militarization. you have maps in usa today showing the different places where strikes will be conducted it's all know all the talk shows everyone's talking about it's certainly not a surprise to anyone in syria i'm sure has been doing their best to prepare for it you know i think that president obama if he doesn't get it he was on the television this morning saying that syria represented a direct national security threat is that possible how is that possible how is that

policy and i. it's absurd. it's not possible it's a ridiculous claim but he's making his case for congress and when you make statements like that i think even a congress says no he will use nato he will go with nato go in really just to save face and not be characterized as. well i'm glad you bring up saving face fearless obama this is his dilemma saving face is credibility what's at stake here go ahead that's it it's going to deliver he has been mis created but the credibility of a so-called red line is the problem and that's what we're looking at with the excuse that chemical weapons are a violation of international law is absolutely right and i wish that the u.s. had taken that position before it for example sent targeting satellite material to iraq to use chemical weapons against iran during the iran iraq war i wish they had used it to prevent the the the. the small outfit here outside of washington that

sent the biological weapons seed stock to saddam hussein's government i wish the u.s. then had said this is it legal we can't be part of it to say it now has a bit of hypocrisy there it should be responded to there should be accountability no better late than never i mean what better to that accountability because frank if he doesn't come militarily nothing in international law allows the use of military force by one country to punish the government of another country for a violation it was not aimed at us this is not self-defense it is not our interests that are at stake here it's the people of syria and if we want to be serious about defending their rights the first thing we can do is not send missiles against them ok cynthia would you like to reply to that. well we have had we have done this one for us in the case of kosovo and have done it effectively so there is a precedent for causes but with it and in a lot of people were a lot of civilians were killed i'm telling i don't get it and prevent it again so

it's not a whole lot of point in arguing about it you know they're going to praise him for a home you know as long as the international law it's. ok things in the u.n. will never ok anything it becomes you know a hopeless case but i do think in this case president obama has and that we has the release of a cut and so far up at the knee he's ok what about what happened to international law to ask the people of kosovo jason i asked the piece of people of kosovo the people that worked well i mean there was a slaughter going to john kerry saying i'm jumping out of there he chases after the nato international law is being disregarded here i mean the supreme as justice robert jackson said he was our chief counsel to the nuremberg trials nazi group war criminals he said the supreme international crime this is been kind of a defective legal international i think legal opinion since the supreme

international crime is a war of aggression because it contains within it kenya lady of evil of everything that comes after it and i think that's what we're facing here is a war of aggression and we haven't even begun to address the fallout of that in the blowback of that war of aggression and we've seen in libya we've ruled by militias now we overthrew the the regime there but now it's ruled by militias iraq is a free nation threatening to split into into three partitions afghanistan is a failed state the nato general just said yesterday they need it may need five more years of nato and u.s. support before the their arms. forces in afghanistan can stand on their own i mean we're just creating we're destabilizing countries all know and i believe that you have to wonder what ok you know that you. would be prepared go ahead so you go ahead i am in violent agreement with you about the problems of the militarization

of u.s. foreign policy you only have to look at egypt for that you know that's all we do is deal with the military and they don't even listen to us it's a complete and total failure i agree with you on that i do however think in the case of this humanitarian catastrophe and grows violation of international law human rights in every standard you can think of that there needs to be a big response from the united states and i think there has to be some kind of targeted military aspirants companied by use you know using that as pressure to get the sides to the bargaining table i don't see what are you running out of time to get i hope so i hope all along it's a cold war which for diplomacy many thanks indeed my guest in washington and in new york thanks to our viewers for watching us here or to see you next time and remember probably talk.

well if you're going to like the new knowledge. you know about. a pleasure to have you with us here on our team today i roll researcher.

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because of. a. welcome to breaking the sets i'm abby hire a lawyer who is waiting on pins and needles to wait to see if us attacks syria and the death toll resulting from america's previous middle east in this adventure continues to rise yesterday sixty seven iraqi citizens were killed after multiple car bombings tore through central baghdad and you know what most of you probably didn't even bat an eye at that number because in the aftermath of america's imperialist experiment that's just a regular tuesday in iraq we're only four days into september and already one hundred sixty rockets have been killed by car bombs gun fire suicide bombers or d's according to iraq body.