December 12, 2013 | Quote
Seymour Hersh and Assad’s Nun Spin a Story
Over the weekend, Seymour Hersh published an article in the London Review of Books claiming that the Obama administration got it wrong regarding the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. It wasn’t Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces that launched the attack. Rather, it was the Syrian rebels who did it, in particular an al Qaeda affiliated group, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Eliot Higgins, writing in FP.com, dismantled Hersh’s piece, using video evidence to show that the chemical weapons attack was almost certainly conducted by Assad forces. Higgins, author of the Brown Moses blog that covers the ongoing Syrian conflict, quotes a chemical weapons specialist who applies “a simple logic test” to Hersh’s thesis. “Who is more likely to have done the deed? The regime, which has confessed to CW [chemical weapon] production facilities and has declared a stockpile of precursors that match the Aug. 21 chemistry very well? Or persons unknown, with their alleged mystery factory, with no actual location, no trace of either supply chain or waste stream, no known employees, and far better things to do with the required amount of money?”
Higgins’s meticulous reporting merits praise, but the fact is that the thrust of Hersh’s article is absurd on the face of it. According to the New Yorker’s Pulitzer-winning reporter, the White House was cooking intelligence because Obama wanted a war with Syria. That is, a president who repeatedly ignored the red line he’d drawn over Assad’s use of chemical weapons, who after deciding to strike Syria sought a congressional authorization for the use of force that he knew he was almost surely not going to get, who was saved from embarrassment, and from striking Syria, with the Russian initiative to rid Assad of his unconventional arsenal, and who was in secret negotiations with Syria’s ally Iran, actually wanted nothing more than a pretext to bomb Assad. It’s a story only the Assad regime could love.
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Hersh’s article, as Tony Badran wrote at the time, was part of the Syrian regime’s disinformation campaign. Hersh’s piece, explained Badran, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “foreshadowed Syria's plan to destabilize Lebanon through Fateh al-Islam months before the fighting broke out.”
Moreover, Badran wrote in another post, Syria's and Hezbollah's propaganda not only fed Hersh the fake story obscuring their role and blaming Fatah al-Islam on their opponents, but also recycled it in their own media during the course of the fighting at Nahr al-Bared. That is, the Assad regime and its allies used Hersh to launder their own propaganda.
Hersh, Badran wrote me in an email, “has a history of winding up in the middle of Assad regime information operations. These campaigns have various functions. For instance, they can set up regime-supported kinetic operations, as was the case with the Nahr al-Bared conflict. Alternately,” says Badran, “these campaigns may serve to support regime public relations efforts. Thus, they often coincide with Assad's attempts to open channels with Washington, positioning himself as an indispensable partner against Sunni Islamism, which he stresses is America's 'true' enemy.”