Reasons NOT to Attack Syria

11 Reasons Why We Should Not Attack Syria

Remember the last time we were told military strikes were needed because a Middle Eastern despot had used weapons of mass destruction?
posted Aug 29, 2013
Photo by Patrick Nicholson Caritas Internationalis / CAFOD.

Syrian children photographed in June 2013 in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Photo by Patrick Nicholson Caritas Internationalis / CAFOD / Flickr.

As U.S. political and media leaders prepare for military strikes against Syria, the parallels to the lead-up to the war with Iraq should give us pause. Weapons of mass destruction, we are told, are being used by a cruel Middle Eastern despot against his own people. A military strike is inevitable, media voices say; we must respond with missiles and bombs. The arguments sound all too familiar.

U.S. intervention would play into the hands of the Syrian regime, triggering an outpouring of nationalist support for Damascus.

Meanwhile, weapons inspectors from the United Nations are on the ground investigating evidence of chemical weapons. But U.S. and European leaders are looking at an immediate strike anyway—although Britain’s Labor Party, still smarting from popular opposition to its leading role in the invasion of Iraq, has successfully pressed for a hold on military action until the results of the U.N. investigation are in.

There are a great many differences between circumstances in Syria and Iraq, of course. Nonetheless, critics warn that, much as it did in Iraq, a military incursion here could have disastrous consequences. Here are 11 reasons the United States should stay clear of military action:

1. We don’t actually know who is behind the chemical weapons attack. An attack employing chemical weapons took place in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21 and killed 355 people, according to Doctors Without Borders. Obama administration officials say the attack was carried out by the Syrian regime, but Institute for Policy Studies analyst Phyllis Bennis points out we haven’t actually been given evidence that this is the case. And, while it’s unlikely that the opposition was behind the attack, NPR has pointed out that the rebels have an incentive to use such weapons to trigger outside intervention and end the stalemate they’ve been stuck in since late 2011.

2. A military strike would be illegal under the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. U.S. military attacks can only be carried out by an act of Congress, unless there is a national emergency created by a direct attack upon the United States. The fact that Congress has adjourned doesn’t change that. “There is no provision in the Constitution or the War Powers Resolution for a ‘recess war,'” says Robert Naiman, writer for Just Foreign Policy. If it was a true emergency, Congress could be called into session to pass a declaration of war.

3. It would violate international law, too. Syria has not attacked the United States, and there is no U.N. Security Council authorization for a strike on Syria. It wouldn’t be the first time the United States has violated international law, but doing it again adds to a damaging precedent and contributes to a lawless world.

4. The American people oppose it. Sixty percent of Americans oppose intervention in Syria, according to a recent Reuters poll. Just nine percent support intervention. Even if the use of chemical weapons is proven, just 25 percent of Americans would support intervention.

5. Violence begets violence. According to Stephen Zunes, chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, military interventions actually worsen and lengthen violence in the short term. “Countries whose dictatorships are overthrown by armed groups … are far more likely to turn into new dictatorships, often accompanied by ongoing violence and factionalism,” Zunes says in an article in Foreign Policy in Focus. In the long term, he writes, interventions only reduce violence if they are impartial, which would certainly not be the case in any upcoming conflict in Syria.

6. Foreign intervention will deepen nationalist support for the Syrian Baath Party and the Assad regime. Zunes also reports that hundreds of members of the Syrian Baath Party, a key source of support for Assad, have left the party in outrage over the regime’s killing of nonviolent protesters. But, he says, “few defections could be expected if foreigners suddenly attacked the country.” U.S. intervention would play into the hands of the Syrian regime, triggering an outpouring of nationalist support for Damascus. The same thing happened in 1983-84 following U.S. Navy air attacks on Syrian positions in Lebanon, he says, and in 2008 after U.S. army commando raids in eastern Syria.

Syria has become a venue for a war between the United States and Russia, and between Iran and an allied U.S. and Israel.

7. There are no logical targets. Bombing stockpiles of chemical weapons would be untenable, since many would release poison gases into densely populated neighborhoods, according to Zunes. And there are too many ways of delivering chemical weapons—planes, missiles, mortars, and so on—to eliminate all of them.

8. It will be impossible to control who benefits from Western intervention among the rebels. The Pentagon estimates that there are between 800 and 1,200 rebel groups currently active in Syria, according to USA Today. Among them are ones with avowed affiliations with Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other groups the United States considers to be terrorists. While the House Intelligence Committee has said it’s ready to accept the risk of providing weapons to such groups, a look at Iraq and Afghanistan shows how such plans can easily unravel.

9. Civilians will be killed and maimed. Policy analyst Phyllis Bennis points out the obvious: Strike with bombs and missiles, and, whatever your intent, civilians with no involvement in the conflict—including children and the elderly—will be harmed.

10. There is no apparent exit strategy. Once we are involved, it is unclear how we will extract ourselves from a massive, ugly civil conflict that could spread to involve nearby countries such as Lebanon, Israel, and Iran.

11. Yes, there is a better way. Tried, true, and boring though it may be, diplomacy often works. As Bennis told Democracy Now! this week, Syria has become a venue for a war between the United States and Russia, and between Iran and an allied United States and Israel.

What’s needed, she says, are peace talks involving not only the parties who are fighting, but their backers as well. We need “all the forces on the two sides coming together to talk,” she says, “rather than fighting to the last Syrian child, to resolve these wars.”


Sarah van Gelder newSarah van Gelder wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practice actions. Sarah is executive editor of YES!

from:    http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/eleven-reasons-why-we-should-not-attack-syria

Gobekili Tepe — Older than Stonehenge

Gobekli Tepe: Oldest Monumental Architecture of Planet

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey’s stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization

Located 35 miles north of Turkey’s border with Syria, Gobekli Tepe consists of 20 T-shaped stone towers, carved with drawings of snakes, scorpions, lions, boars, foxes and other animals.

The amazing thing about them is they date back to 9,500 BC, 5,500 years before the first cities of Mesopotamia and 7,000 years before the circle of Stonehenge.

Scientists say that back then humans hadn’t even discovered pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages, had no agriculture and only relied on hunting to survive

Göbekli Tepe had already been located in a survey in 1964, when the American archaeologist Peter Benedict mentioned the site as a possible location of stone age activity, but its importance was not recognised at that time. Excavations have been conducted since 1994 by the German Archaeological Institute (Istanbul branch) and  Sanliurfa Museum, under the direction of the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt (University of Heidelberg). The title isn’t actually doing Gobekli Tepe justice since the Turkish archaeological site is 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Gobekli Tepe changes everything archaeologists discovered so far and it is considered the most important archaeological find in recent history. Klaus Schmidt, the man who first discovered Gobekli Tepe says the carvings might be the first human representation of gods.

Source:  http://forum.xcitefun.net

Göbekli Tepe

Evidence for the existence of extra-terrestrial life?

Unexplained 12,000 year old underground city, in southeastern Turkey, is made of massive carved stones, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who apparently had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery.

Göbekli Tepe (Turkish for “Potbelly hill”) is a hilltop sanctuary erected on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge some 15 km northeast of the town of Sanliurfa (formerly Urfa / Edessa) in southeastern Turkey.
The site is currently undergoing excavation by German and Turkish archaeologists.

Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient. The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic. The oldest occupation layer (stratum III) contains monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures. Göbekli Tepe has revealed several adjacent rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime, reminiscent of Roman terrazzo floors.

Thus, the structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BC. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organisation of an order of complexity not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies.

At present, Göbekli Tepe raises more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers. We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and paid or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society. We cannot “read” the pictograms, and do not know for certain what meaning the animal reliefs had for visitors to the site; the variety of fauna depicted, from lions and boars to birds and insects, makes any single explanation problematic.

The reason the complex was eventually buried remains unexplained. Until more evidence is gathered, it is difficult to deduce anything certain about the originating culture.

Source: http://grasptheuniverse.com/ancient-artifacts/gobekli-tepe/

Andrew Collins – Finding Eden: Mystery of Gobekli Tepe & Giza’s Cave Underworld

Description: In southeast Turkey stands the oldest temple in the world. At nearly 12,000 years old, Gobekli Tepe is an enigma to archaeology. Consisting of a series of stone circles, made up of T-shaped pillars bearing exquisite carvings of animals, birds, insects and abstract human figures, this ritual complex was constructed at the end of the last Ice Age by faceless individuals, who rose far beyond the conventional understanding of the hunter-gatherers who occupied the Eurasian continent at this time. Why were these amazing stone circles buried overnight, sometime around 10,000 year ago? It is an enigma that seems to start in Africa some 17,000 years ago, and ends with not only the creation of civilization down in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, but also in the sudden emergence of the ancient Egyptian civilization, where the story continues with the discovery in 2008 of a cave underworld beneath the plateau at Giza. Powerful evidence suggests that this underground complex existed ever before even the Pyramid Age, and might well reflect an African origin to the roots of ancient Egyptian religion. It might also hold the key to answering claims that in the vicinity of the Sphinx is a lost Hall of Records.

Biog: History and science writer Andrew Collins is a leading expert on Gobekli Tepe, and provides a powerful insight into the strange worlds both at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and beneath the Pyramids at Giza. His books include From the Ashes of Angels (1996), Gods of Eden (1998), The Cygnus Mystery (2006), and Beneath the Pyramids (2009), in which he discovers and explores the lost underworld that exists beneath the Pyramids of Giza. Andrew, born in 1957, lives with his wife Sue in Marlborough, UK.

Filmed at the Megalithomania Conference in Glastonbury on 9th May 2010 by Nautilus AV Productions.
http://www.megalithomania.co.uk/dvd.html

for more information, including interview with Graham Hancock, information on the unar-solar calendar, etc. go to the source:    http://blog.world-mysteries.com/strange-artifacts/gobekli-tepe-6000-years-older-than-stonehenge/

Syrian Desert Ancient Rock Structures

Desert mystery

June 25, 2012

Desert mystery

Enlarge

Archaeologist Robert Mason spoke at the Semitic Museum about the discovery of mysterious rock formations near the Syrian monastery Deir Mar Musa (above), and the need for further exploration. Photos by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

There’s a mystery in the Syrian desert shielded by the conflict tearing apart the Middle Eastern nation.

 

In 2009, archaeologist Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum was at work at an ancient monastery when, walking nearby, he came across a series of rock formations: lines of stone, stone circles, and what appeared to be tombs.

Mason, who talked about the finds and about archaeology at the monastery on Wednesday at Harvard’s Semitic Museum, said that much more detailed examinations are needed to understand the structures, but that he isn’t sure when he will be able to return to Syria, if ever.

Analysis of fragments of stone tools found in the area suggests the rock formations are much older than the monastery, perhaps dating to the Neolithic Period or early Bronze Age, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Mason also saw corral-like stone formations called “desert kites,” which would have been used to trap gazelles and other animals. The region is dry today (“very scenic, if you like rocks,” Mason said), but was probably greener millennia ago.

It was clear, Mason said, that the purpose of the stone formations was entirely different from that of the stone-walled desert kites. The kites were arranged to take advantage of the landscape and direct the animals to a single place, while the more linear stone formations were made to stand out from the landscape. In addition, he said, there was no sign of habitats.

“What it looked like was a landscape for the dead and not for the living,” Mason said. “It’s something that needs more work and I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.”

In a talk in 2010, Mason said he felt like he’d stumbled onto England’s Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is located, leading to the formations being dubbed “Syria’s Stonehenge.”

Mason also talked about the monastery, Deir Mar Musa. Early work on the building likely began in the late 4th or early 5th century. It was occupied until the 1800s, though damaged repeatedly by earthquakes. Following refurbishment in the 1980s and 1990s, it became active again.

Mason thinks the monastery was originally a Roman watchtower that was partially destroyed by an earthquake and then rebuilt. The compound was enlarged, with new structures added until it reached the size of the modern complex, clinging to a dry cliff face in the desert about 50 miles north of Damascus.

Mason was searching Roman watchtowers when he came across the stone lines, circles, and possible tombs.

The monastery is the home to many frescoes — some badly damaged — depicting Christian scenes, female saints, and Judgment Day. Mason also explored a series of small caves that he believes were excavated and lived in by the monks, who returned to the monastery for church services.

Mason said that if he’s able to return, he’d like to excavate the area under the church’s main altar, where he thinks there might be an entrance to underground tombs. He’s already received the permission of the monastery’s superior, who was recently ejected from the country.

from:    http://phys.org/news/2012-06-mystery.html

Turkey/Syria Border — Earthquake

Strong damaging earthquake hits Turkey near Sirnak and Syria border – 18 injured.

Last update: June 14, 2012 at 2:23 pm by By

The Kandilli Observatory seismology center said a magnitude 5.5 quake struck at a depth of 5.4 kilometers (3.3 miles) on Thursday morning at 8:52 am. ( 05:52 GMT)

At least 18 people have been injured by jumping out of windows and general panic in Silopi. Part of a minaret has also collapsed. This has been deemed CATDAT Orange.

The 18 people wounded in various parts by the panic caused by the earthquake have been discharged from hospital. Aftershocks continue to occur and people are waiting outside. People have been warned not to go back into their homes. The Silopi State Hospital patients due to the earthquake were administered aid in tents.

An initial damage assessment will be undertaken with some slight damage to houses.

Does not enter people’s homes are often warned of the Mayor’s announcement devices. Silopi State Hospital patients due to the earthquake, both installed to discharge into the tent.

Municipal teams had alerted all of the units with their own means creating a crisis desk. Municipality initiated a damage is detected.

 

 

Most important Earthquake Data:
Magnitude : 5.5Ml (KOERI), 5.3Mb (USGS)
UTC Time : 05:52:53 AM, Thursday, June 14th 2012
Local time at epicenter : 08:52:53 AM, Thursday, June 14th 2012
Depth (Hypocenter) : 5.4km, 9km
Geo-location(s) :

  1. 2km (1mi) ESE of Silopi, Turkey
  2. 20km (12mi) WNW of Zakhu, Iraq
  3. 28km (17mi) ESE of Cizre, Turkey
  4. 31km (19mi) S of Sirnak, Turkey

from:    http://earthquake-report.com/2012/06/14/strong-damaging-earthquake-hits-turkey-near-sirnak-and-syria-border/

 

Nazca Lines in Mideast

Visible Only From Above, Mystifying ‘Nazca Lines’ Discovered in Mideast

Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor
Date: 14 September 2011 Time: 10:33 AM ET
wheel stone structure in jordan
The giant stone structures form wheel shapes with spokes often radiating inside. Here a cluster of wheels in the Azraq Oasis.
CREDIT: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0237

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.

They are the Middle East’s own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient “geolyphs,” or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.

Referred to by archaeologists as “wheels,” these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across.

“In Jordan alone we’ve got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older,” said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.

Kennedy’s new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

His team’s studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the structures may have been used for or what meaning they held.