The Dair El Zor Hoax

Why are the Israelis lying about striking a "nuclear facility" in Syria?

By Justin Raimondo

".....First, it was meant as a warning to Iran, a clear demonstration that the Israelis can and will act if Tehran fails to curb its ambition to join Israel as a full-fledged member of the nuclear club. Furthermore, it was meant to show Washington's solidarity with Tel Aviv in this matter: in spite of doubts arising from the Rice-Gates faction within the administration, the Americans gave the Israelis the green light. It also, I believe, prefigures, on a much smaller scale, the sequence of events likely to trigger war with Iran: an Israeli strike, Iranian retaliation via Hezbollah, followed by American intervention, which would be practically inevitable.

Second, the Syrian hoax aims at derailing the recent U.S. agreement with North Korea to dismantle its nuclear apparatus. If North Korea is "proliferating," it's already in violation of the accord, and the neoconservatives in the administration and its periphery are already howling that the deal is off.

Third, and, in my view, most important in the long run, this whole propaganda campaign is designed to make an ideological point. As Joshua Muravchik put it in the Los Angeles Times Sunday morning.....

It's fitting that the whole propaganda campaign is based on a gigantic lie, one that surpasses their previous record in its brazenness and sheer scope. This is the War Party's signature style. In spite of reports that Israeli commandos landed on Syrian soil and made off with "nuclear materials" – a highly unlikely made-for-TV-movie scenario – one imagines that if this were true, they would have displayed the evidence by now. And what about the IAEA? Surely their scientists would have detected the nuclear emissions from such a bombing raid: yet we have seen no evidence, no announcement, no nothing. What's up with that? It's all verrrrrry suspicious.

As Joe Cirincione put it to the BBC:

"This appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war with Iraq, then it should."

It's the same gang, with the same agenda, only this time their lies are on a bigger scale – and the stakes are much higher. What's amazing, to me, is that, even with this kind of record, these guys appear to be getting away with it. Once again, the major news media outlets are acting as conduits for war propaganda – and instead of displaying the least bit of skepticism, they're more gullible than ever."