Bashir Assad Quotes
That the rebels or the terrorists used the chemical weapons in northern Aleppo five months ago [in 2013].
Assad, Bashar. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose, PBS, 9 Sept. 2013.
Ironically Germany which has publicly usually been so sensitive and responsible after their massive chemical extermination in the concentration camps of WWII, was embarrassed by their own private companies which, to make money, sold the chemicals and the technology to the then worst murderer in the world.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
He was the Secretary of State in the War Office at the time. The Royal Air Force had suggested an experiment---gassing “recalcitrant Arabs” from the air. This predated Sadaam Hussein's gassing of Hussein's gassing of his own people by over 70 years.
The First World War had recently ended with the mass of horrible casualties that resulted from the use of poison gas. Permanently debilitated veterans were trying to rebuild a life all over England. Many Englishmen wanted to ban English use of poison gas. Churchill objected as the Middle East was a cauldron of various forms of terrorism then in areas that the British were “responsible for” under the Peace Treaty. He argued that there was little difference be gas and shells, but that did not persuade many others. Churchill was outvoted and overruled and the British have never used poison gas since although they had a large supply and were prepared to use it in WWII if the Germans did. This quotation was a blot on Churchill’s reputation. One issue was whether or not it was human to use poison gas. Churchill was willing to say no where white Christians were concerned but was perfectly willing to use them on the “uncivilized”.
Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.
Bashar Hafez al-Assad is a Syrian politician who is the current President of Syria, holding the office since 17 July 2000. He is also commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces, General Secretary of the ruling Ba'ath Party and Regional Secretary of the party's branch in Syria.
