[DesertRhino]

Laughable. What a farce. I always enjoy these gas stories. People treating “sarin” with handkerchiefs and bottled water. As best these people were pepper sprayed just before the camera started rolling.

And always the nerve gas, but never anyone doing the funky chicken on the floor.

And also, gas is hard to use well and you need a lot of it. Assad seems to “use” it randomly. A shell here, 6 months later a bomb there...etc.
It doesn’t pass the straight face test that the one thing we say will make us remove Assad and attack Syrian forces is a gas attack. So knowing he occasionally fires a random gas round for no identifiable purpose.

This is retarded and right up there with the Spanish sinking the USS Maine, German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies in WWI, Poles attacking a German border post as the cause of the 1939 nazi attack, Gulf of Tonkin, Kuwaiti babies taken from incubators, and WMDs.
Propaganda sure is fun!

[gr8eman]

Great post! I wrote a paper on wartime propaganda and you pretty much covered the gamut! One of the most effective propaganda campaigns was run by the Brits before WWI and featured a (French or Belgian) nurse who treated wounded, etc. The Germans arrested her and shot her as a spy, and MI5 used that to whip up fury in Britain as they claimed she was just a nurse and the press published drawings of an innocent woman being murdered. MI5 used that to recruit troops and enter the war in Europe. Turns out that she really was a spy and at the time the rules of war were in favor of the Germans as they had a trial.

Re: Trump bombing the Syrians for the supposed Sarin attack, I never thought he had positive intel that it wasn't fake. I think he didn;t care, and used the opportunity to show the world that there's a new sheriff in town. Pretty effective IMO!