by John Young
Last night I heard the news that Syria had loaded nerve gas into bombs and was prepared to deploy the gas. Shortly thereafter, I heard an unusually strongly phrased threat from our President and an equally robust promise of response from NATO.
Nerve gases are organophosphate compounds that inhibit the enzyme acetylcholinesterase. If the term “acetylcholinesterase inhibitor” is familiar to you, that’s because a number of commercial insecticides including malathion and parathion work via similar methods. However, there is a huge difference in the human toxicity of organophosphate insecticides and organophosphate nerve gases. The LD50 (a dose that will kill 50% of the test subjects) of malathion for a rat is 480mg/kg. VX nerve gas, in contrast, can kill a person with just 10mg on the skin.
Nerve gas poisoning looks similar to strychnine poisoning on steroids. Muscles can contract, but they cannot relax. The pupils contract to pinpoints, and muscles hyper-contract, perhaps even breaking bones. Ultimately the victim dies in convulsions and suffocates because the diaphragm cannot relax to allow breathing. Nerve gas is extremely nasty and, as described earlier, can be lethal in amounts too small to notice. It can take weeks to recover from even sub-lethal exposures. Because it can be absorbed through the skin from the air, it is very hard to protect against, so nerve gas is quite rightly feared.
But the problem with fear is that it is not always rational and it skews decisions.
As you’ll recall, we went to war against Iraq because of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, especially nerve gas. The threat posed by these weapons was so great that we could not take the risk of their being deployed against us. So we went to war, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and subjected thousands upon thousands of our own soldiers to death and serious injury. There was only one problem: the Weapons of Mass Destruction didn’t exist. The allegation that Syria has loaded bombs with the ingredients for Sarin is indeed a serious one. It is serious enough that, in the past, such allegations have been seen as justification for preemptive war, as in our invasion of Iraq. After all, if you wait until after nerve gas is used, a lot of people will die needlessly.
But again we come back to Iraq. Before our invasion of Iraq, we sent representatives to the United Nations with lots of satellite photos purporting to prove Iraq’s possession of such weapons. We also made note of Iraq’s importation of yellow-cake uranium, without telling an American public that is not very scientifically literate that such uranium needs extensive refining that can only be supported by a large techno-industrial society before it can be used as a weapon, and that Iraq didn’t have anything even remotely approaching the capacity to refine uranium. You can look up the technical hurdles to refining uranium on Wikipedia and quickly realize that very few countries have the infrastructure.
So … people lied. Intelligence assets lied. The intelligence services of allies lied. Our Secretary of State and our President lied. To be somewhat charitable, its possible that the President and Secretary of State were relying on underlings, and that the underlings were dishonest. But either way, what they said was non-factual, and a lot of people have died or suffered as a result.
In light of this, news reports that Syria has loaded bombs with nerve gas … just are not … credible. In fact, all of these reports seem to originate from one “unnamed” official, while the official Pentagon establishment says there is no evidence at all that Syria has taken such steps.
It is well-known that the United States government (as opposed to the PEOPLE of the United States) wants an end to the leadership of the current Syrian government.
So one doesn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that if the United States reacts to this likely non-existent threat, it will be with guided missiles that are targeted — not at chemical plants — but at the existing Syrian leadership.
Hopefully the President will learn from former President Bush’s mistakes and look at these allegations with a very jaundiced eye before committing to ANY sort of military intervention. But will he do so if the “fix” is already in and for reasons the people of the United States are not told, this is just a pretext?
This is what happens when the government cries wolf. They lose legitimacy. They lose credibility. Their actions become so disconnected from reality that I have to draw a clear distinction between the desires of the government, and the desires of the people, because the two are on different planets.