On Tuesday morning in Syria, large numbers of people in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, Syria were rushed to hospital for symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent. Dozens died. The attack has been described as a sarin attack, and though the exact identity of the chemical is unclear, the World Health Organization reports that “[s]ome cases appear to show additional signs consistent with exposure to organophosphorus chemicals, a category of chemicals that includes nerve agents.” The first reports from the ground, which were largely accepted and/or corroborated by Western intelligence agencies, indicated that the chemical exposure symptoms came immediately after bombing by Syrian war planes.
Shortly thereafter, a counter-narrative began to emerge from Russia, Iran, and the Assad government. The details are murky, but in this telling, Syrian war planes bombed a rebel-controlled factory which was producing chemical weapons. According to this story, the deaths were the result of chemical weapons manufacturing on behalf of the rebels rather than the Assad government. It should be clear that this directly contradicts the story we are being told by our government. One or the other (or possibly both) is wrong.
Around here, there is a large deal of skepticism of the US government and US intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. This skepticism is emphatically justifed by the lead-up to the Iraq war, which was a travesty there is no need to describe further. So it is no surprise that the Russian narrative has taken hold among some left-leaning critics of Trump. One such critic is Scott Ritter, a former arms control expert who was one of the few people to be correct on Saddam Hussein’s lack of weapons of mass destruction. It is natural that his Huffington Post article supporting the Russian narrative would be picked up in a highly recommended diary on Daily Kos.
Natural, and understandable. But completely wrong. While being appropriately skeptical of US intelligence claims, we have failed to be appropriately skeptical of the Russian counter-narrative. It’s what we wanted to hear, so we swallowed our better judgment and jumped all over it.
A cursory inspection of the Russian claims, picked up by Ritter, reveals them as highly implausible. The Guardian, hardly an instrument of Trump propaganda, had this to say:
[The Russian/Assad] claim does not fit with facts on the ground, for several reasons. An airstrike on a weapons depot with high explosives would have destroyed much of the sarin immediately, and distributed any that survived over a much smaller area.
“The pattern of casualties isn’t right for the distribution of materials that you would get if you had a location with toxic materials breached by an airstrike. It’s more consistent with canisters that have distributed [chemical weapons] over a wider population,” Guthrie said.
The rest of the article (a news article, not an editorial) is even more skeptical, for a number of reasons: sarin is hard to manufacture, and it is very unlikely that the rebels have “managed to get their hands on more than a few kilos” of similar chemical agents. A key sign that an ideologically charged claim is wrong is that it is being rejected by some ideological allies. This should be a warning flag to everyone tempted to believe the Russian story.
The Guardian is hardly out on a limb — other experts confirm the Guardian’s conclusion. See this exceptional comment by Rei, quoting the organization Bellingcat, which has had no trouble attributing bad things to the United States (in the case of the Aleppo mosque bombing).
Finally, the arguments-by-authority for Scott Ritter are very questionable. Although he was right about Iraq, he’s spent the majority of the last six years in prison for exposing himself to a police officer impersonating a 15-year-old online. Doesn’t make his claims wrong, but it makes the argument that we should trust him because of his judgment… questionable at best.
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So what went wrong? In a nutshell: confirmation bias. Around here we are predisposed not to trust Trump, and to take US intelligence reports with a massive grain of salt. Both of these predispositions are correct, and so we have been reasonably skeptical of what we are told by the government.
But the Assad/Putin counter-claims? They were what we wanted to believe. So we ran with it. In an environment suffused by fake news and propaganda, where everyone is trying to play us, we should be skeptical of claims that sound wrong, and TEN TIMES as skeptical of claims that sound right. We failed that basic test.
Another problem is that we have at times failed to distinguish between the facts and the actions the facts are being used to justify. Just because the official narrative is correct on the facts doesn’t mean it’s correct on the policy prescriptions, like the airstrike! It’s entirely possible, in fact probably one of the sanest positions, to reject the airstrike and also reject the Putin/Assad narrative of what happened.
It should be obvious from last year’s election that Putin and his pals are very good at leading people down conspiracy rabbit holes based on what they want to believe: he did it to the right last year, and he’s going to do it to the left for the rest of the Donald Trump presidency. The fact that a piece of his propaganda is the to-recommended diary on Daily Kos is a victory for him. And make no mistake, it’s an embarrassment for the community.