By Vladimir V. Sytin
Russia and Iran voiced harsh criticism of a recent U.S. Tomahawk missile attack on Syria's al-Shariat air base. Moscow regards the U.S. strikes as an act of armed aggression against the sovereign state that is the ally of the member country of the UN Security Council.
Russia has also suspended a 2015 agreement designed to prevent incidents between U.S. and Russian aircraft. Currently, the Russian Defense Ministry is taking measures to strengthen the air defense system of the Syrian army.
According to Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin Press Secretary, Washington's military attack has done severe damage to U.S.-Russian relations that are in a sad state
already. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev says the United States is now "one step away from military clashes with Russia." Kiss good-bye normalized relations with Russia.
Igor Konashenkov, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, stated that Syrian warplanes fired missiles at a large ammunition dump where terrorists concentrated military equipment. The ammunition dump housed the shops used by terrorists to make demolition bombs filled with war gas.
It is completely obvious that the attack on chemical weapons storage facilities alleged by the Pentagon to be at the al-Shariat air base has every hallmark of a Washington's orchestrated event. Politologist Paul Craig Roberts wrote that the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would allow Exxon's Rex Tillerson, who is U.S. secretary of state, and neoconservative hegemonists to cut Russian natural gas off from Europe with a U.S. controlled gas pipeline from Qatar to Europe via Syria.
Observers think Russia's only alternative now is to tell Washington to go to hell that Russia will not permit the American evil empire to remove Assad. All chemical weapons were removed from Syria by Russia and turned over to the U.S. and its European vassals. The Syrian government has no such weapons and has no reason to use them.
As independent researcher Brian Maher put it, U.S. president Donald Trump is just a bull in a china shop. Or worse, as Winston Churchill supposedly said of former U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles - "a bull who carries his own china shop around with him."
In fact, the Trump's missile attack on Syria's air base is the most impetuous, thoughtless, reckless and stupid act from the Oval Office. Virtually every
one of those $1.4 million per copy Tomahawks amounted to a big fat nothing-burger. Analyst David Stockman noted that 36 of the 59 missiles were apparent
duds and landed other than the al-Shariat air base, including a nearby village where apparently a number of civilians were killed. A Russian general taunted that "combat efficiency of the U.S. strike was very low."
The 23 missiles that did hit the base actually missed the main runway, which, by the way, was back in operation, launching Syrian air force sorties within 24 hours. None of Syria's operational warplanes were hit, but a handful of antique MIGs that have long been languishing in the base's "repair" bone yard.
Funnily enough, the so-called American sharpshooters did annihilate several hangars and a few fuel tanks - the better for some post-attack fireworks to be posted to the War Сhannels such as CNN and Fox. What the Tomahawks surely did not hit were the non-existent chemical weapons storage facilities. With Washington's satellites monitoring al-Shariat like a cloud of bumblebees, there was not a whit of evidence of Syrian personnel running around with gas masks after the missiles hit.
Undoubtedly, Washington's military attack on Syria is unambiguously a war crime. It occurred without any UN authorization. The American evil empire is the greatest violator of international norms in modern history. The U.S. has gratuitously destroyed two Japanese cities with atomic bombs, invaded Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, organized the destruction of Libya, Somalia, conducted attacks on Serbia, Pakistan and Yemen, and organized a neo-Nazi coup against the democratically elected government in Ukraine. Only the U.S. has a list of crimes this long.
