Douma and its conspiracists
How the "anti-war" left created a conspiracy theory out of a Syrian Civil War tragedy, and how the UN unwillingly helped
Unless you are an explorer of the further reaches of left-wing internet, you may have not heard of the biggest international scandal of our age. A scandal that paved the way for more US imperialism in the Middle East. A scandal so embarrassing to the US/NATO/military-industrial complex that the mainstream media has deliberately ignored it. A scandal of such tremendous geopolitical implications that it is only comparable to the Iraq WMDs. Or so it’s proponents say.
This scandal involves leaked documents related to the investigation by the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of chemical attacks in Douma, Syria, on April 7th, 2019. Titled the OPCW Douma Docs by Wikileaks and provided by two whistleblowers that participated in the investigation, these documents purport to show that the OPCW altered the findings of some of its experts in order to strengthen the evidence for the chemical attack, evidence that was far from conclusive. The OPCW’s conclusions subsequently justified the US-led coalition’s bombing of Syrian government targets just days after the alleged chemical attack took place, and gave grounds for its continued military intervention in Syria.
But the scandal became more than that. It grew to become the anti-war left’s favorite conspiracy theory, one which served the purpose of whitewashing Syria’s dictator Bashir al-Assad’s crimes against his own people. It also became a dress rehersal of how this segment of the left has gone on to whitewash Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately, the OPCW’s own lack of transparency didn’t help, fueling the conspiracist fires all the while a truthful account of what actually happened at Douma still eludes us, nearly half a decade after the tragedy.
Proponents and opponents
The OPCW story has been picked by numerous well-known journalists including Jonathan Steele and the late Robert Fisk, both which have been well known for their anti-war views but who, like most of the “anti-war” left are rarely so critical towards the US’s enemies, however unsavory they might be (hence my use of quotations to refer to them). But by far the leading proponent of the story has been Aaron Maté, an independent journalist in 2019 won an Izzy Award for his coverage of Russiagate. Maté is one of the main contributors of a website known as The Grayzone, founded by Max Blumenthal, another regular in the internet anti-war ecosystem. And Maté has found no greater outlet on the internet than Jimmy Dore, a popular leftist YouTuber with over one million followers and who regularly has him on his show.
While The Grayzone appears to present itself as team of intrepid independent journalists who do not fear speaking truth to power, their lack of objectiveness is evident from a quick glance at their front page on any given day. It is an outfit whose sole existence is to appeal to a particular kind of anti-establishment leftist whose worldview revolves around the single issue of US and Western imperialism. One of Maté’s critics, former Intercept journalist Ken Silverstein, colloquially described The Grayzone as “band of dimwits who have one principle, though that’s probably not the right word: If the US is for it, we’re against it. If the US is against it, we’re for it.” A better summary of their principles is hard to come by.
Tellingly, in the Grayzone you will find journalistic gems such as Blumenthal’s 2019 visit to an upscale Caracas supermarket which he passed off as an average Venezuelan grocery store in order to disprove the “mainstream media narrative” of widespread food shortages. Or you can see their commitment to truth on Twitter, where Maté made not a single mention of the Syrian election after Bashar al-Assad won with a ludicrous 95% of the vote, and despite the fact that Maté himself was in Syria at the time as part of an Assad government-sponsored election observation tour. A trip which he later claimed that he paid for himself and which was not related to the election, as the Silverstein piece on him reveals. As for Dore, he is one of the most polarizing figures of the online left given his obnoxiously combative personality that has made him reviled by most of his leftist peers. His audience, which has an almost cult-like devotion to him, blurs the line between the same talking points seen in right-wing populist outlets like the Tucker Carlson show which, unsurprisingly, Dore himself has frequently appeared in.
It is not surprising that the lack of objectivity that has characterized much of Aaron Maté and The Grayzone’s work has poisoned the appeal of the OPCW story outside of their hardcore “anti-war” audience. Yet the OPCW story has proven surprisingly difficult to debunk. Numerous Twitter exchanges between Maté and his critics, be it The Young Turk’s Ana Kasparian, or The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, have led to nothing remotely like a “gotcha” moment, and if anything have only reinforced the OPCW story’s proponents that their narrative is rock solid. Debating a proponent of the OPCW whistelblower story claims very much feels like stepping into the ring with Floyd Merriweather. You just won’t find ways of landing the blows.
The attack
Let’s start by recapping the official OPCW narrative as described in its final report. On April 7th, 2018, the small city of Douma (located north-east of Damascus and held by Jaish al-Islam, a Saudi-backed Islamist militia) was under siege by Syrian government forces. At 4 p.m. and later at 7:30 p.m. reports began appearing of suspected chemical attacks. Subsequent witness statements suggest that the earlier attack was unlikely to have been a chemical one, and that the respiratory distress of many of the victims that reached a nearby hospital was explained as exposure to smoke and dust from conventional shelling. However, the second attack resulted in large numbers of victims arriving at a nearby underground hospital with symptoms consistent with chemical exposure. Medical staff additionally reported the smell of chlorine, one of the most widely used chemical weapons in the war.
Members of the Syrian Civil Defense (better known as the White Helmets) as well as other first responders entered the building (an apartment block referred to in reports as Location 2) where the alleged attack took place until 9:00 p.m. where they encountered dozens of dead bodies (warning, link has graphic content) most of which were strewn across middle floors. It is estimated that 43 bodies were located in this building with some additional bodies found on the street nearby. A yellow gas canister was found in a balcony on the roof, resting over a crater caused by its impact. Responders later received news of another building (Location 4) where an additional yellow gas canister was found in a bedroom. However, the valve was only partially open, which resulted in only a small amount of its contents released. No bodies were found in this building although the smell of chlorine was also reported. Remnants of metal braces and fin stabilizers found near the canister in Location 2 and still on the canister in Location 4 suggested that they had been dropped by low-flying aircraft, mostly likely Mi-8 helicopters, which were reported by witnesses to have been flying over Douma around the time of the 7:30 p.m. attack.
The OPCW’s fact-finding mission (FFM) was only able to access Location 2 on April 21st, by which time the town was under Syrian and Russian military control. The OPCW was unable to obtain access to the bodies which had been buried by then, and they were also denied entry to the apartments in Location 2 under the (rather suspicious) excuse that they were locked and that government officials were not authorized to open them. However, they did have access to the balcony as well as the apartment directly below it. Inspection of the canister revealed that it was empty, suggesting its contents had been fully expelled into the apartments below. Comparison of Location 2 with a video shot inside the building 13-16 hours after the attack, as well as Russian media videos that were published before the OPCW FFM arrived on location showed evidence of tampering, including with the canisters themselves (in both locations). A warehouse suspected of chemical weapons manufacturing was also visited but no evidence was found.
In parallel with the OPCW investigation, another one was being undertaken by The New York Times, Forensic Architecture (a digital forensics firm), and Bellingcat (an open-source intelligence and investigation site). This was published on June 25th, 2018, even before the OPCW’s interim report was released on July 6th. The conclusion of this investigation was nearly identical to that of the OPCW and appeared to show clear evidence of a chemical attack. On March 1st, 2019, the OPCW’s final report was published claiming “reasonable grounds” that a chemical attack consisting of chlorine gas took place on Douma. By now the culpability of the Assad regime in yet another atrocity was largely unquestioned, in turn legitimizing an attack by US-led coalition air forces against Syrian government on 14th April, 2018.
The leaks
On October 23rd, 2019, about half a year after the OPCW’s final report was released, Wikileaks published the first of four batches of documents related to the OPCW’s investigation of the Douma chemical attacks. These were leaked by two whistleblowers who participated in various capacities with the Douma investigation. One of them was a South African ballistics expert named Ian Henderson who had 16 years experience working with the OPCW. The other, referred to anonymously as “Alex” in the leaks, was later known to be Dr. Brendon Whelan with a further 11 years of work experience with the organization. The documents included among other things, e-mail correspondence with OPCW staff, minutes from a meeting with toxicology experts, a ballistics engineering report written by an “engineering sub-team” led by Henderson, as well as an unpublished draft of the Interim Report which shockingly claimed no conclusive evidence for a chemical attack.
The documents showed considerable inconsistencies between the degree of certainty expressed by the OPCW in its published reports with that of its technical staff. For example, the toxicology reporting in the OPCW final report suggests exposure to a toxic agent but does not single out chlorine gas; the leaked minutes of the toxicologists meeting goes so far as to openly rule it out. The evidence from the chlorine samples taken at the two locations was also somewhat flimsy, with the final report not giving details on the trace amounts to compare with the amounts found naturally in the environment – the draft interim report discounted the presence of chlorine altogether. The ballistics was also put into question, such as the wire mesh damage on the Location 4 canister which appeared unlikely from a vertical drop; the similarity between the Location 2 crater with another such crater in a nearby apartment (something the final report also noted); and perhaps most puzzling, the highly improbable angle between the hole in the roof in Location 4 and the location of the canister – with metal brace and fins nearly intact – on a bed that appeared to have suffered no damage whatsoever. None of the published OPCW reports offered an explanation for this and even Forensic Architecture admitted that the canister was likely moved, either for reasons of safety or for more sinister purposes such as a staged attack (or to suggest that it was a staged attack).
The e-mail exchanges also give a glimpse of the highly regimented and secretive internal operations of the OPCW, where there is little transparency in terms of the details of how its investigations are undertaken and how their staff’s input is collected and analyzed. To some extent this is expected, given the delicate nature of the OPCW’s work and the potentially serious geopolitical implications of its findings. But at times Henderson appears as a something of a loose cannon. For example, his last-minute submission of his engineering sub-team’s report (likely written solely by himself) was handed over just two days before the Interim Report was published. However, the e-mail exchanges clearly show that differences of opinion within the OPCW regarding the evidence for the chemical attacks were far from limited to just the two whistleblowers and their superiors, and that members of the FFM were minimally involved in the redacting of the published reports.
Equally damning was a revelation that came outside of the leaks themselves. In an article for Counterpunch published November 15th, 2019, journalist Jonathan Steele described the presence of US officials meeting with the OPCW’s chef de cabinet just two days before the Interim Report was published, in what would be a potential breach of the OPCW’s impartiality if indeed such a meeting took place. Better proof of a motive behind the cover-up could not be found.
Finally, there is the issue of Bellingcat, an organization that is something of a bête noire for the “anti-war” left due to its investigations being used by Western security agencies, many of which have involved Russian-related activities such as the Novichek poisonings as well as the shooting down of Malaysian Flight 17 over Ukraine. Criticism of Russia guarantees enmity with the “anti-war” left, and citing Bellingcat as a source in any discussion with this crowd is invariably a guarantee of immediate incredulity and ridicule. Nevertheless, Bellingcat remained suspiciously fixated on the Douma Docs, going at lengths to debunk the (admittedly flawed) engineering sub-report as well as offer numerous justifications on the way the OPCW reports were redacted. Yet it has offered little in terms of additional investigation into the case beyond its earlier contribution with The New York Times and Forensic Architecture, leaving the existing holes in the OPCW story wide open.
No smoking gun
In response to these revelations, the OPCW conducted its own “independent” investigation of the leak which it reported to member states and the press on February 6th, 2020. It found “serious” breaches of confidentiality but claimed that both whistleblowers did not have significant involvement in the original investigation and that therefore their conclusions were “erroneous, uninformed, and false”. The OPCW declared that it stood by its conclusions in the final report.
Leaving out the details of the investigations (and the counterargument provided by the leaks), the circumstantial evidence of a chemical attack is highly credible. We know, for a fact, that the Syrian government consistently used sarin and chlorine gas against its enemies despite its 2013 commitment to eliminate its chemical weapons stockpile (the OPCW only verified the Syrian government’s “declared” stocks). We know that chlorine attacks are typically done by helicopters dropping yellow gas cylinders with a metal brace and stabilizer fins, exactly like those that were found in Douma. We know that Syrian army helicopters, which took off from the nearby Dumayr airbase, were flying over Douma at the time of the attack. We have witnesses describing foul smells, and the location of the bodies in the middle floors of the building is suggestive of people moving up to escape the chlorine, rather than remain in the basement as would be the case with conventional shelling. Chlorine is heavier than air and settles down which means the best escape is to get to higher ground, a response which many Syrians have rehearsed well.
The direct evidence, however, is much less robust particularly when combined with what has been revealed in the leaks. If this were a criminal case, it would probably resemble the OJ Simpson trial, one in which all the evidence seemed to suggest an obvious murderer. Until the glove didn’t fit. The simple fact is that neither side has a smoking gun to prove that what they believe happened in Douma on April 7th, 2018 actually did. Tellingly, the final OPCW report claims “reasonable grounds” that a chlorine chemical attack took place, in contrast to OPCW reports from other attacks which have used much stronger language, namely the words “most likely” or “high degree of confidence”. These sound far more conclusive than the more-likely-than-not nature of the term “reasonable grounds”. As anyone who has worked with an international organization knows, words matter, and the carefully chosen phrasing by the OPCW certainly suggests a degree of doubt.
But unfortunately for the proponents of the OPCW story, their claims simply raise doubts about the official narrative but they don’t offer a new one. The most common alternative theory presented or implied by the anti-war crowd is that the attacks were staged by the rebels. This is, not coincidentally, also the official explanation given by Syrian and Russian authorities whose credibility should also be suspect. But this is only a residual theory, one that can be arrived at only by ruling out more likely ones, however flawed they might be. It is one taken from the playbook of creationists debating religion: trying their hardest to find holes evolutionary theory but failing at the same time to offer any proof that Biblical creation is true. We are left even more in the dark about what happened in Douma on that April night.
The motives
Defenders of the OPCW whistleblowers story frequently rely on the motive for the attacks as evidence of its implausibility. The argument used by Maté and others is, why would the Syrian government risk the public relations fallout of using chemical weapons when they were already winning the war? As Maté wrote in a very extensive July 2020 piece in The Nation,
The Syrian government was on the verge of retaking the last Douma holdouts of Jaysh-al-Islam, a Saudi-backed militia that was relentlessly shelling the Syrian capital. To suddenly deploy chemical weapons would mean that Syrian forces knowingly crossed the “red line” that would trigger US military intervention.
But this argument is a flimsy one: the Allies bombed German cities like Dresden back to the stone age during the final months of World War II when the war was all but won, to say nothing of the use of atomic bombs against Japan. Hastening the conclusion of a battle or war is often the best incentive to use overwhelming force, especially considering that the rebels in Douma were shelling nearby Damascus with mortars despite being on their last legs. Shelling which Maté has described as “relentless” and “horrific”, despite being pinpricks compared to the bombing from Syrian government forces which included heavy artillery and aircraft (Maté rarely uses such adjectives when describing Syrian or Russian use of force).
The timing of the chemical attacks also does not work in Maté’s favor. At the time of the attacks, the rebels holding on at Douma had been engaged in Russian-brokered negotiations for their safe evacuation in exchange for the release of Syrian army hostages. This was their only bargaining chip preventing their surrender in the face of impending military defeat. Douma, along the surrounding region of Eastern Ghouta, had been the focus of another major Syrian (and Russian) offensive beginning on February 18th and Douma was the final rebel hold-out. However, an earlier ceasefire was broken on April 6th when the Syrian government resumed its bombardment of the city. As such, the incentive for using chemical weapons to hasten the outcome was certainly there, to achieve a crushing and symbolic victory by the Assad regime in a region that saw some of the first protests against his rule. The strategy worked. The rebels ultimately agreed to end the fighting and release the hostages. The first rebel evacuees left Douma the following night, on April 8th.
But what about the possibility that the attack was staged? The main factor working against this argument is not so much the ability of the rebels to place gas canisters inside buildings or stage a fake hospital scene but rather the ability to do this in the midst of relentless shelling with only a day of preparation. The ability to produce dozens of relatively fresh bodies and present them with signs of poisoning by a toxic agent also seems somewhat preposterous, especially in such a timeframe. It is worth reminding the Douma skeptics that at no point have the Syrian or Russian governments denied that people actually died in the locations where the attacks took place. The claim has merely been that the deaths were not as a result of chemical weapons and if they were, that the rebels were to blame.
It is true that rebel forces in the Syrian civil war have also been known to use chemical weapons, including chlorine gas. This leads to the even more conspiratorial suggestion that the rebels gassed their own people and passed it off as being the work of the Syrian government. The defenders of Douma, Jaish al-Islam (which in Arabic means Army of Islam), were certainly no angels: they have been accused of no shortage of human rights abuses and even Amnesty International included them in a list of rebel groups that likely committed war crimes during the Battle of Aleppo. But Douma skeptics would struggle to make a convincing case for a rebel chemical attack. The very same evidence that they deny when exculpating the Assad regime from guilt does not magically work in their favor when blaming the other side for the exact same thing. No evidence of rebel responsibility has ever been shown.
Finally, would the rebels in Douma materially benefit from a successfully staging a false flag chemical attack? The answer is probably no. Any US-led retaliation would probably be of little tactical benefit to the rebels and indeed it wasn’t: targets hit during the April 14th strikes were the Barzah scientific research center north of Damascus (which contrary to US claims, was not involved in chemical weapons development according to the OPCW) and the Him Shanshar military installation near Homs. None of this benefited the rebels in any meaningful way in reversing their fortunes on the battlefield, all the more considering that the Syrian government was already in control of Douma the time the Coalition attacks took place.
The personal motives
But what of the motives of the whistleblowers themselves? Like most international organizations, the OPCW must operate under the pretense of impartiality but to assume that none of its members hold strong political and ideological biases would be extremely naïve. We have already discussed some of the rather problematic apologetics towards the enemies of the US by numerous journalists which have covered the OPCW leaks including Maté (along with the rest of his Grayzone colleagues), Fisk, and Steele. It is not inconceivable that Henderson or Whelan may have held similar sympathies and may have taken advantage of the less robust evidence from Douma compared to other comparable attacks to construct a narrative that was sympathetic to the “anti-war” left from it.
Credible proof of this is that Wikileaks was actually not the first outlet to receive one of the Douma Docs. On 19 May 2019, Henderson leaked his engineering sub-report to an organization known as the Working Group for Syria, Propaganda, and Media (SPM). The SPM is a loose group of mostly UK-based far left academics which has continuously promoted the idea that many of the suspected human rights abuses by the Assad regime were actually false flags used to encourage US intervention. Its other claim to fame has been a series of articles attempting to debunk the Russian Novichek poisonings that happened on UK soil. One can yet again see the familiar pattern of anti-war derangement: every atrocity committed by the enemies of the US must surely be a lie, and everyone who repeats the pro-war narrative, be it journalists or NGOs, are surely on the CIA or MI6’s payroll. These views are also much less fringe than many would believe: Britain’s then opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, infamously avoided pinning the blame of the Novichek poisonings on Russia despite the overwhelming evidence of Putin’s responsibility.
Perhaps most notoriously, the SPM’s Paul McKeigue (a professor of genetics at the University of Edinburgh) was on the receiving end of a sting operation by members of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an NGO which collects written evidence of Assad’s atrocities in Syria. As detailed in a lengthy BBC piece, McKeigue was obsessed with the character assassination of the CIJA’s leader, Bill Wiley, by attempting to demonstrate his links with US intelligence agencies. He was equally obsessed with exposing the CIJA’s financing in the hopes that it would reveal Western interests. To this end, he was lured into communicating with a fictitious Russian agent known as “Ivan”, created by Wiley himself, and which resulted in an almost comical infatuation by McKeigue toward exposing Western wrongdoing with his Russian comrade-in-arms. McKeguie’s public response to this sting was a rambling and unsubstantiated mess of accusations against the CIJA and “career CIA officer” Wiley but which later confessed the latent intellectual flaw at the heart of the more deranged members of the anti-war left (emphasis mine):
This was a clever deception operation, and the people on the other end found one of my weaknesses: an obsessiveness with digging for information about what I am investigating. In pursuit of what looks like discovery of the truth my judgement and common sense (though not my technical ability to evaluate evidence once it is available) can get left behind.
McKeigue isn’t the exception among the personalities involved with the SPM. He is the rule. One of the SPM’s other members is David Miller, a controversial British sociology professor from the University of Bristol who has been embroiled in an antisemitism scandal after calling Jewish students “political pawns” of Israel. Another distinguished member is Vanessa Beeley, a British blogger who has described the White Helmets as a “fraudulent terrorist organization” and who has been invited to speak with Assad’s cabinet ministers. She also called Jo Cox, a British MP murdered in 2016 by a far right extremist, as an “al Qaeda advocate” and has claimed “Zionists rule France”. One of the SPM’s former board members was Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at NYU and who is a signatory to the 9/11 Truth Statement and who believes the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. The latter puts him in the distinguished company of far-right conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones proving yet again that the similarities between these two fringes at the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum aren’t coincidence, they are by design.
It would be a stretch to assume that Henderson did not know who he was associating with by leaking his engineering sub-report to an outfit as unsavory as SPM. Which is why one cannot discard the real possibility that Henderson’s own political views (as well as those of Whelan) may have been aligned. One may be tempted to assume these extreme beliefs are the exclusive domain of bloggers and YouTubers, but the fact that academics from prestigious universities share them means the whistleblowers may have had political motivations themselves. This should make us wonder if the story presented in the Douma Docs, perhaps contaminated with convenient omissions and cherry-picked evidence, takes us any closer to the truth.
The fallout
Even accepting a higher likelihood that the Douma attack did not happen in the way that the OPCW report claims, the whistleblower story has been made to suggest much more sinister geopolitical machinations. According to this narrative, the US conspired to create a faux chemical attack, blamed the Syrian government, and used that excuse to intensify its war of aggression in Syria which in turn is merely a proxy between a wider regional rivalry with Iran and a global rivalry with Russia.
This is important because of the other implication that this narrative entails, and that is the comparison with the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) allegedly possessed by Saddam Hussein in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. People like Maté and Dore frequently describe the OPCW whistleblower story as “the biggest scandal since the Iraq WMDs” and this comparison serves the purpose of equating their significance to their audience. But it is obvious that the two are not remotely comparable. The WMD hoax pushed by the Bush and Blair administrations was a casus belli for the largest US-led military operation of the 21st century, which resulted in the invasion and occupation of a sovereign country and the death of over 100,000 people (mostly civilians) under the most conservative of estimates, made all the more egregious by the fact it was based on a blatant lie.
But if Douma was also a hoax, what did it achieve? Absolutely nothing. It resulted in US, British, and French missiles lobbed against three militarily insignificant targets, which caused zero fatalities on the Syrian side and barely impeded its war effort. Propaganda-wise, it probably helped the regime more than it hurt since it could leverage the attacks as yet another example of US aggression. Was there an escalation of the conflict since then? No. Some of the biggest airstrikes and bombardments conducted by the US-led coalition took place before Douma, such as the four-month siege by air and artillery of Raqqa, the ISIS capital, in 2017. And notably, no direct US attacks against Syrian government targets have taken place since. If one judges the intensity of the US-led coalition’s war effort in Syria by the number of civilian deaths it has caused, 84% of these occurred before 2018. By all available metrics, the US has been less involved in Syria since Douma, not more.
By setting the parallels with the WMD story, Maté and his followers also benefit from what is a regrettable media silence over the OPCW whistleblower story. Even if it is a stretch to equate this coverup with the Iraq WMD hoax (a friendly reminder that even the US liberal media largely supported the war back in 2003), to deny the newsworthiness of the story appears irresponsible, especially considering the massive attention given to other WikiLeaks revelations that were even more damning to the reputation of US/Western foreign policy. At some point it appears that this story was relegated to the bargain bin of news stories, and the more attention it got from fringe online publications the less it received from big media.
Not that this matters to the conspiracist mentality of the online anti-war left, whose logic is rarely more sophisticated than “if the mainstream media doesn’t cover it, it must be true”. But one of the most celebrated anti-establishment investigative journalists in recent decades, Glenn Greenwald, has largely been silent on the OPCW story, which means that the general disinterest in this story is not limited to mainstream news outlets. Greenwald, it should be noted, has previously appeared with Maté on The Grayzone as well as on the Jimmy Dore Show, unsurprising given their mutual disgust at the liberal media and liberal political establishment. Even more surprising has been his silence on this issue in light of his recent conversion into a Tucker Carlsonite far right apologist, who now spares no expense in attacking the mainstream media and liberals in general.
Whether one thinks that the mainstream media’s silence over Douma proves the skeptics, or that the disinterest from respected anti-establishment journalists like Greenwald is proof that the OPCW scandal has no legs to stand on, the fact remains that media coverage (or lack thereof) is not proof of any story’s validity. What it does lead to, however, is the perfect storm of conspiracy.
I want to believe
Up to this point, if you are torn between believing the OPCW narrative or siding with the skeptics then you would not be alone. It is hard to reconcile narratives that lack an obvious smoking gun, and our own ignorance on the highly technical nature of chemical attack forensics should temper our knee-jerk reactions to make definitive judgements on what evidence we have, lest we turn into the amateur structural engineers that proliferated on the internet after 9/11.
The indisputable fact is that the direct evidence provided by the OPCW is far weaker than the “reasonable grounds” it suggests, regardless of how convincing the circumstantial evidence is. The leaks, though undoubtedly flawed in more ways than one, should at least be taken seriously in one very crucial way: that there was nothing remotely resembling consensus among the OPCW staff members involved in the investigation, and that the OPCW was definitely under pressure to make it seem that its evidence was more robust than it actually was.
As a result of the leaks, the OPCW was put in the unenviable need to double down on its original conclusion in order to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that its case was built on less-than-definitive evidence. It was also led to the organization, particularly through its current director Fernando Arias, of engaging in the character assassination of Henderson and Whelan who, despite their possible radical left leanings, were known to have been praised for their professionalism during their decades working for the OPCW. In the one issue where I fully side with Maté is that the OPCW and the UN needs to get to the bottom of this scandal, be far more transparent in how the investigation at Douma took place and how the reports were redacted, and apologize to the international community for any breaches of professionalism and impartiality on their part.
But the advocates of the OPCW leaks story are not merely seeking apologies from international institutions, nor are they content with instilling healthy skepticism over what happened at Douma. Behind the pretense of independent journalism that speaks truth to power is an almost cult-like impulse to instill a totalizing ideology on its supporters. And it is an impulse that preys on the unfortunate failure of many human beings to be able to reconcile conflicting beliefs. One can, and should, be against US intervention and imperialism in all its forms but this does not require bending over backwards to defend tyrants like Bashar al-Assad, and whitewash his recurrent war crimes and human rights abuses committed against his own people. That most of these people have spent whitewashing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite its obvious imperialist intentions (to say nothing of its cultural genocidal ones) tells you everything you need to know about the malignant, campist worldview that the “anti-war/anti-imperialist” left thrives on. And how this is becoming a growing liability to the seriousness in which leftist foreign policy is taken.
Geopolitics is a messy, ugly affair. We have all too frequently been fed romanticized notions of a liberal rules-based world order but which in practice has failed to tame the impulses of sovereign states acting in their own interest. And in this world, might still makes right more often than not. Yet this should not cloud our necessity to find truth rather than easy explanations that fit our pre-existing narratives. On April 7th, 2018 a war crime happened in Douma. Its victims deserve the truth.
Did you like this article? Follow me on Twitter at @raguileramx and on YouTube at ProgressumTV. You might also like my book, The Glass-Half Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century (Repeater Books, 2020). My security-related work has appeared in The Military Balance, Armed Conflict Survey, and Strategic Survey from the International Institute of Strategic Studies.