Bellingcat did a thorough job taking down Seymour Hersh’s latest article denying Assad bombed civilians with gas in Khan Sheikhoun. They did not however take up the strategy of deconfliction which Hersh described as a military collaboration between the US & Russia & through Russia with Syria.
According to him, there are deconfliction monitors aboard surveillance planes constantly patrolling the war zones. This is how Hersh describes it:
“In an important pre-strike process known as deconfliction, US & Russian officers routinely supply one another with advance details of planned flight paths & target coordinates, to ensure that there is no risk of collision or accidental encounter (the Russians speak on behalf of the Syrian military). This information is supplied daily to the American AWACS surveillance planes that monitor the flights once airborne.
Deconfliction’s success & importance can be measured by the fact that there has yet to be one collision, or even a near miss, among the high-powered supersonic American, Allied, Russian & Syrian fighter bombers.”
Assadists have some explaining to do. Like how does deconfliction fit in with their regime change scenario? How can you take down a regime if you’re collaborating with them militarily? Wouldn’t that put you on the same side?
Can anyone remember in US military history when deconfliction was ever before employed as a strategy? It doesn’t make a damn bit of military sense unless the US, Russia, Syria, Iran, & other governments are all part of the counter-revolutionary campaign to bring down the revolution, not the Assad regime. The one thing these governments agree on is that they cannot tolerate popular uprisings demanding democracy; they find dictatorships, military juntas, & feudal autocracy much more conducive to an economic & political stranglehold over the Middle East.
The only principled antiwar demands are: the immediate cessation of Syrian bombing of civilians & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all US, Russian, Iranian, & other foreign military forces from Syria.