As I said on the Guardian piece also relaunching this news: this is a piece pushed by French intelligence services. These are the same services that lied through their teeth for 30+ years on the Ustica tragedy, when one of their jets tried to take out a Libyan MIG fighter they thought was carrying Gaddafi, and the air-air missile hit an Italian DC-9 passenger plane instead, killing hundreds of civilians. A company backed by the French secret service recovered the wreckage and removed all the evidence they could find, and NATO very helpfully erased all their (otherwise very detailed) flight records for that night. To this day, after 30 years of painstaking investigations, the whole world knows what really happened, even US sources informally admitted it, and still French services refuse any responsibility. And they’re not protecting anything or anyone: the pilot responsible for the mistake killed himself shortly afterwards, distraught with guilt. They just don’t want to admit they’re useless.
Given this precedent, I wouldn’t trust French spooks to tell me what time it is, let alone analyse a scenario they don’t even have access to, in a country they’d love to take over. After all, if Syrians keep buying Russian jets and munitions, who are the poor Frenchies supposed to sell their wares to? We’ve seen so much false information being pushed by all sorts of actors in 2003, which turned out to be unreliable or fabricated shortly later. You can’t go to war on the basis of a random piece of paper of dubious origin because “a line has been crossed” or some other idiocy; you go to war with a long-term strategy and objectives. What are these objectives? Defending civilians? So why bomb Syria while doing nothing for DRCongo or wherever this silly humanity is perpetrating the massacre-du-jour on other civilians?
Let’s be honest here: it’s just another land grab for oil and the Great Game.
