Syria

Strategypage has a long nuanced article on WTF is going on in Syria.

as I noted earlier, no matter what Trumpieboy did, his enemies would blast him for it.

So now it seems they are falling for "fake news" out of Russia. Who wudda thot?

 Russian Bots Unleashed Russia continues pushing the accusation that the “Syrian chemical attack on Douma” was actually a fake. Syria has joined in and made a film about this fraud. But the Syrian video was quickly exposed as providing fake evidence of the staged attack when it was pointed out that the video proof the Syrians broadcast was from an earlier Syrian propaganda film that was presented as staged.

The Russians were somewhat more successful as they unleashed an enormous “bot campaign” in support of its conspiracy theory. This bot campaign could be seen throughout the English language web as robotic accounts quickly provided scripted messages in support of the conspiracy theory in any public site where people were discussing the Syrian chemical attacks and using certain words and phrases that the Russian Internet monitoring system was set to seek out so the bots (programs pretending to be people posting messages) could be sent to support the claim that the chemical attack was faked to justify illegal air strikes on Syrian.

and they are doing it not only to embarass the Americans, but because the attack showed Russia's weapons weren't worth buying. In other words, follow the money:

It was an impressive disinformation campaign and part of a larger Russian effort to distract those asking why Russian air defense systems failed to perform when the air strikes hit and have been similarly ineffective against Israeli attacks.

Lots more stuff there. For later slow reading on my tablet.