US claims about the alleged gas attack which saw US President Donald Trump launch cruise missiles against a Syrian military facility should not be taken at face value, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone told RT.
Trump launched 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in the northwest of the country in retaliation for what the US claims was a regime gas attack against civilians in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun days previously.
No investigation into the gas incident has been carried out and the Syrian government has claimed a conventional bomb hit a rebel chemical weapons depot.
“If it is all true and Assad did use chemical weapons, then the world’s nations should mobilize together to stop that and put him on trial,” Livingstone conceded.
However the former Labour MP warned “all my life I have watched America announce it is doing this or that and it turns out to be untrue.”
“I mean at the start of the Vietnam War, I remember I was 19, we were told North Vietnamese ships had attacked an American ship and they started bombing North Vietnam.”
Livingstone was referring to the famous 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in which the US claimed to have been engaged by North Vietnamese warships.
This claim, which was proven years later to be untrue, provided the excuse for an increased US intervention in the South-East Asian conflict.
“Three-and-a-half million Vietnamese died in the years that followed, and then 20 years later it comes out that that was all complete fiction, made up, and so I never rush to accept anything I’m told by America, it is all about American imperialism,” Livingstone said.
Asked about the geopolitical implications of the strike in Syria, Livingstone said, “Unless you are prepared to send hundreds and thousands of ground troops into Syria you don’t have a great deal of influence.”
Livingstone pointed out that during the Nazi blitz on London, airpower alone was unable to break people’s spirits.
The lifelong Labour man was suspended from the party this week after an internal tribunal ruled his 2016 comments about the relationship between Adolf Hitler and Zionism had been inappropriate.