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It looks like this Syrian fiasco is heating up again. Judging from what our Dear Leader proclaimed in the above Tweet he finally has assigned some blame for something to Putin himself. As of this writing the gas attack in the town of Ghouta has claimed 70 lives and numbers of injured.
CNN is also reporting (HERE) that Syria is claiming the U.S. has made a missile attack on an air base near the town of Hom, which the Pentagon is denying. All this is occurring smack in the middle of Trump’s “revealing to our enemies” (just like Obama did) that he “wants to remove our Troops as soon as possible” from Syria “…and let others take care of it.”. What a hodge-podge mess. So, what is exactly going on here? It’s anybody’s guess really. Likely only Putin has a clear idea what is happening because he’s likely causing the events. Trump has no idea what he’s doing and Assad is Putin’s puppet. Pretty much a theater of the absurd… at the expense of innocent Syrian civilians, and most certain to be loss of American lives as time and events unfold further from all this.
It gets old hearing Trump constantly with this excuse.. “I inherited all this from Obama.” Every president leaving office leaves something for the next president to “inherit”.. good or bad. More often than not, the next president is in political opposition from the last president… so obviously whatever the last president has done is usually decided as being all “bad”, hence some burdensome cross to bear for the new president to “fix”. Obama went in there on some mission to remove the impending threat to an Isis caliphate right in the middle of the Syrian civil war. Since our nation is technically at war with terrorism, and Isis is a terrorist group, that was our moral authority to get involved. Supposedly, Trump has singlehandedly defeated Isis dreams for a caliphate and now he wants to bring the troops home in some “mission accomplished” Bush-deja vu thing, and ignore the raging civil war and humanitarian needs all around them… and the occasional nerve gas attacks by Assad (or, the Russians?).
Of course, there was Trump drawing some figurative line-in-the-sand thing in that gas attack about a year back when Trump dumped those 59 cruise missiles on one of Assad’s air bases in some retribution thing. So I guess that sets the precedent for doing it again because we want to punish Assad for using chemical weapons against some treaty? This is a political nightmare on top of being a real human tragedy in the region.
One of the problems with our decades and decades policy of trying to export democracy is the fact that some countries frankly are not ready for democracy and we should just butt out. Sometimes these Third World dictatorships do simply make sense in at least lending control and organization. If the civilian populace wants change… then revolt like we did. It serves to put THEIR skin in the game rather than American or allied troops. Well, on the surface that sounds easy, I know. The reality is that very few civil wars stay contained within their own borders. At the outset you have crowds of refugees fleeing the combat and going into neighboring countries… and humanitarian events take over, like hunger, medical attention, poor living conditions, etc. Then the question becomes… how many American lives will it be worth to try and help these refugees, either in delivering humanitarian aid or providing some offensive military intervention to protect them in their neighborhoods?
Frankly.. how does any soldier rally his commitment that he’s “helping to defend his country” when it has nothing to do with that at all. Our role in Syria has nothing to do with defending our country. If anything, the soldier in these situations is risking his life to carry out American policy as it relates to assisting those who are unable to assist themselves… generally under combat conditions with idiotic rules of engagement to keep him from getting too trigger-happy in wanting to defend himself or others.
Then the flag-draped caskets come into Dover and families wonder how their loved one got caught in some crossfire, walked into some ambush, or got blown up by an IED.. and then investigations start. Investigations in a combat zone? Shit happens in combat… in war zones. We think our “peacekeeping” missions inside war zones that result in American fatalities are “murder” requiring investigations just to give meaning of their child’s death to family members to make sure their loved one’s death was… justifiably “heroic”? Did some grunt lieutenant make a wrong decision walking his men down the wrong road? I dunno… this whole scenario is way out of whack to me. We Americans are getting way too used to these crazy missions into war zones, that are sanitized in calling them “humanitarian” missions.. and loved one’s think their child is going off to summer camp or something, and things go bad, and we want investigations into their death like it’s CSI. We’ve lost some reality somewhere in all this.
I sincerely doubt our troops will be leaving Syria any time soon. I truly do not know which way to go on this primarily because I am not in any loop where I should have all the info; I’m just a regular citizen. Here’s some guesses….
- Trump authorized the missile strike on the Hom airbase.
- Trump contacted an ally.. the Brits, Israelis, or the French to missile strike the air base in order to “dampen” our involvement.
- Assad dropped the chemical bomb then struck his own air base to make it look like the Americans did it.
- Assad dropped the chem bomb because (like McCain has said) he got emboldened when Trump said he wanted the troops out. Putin came up with the idea of the missile strike to look like the Americans did it.
- Assad was out of the country for holiday, and Putin dropped the chem bomb and did the missile strike to taunt Trump.
- Just blame Hillary and those 30,000 emails.
This Syria thing is going to get far worse before it gets better… and starting today (Monday) hawk Bolton starts his new job a National Security Adviser. Stay tuned.
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Trump is on fire with those nicknames for other world leaders.
I am guessing that President Assad is going to love his new name, ‘Animal’, just as much as Kim secretly loves being called ‘Rocket Man’. I wonder what he calls Theresa May? ‘Saggy tits’, perhaps?
Best wishes, Pete.
She has tits?
Trump concern for children is such crap…..he has gone so far as ask why more families are not killed by drone strikes…..his last strike in Syria after the earlier CW attack was limp dick attack…..did not accomplish a whole lot…..but he did something is the cry…..chuq
Are you suggesting we have a limp dick in the White House, chuq?? Please say it ain’t so. 🙂
As long as there is a dollar to be made off flesh and blood by the Military/Industrial Complex, there will be no significant withdrawal of U.S. involvement there. War nets billions for the warlords, the hawks, and the munitions suppliers. Most of the conflicts we are engaged in have been engineered to be “Perpetual” for those very reasons. True withdrawal begins when profits are overshadowed by expenses.
The real problem is socialized costs and privatized gains.
Profits are WAY overshadowed by expenses (there’s no company on earth that makes 1 trillion in profit).
There will be no significant withdrawals as long as profits for the industrial/military complex outweigh the expenses of the war venture there.
Well for sure if Trump dumps another 59 cruise missiles somewhere that’s another 59 million toward the economy to replace.
There’s more than enough heat just about everywhere else in the world to keep the military industrial complex humming.
I don’t understand why we’re still in Syria at all. We said it was to combat ISIS, well mission accomplished! Don’t let the door hit us where the good Lord split us we need to get out. Yesterday.
Useless piece of sand in the middle of nowhere populated by uncivilized tribalists whose whole sexual stimulation always has been and always will be killing each other in one religious conflict or the other. A total waste of time, talent, equipment, money, manpower, and blood for The United States.Our presence there has accomplished nothing because when we are gone, the defeated Isis will rise as some other creepy entity with a new name but a similar mission and the whole nightmare will begin all over again.
Useless piece of sand in the middle of nowhere. Senseless savages will always kill each other as they have for centuries. Murder is in their blood and in their Moon God belief system. Their DNA is death, destruction, oppression of women, war, conflict and secret perversions. America should have never been there in the first place and have accomplished absolutely nothing except great cost in blood and money.
Curious reaction.
Is the Middle East a simple problem to solve? No. War has been the norm in that part of the world for millennia. One reason is obvious. That part of the world is the cradle of civilization. It has the advantage of sitting at the intersection of three diverse continents. Unfortunately, what was once an advantage is now a disadvantage. Because that part of the world sits at the intersection of three diverse continents, the people who live there constantly find themselves for one reason or another buffeted by competing interests.
What are the current objects of contention? Oil. The holy sites. The anger at the mere existence of Israel. Beginning the next Islamic jihad.
Is Obama partly to blame for the current state of affairs? Not really, but he obviously made things worse. Obama allowed ISIS to form and build up. Putin saw weakness and brought his forces into the region. Instead of letting the Arab Spring run its course, Obama promoted it, thereby increasing the chaos by undermining the stability of already fragile governments. Whether another president would have handled these particular events any better is debatable, but Obama did not have even one significant foreign policy success.
Does the United States have vital interests in the area? Yes. That is obvious. Do we need troops on the ground in the area? Maybe not, but we certainly need military assets available to prop up unstable “allies”. Like it or not, we cannot allow any one hostile power to become dominant in the area. What most complicates this challenge is that to some degree, with the sometimes doubtful exception of Israel, we don’t have any friends in the area. The nations of that area follow an old proverb.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” — This originated in the 4th century B.C. in India. Kautilya – the “Indian Machiavelli” – wrote about the idea in the Sanskrit military book, the Arthashastra (http://washingtonsblog.com/2014/09/americas-strategy-failing-world-complex-use-enemy-enemy-friend-strategy.html).
So it is that today’s “friends” are tomorrows enemies and today’s enemies are tomorrows “friends”. Realpolitik is a hard sell to Americans, but there is another quote we need to remember.
“I hold with respect to alliances, that England is a Power sufficiently strong, sufficiently powerful, to steer her own course, and not to tie herself as an unnecessary appendage to the policy of any other Government. I hold that the real policy of England—apart from questions which involve her own particular interests, political or commercial—is to be the champion of justice and right; pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done…I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow… And if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English Minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of his policy.” — Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (Speech to the House of Commons (1 March 1848)) (from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Temple,_3rd_Viscount_Palmerston).
Good post, Tom. There are times when you can shun that conservative diatribe a bit and focus. Sorry for not “approving” sooner.. I’ve just been letting events evolve and watching rather than bemoaning with the rest. Damn news cycle is five minutes. Literally I am in the middle of a new post and the news changes.. and I give up.
Comment in moderation.
That’s very good advice, Tom.
I try to comment in moderation too….but sometimes I blab. 😆
(more seriously, I keep coming back here hoping to read what you wrote. Hopefully Doug will rescue your post from the queue)