I didn’t expect Trump’s missile strikes to change much on the ground in Syria and, in a way, that was a point in their favor. So long as it was a response to the use of chemical weapons and not a commitment to become heavily involved in one side of a multifaceted civil war, then it could be seen as an effort to deter further use of chemical weapons and nothing more.
But, it’s pathetic to see the Syrian air force still using the same air strip that we supposedly blasted with 59 very expensive tomahawk weapons, and a pretty direct challenge to Trump’s manhood to see them continue to bomb the same city that suffered from the sarin attack. I honestly have to put much of the blame here on the military advisers who sold a plan to Trump that was simultaneously ineffective, costly in dollars, and provocative in several respects. If you’re going to disable an air base, then at least disable it. What they’ve done is make Trump look weak and stupid, which is a good way to get him to escalate, but not exactly fair to him. He’s no expert in aerial munitions or their likely impact on a target. Few presidents would be.
With Trump in the Oval Office commanding our foreign affairs, we’re already in a heap of trouble, so the military needs to work overtime to demonstrate the ability to be the adults and show a high level of competency. Trump has every right to be pissed off at them right now for overpromising and underdelivering.
And they’ve put themselves in a bind now, both because Trump is looking like a fool and will feel the need to fix that impression, and because Trump is less inclined to listen to their advice and guidance.
They’ve just taken a dangerous situation and made it several times more dangerous.
I’m not sure what gives you this impression. There’s no way the military promised Trump that a cruise missile attack (with a pre-warning!) would cause significant damage. Disabling an airstrip with dedicated munitions designed for the task is a matter of days, not weeks, to repair. And Cruise missiles are very much not designed to do any significant damage to runways. They blew up some bunkers. No way in hell they thought this was going to significantly restrict the operation of the airbase.
Who knows what’s really going on in Trump’s addled head but I’d be shocked if the military presented this to Trump as anything more than a symbolic action. The stupidity of the symbolism is all on Trump.
Seconded
If it’s a dusted-off Obama plan, as many have said, then the plan didn’t include informing the Russians. Without that it would have gotten significantly more planes and personnel. I don’t know if the military factored that into their presentation.
Also, I wouldn’t yet discount the possibility that Trump said “bomb them” and the military picked a relatively ineffectual plan precisely not to get involved. The military is largely signed on to Obama’s plan to take out Daesh but otherwise not get involved in Syria (it’s the CIA that’s wanted to support the Islamicists.) Getting into hostilities with Assad could significantly complicate that plan, right when it’s getting close to working.
If Trump had ordered the military to destroy that air base it would have been destroyed. That wasn’t the goal.
The Russians, and therefore the Syrians, were alerted ahead of time as a nice bit of theater for domestic purposes.
you are assuming that the military are not trying to setup the trumster as an idiot. i think that they are doing everything in their power to screw him and get him removed.
“Trump is looking like a fool”
Yeah, among a few seeing-past-the-headline bloggers he is. Among the bloodthirsty MSM (and therefore the public) he is now a Statesman.
Which if Boo is right might mean Trump doesnt escalate which would be a relief.
How foolish would it be to fund raise off bombing an empty air field? Well that is just what the donald is doing right now.
It does appear the strike was underwhelming. But then why should we assume the military is competent? Their history is not encouraging.
I’m not sure why you’re over-thinking this. The targets that the military chose to hit were hit.
What exactly are you even arguing?
well, they proved they can blow things up. But did it change anything, on the ground? I suppose you could say they sent a message but we have been sending messages for fifteen years. And meanwhile Assad was out bombing the same place today.
Hitting those targets meant they had to correctly input the gps coordinates. Good job. But it seems they and Trump have no coherent plan to,accomplish anything. I suppose it’s a secret.
Could be as simple as:
President He-Man: Those beautiful beautiful babies! Bomb the shit outta those scumbags!
Big Brass (to Prez-Man): Yes, sir, will do, sir.
Big Brass (among themselves): Okay, what can we do that’ll look kick-ass on TV, make Dumbshit happy, and not suck us into anything bigger?
[wannabe-]He-Man”
What will happen, if it turns out that Assad is not responsible for the gas attack? Not quite impossible according to the Deutsche Welle: Is Assad to blame for the chemical weapons attack in Syria?.
Btw. DW is like Voice of America, Sputnik or RT government financed and has received increased funds lately to improve countering the “fake news” from Russia, thus this story seems rather surprising to be on DW.
It is interesting that a lot of Journalist in Europe seem to have a real hard on, as well as some of the politicians who have been very critical of Trump before the bombings. However there seem to be a big gulf between the Journalist and the readers. Most of the readers are disgusted about the US bombing, before there is any proof of that it was actually Assad, considering it also a try at distraction from the more than 200 civilians killed in Mossul just a short while age. Many readers also think it could be a falls flak event, and are also reminded of the Colin Powell moment at the UN and see the speech of Nikki Hayles as a sequel to that.
“falls flak event”
Bwahahahaha
You’re a poor excuse for a troll.
Apparently they deliberately didn’t target the runways… only the soon to be empty (after they gave the Russians fair warning) shelters, and such. Partly that’s because the tomahawk probably isn’t the best tool to crater runways with- I bet the unitary munition version leaves a pretty decent sized crater, but runways are big and it’s probably not the best use of a $1.4 million dollar weapon to make holes that a guy with a bulldozer can repair in a day or two.
As I said before, an “effective” military response probably requires a willingness to put Russian lives at risk, and most likely American ones as well being that the Russians reportedly brought some S400 & S300 air defense systems with them.
If Trump wants to go toe-to-toe with the Ruskies in Syria, he needs to get an authorization from congress. It would be a huge escalation and that shouldn’t happen without our pathetic legislative branch giving some sort of approval. Of course, putting themselves on record on this issue is the last thing that the grifters and theocrats in the Republican party want to do at this point in time. i.e. when it comes to stealing a supreme court nomination and upending a couple centuries of Senate tradition, miss McConnell can’t get his grinning turtle face in front of enough T.V. cameras to bask in glory for his unprecedented mendacity, but when it comes to actually doing their constitutionally mandated job, you can count on him to continue to hide under his desk.
Well, for the people who matter, e.g. not you, me, or anyone who isn’t in power and stealing everything, this has all been a win-win-win.
Assad uses chemical weapons to show he has no boundaries (although, you know, he’s been killing people with regular munitions, so in a lot of ways what the fuck does it matter how he murders people).
Strongman Trump gets to finally(!) become the President by blowing things up; the quintessential American E̶m̶p̶e̶r̶o̶r̶ President behavior when challenged. The s̶t̶e̶n̶o̶g̶r̶a̶p̶h̶e̶r̶s̶ Press reports on how heroic Strongman Trump is after all…while Strongman Trump gives a heads-up to Syria’s patron, Russia, so that nothing important gets damaged.
Putin gets to mock faux outrage and send some ship towards another ship, and say strong-sounding words that lets his right-wing authoritarian disciples believe he’s a Strongman.
In essence, Strongman Trump and Strongman Putin got to move a pawn one space forward on the Kleptocracy chess board to show how Strong they are. Meanwhile, they’re still on the phone with each other making sure that nothing important gets blown up.
It’s Kabuki Theatre, all the way down.
Expect more of this while they continue stealing everything not bolted down or blown up.
I think there are two important points here (one of which BooMan is getting into, the other of which he isn’t):
The Press goes after the war porn dollar. It’s a huge market.
If that kid continues to drive the car, we may have to pay $4 a gal for gasoline.
Trump is much more interested in appearance than reality. The applause of the audience and the pay check are what matters to him; beyond that he knows little and cares less. But what we should be waking up to is that our armed forces are not all that good at what they do. An imbecile tells them to attack an airfield; they jump to obey; yet with all their resources, all their expertise, all the expensive weaponry expended, it’s operational within hours. The ugly secret that most Americans will not face is that our military isn’t very good and hasn’t been since WWII. We’ve been coasting on our victories then ever since. We have tremendous resources, especially our servicemen and women. But we have poor leadership.
The military could easily have destroyed the airfield, had that been the goal. It would have required open confrontation with Russian Air Defense and thus a major air campaign and risked losing American planes and would have been insanely stupid… but it easily could have been done.
Instead Trump wanted meaningless symbolism and that’s what he got.
For just about any other administration, I’d be inclined to agree or at least entertain the idea. But we’re talking about Donald Trump.
Assuming Assad is the source of the chemical weapons (and while I don’t know who to believe, I lean towards this explanation at the moment), then it stands to reason that Assad’s forces are using chemical weapons now because they were afraid of the Obama Administration’s reaction (“red lines” notwithstanding) and are not afraid of Trump’s. Just based on what they’ve heard and seen in public, this is a reasonable calculation, but there’s also the possibility that Russia has tangibly assured Assad that they have Trump by the throat. We’ll have to see how the various investigations develop to make a determination on that, though.
Either way, the reason this happened is because Assad thinks the US under Trump is no longer a major factor in how he conducts his war.
In the most charitable viewing this, Trump allowed this situation to develop because he’s an incompetent moron who is and will be completely incapable of articulating, let alone executing, a coherent foreign policy (or any policy, really) as long as he occupies the Oval Office. He left the impression that he is both indifferent to the use of chemical weapons in Syria and incapable of doing something about it because he’s an air-headed nincompoop who has an uncharacteristically friendly, almost subservient, attitude towards Vladimir Putin.
A President and Administration who actually cared about the use of chemical weapons in Syria would have been deeply distraught by this impression and would have been insistent on making sure that the message sent clearly changed Assad’s future estimation of the President’s intentions and competence, even to the point of risking going too far (that’s why it’s a good idea not give wrong impressions in the first place). Instead, the Administration chose to flush $100 million of US taxpayer money down the toilet to reinforce the message that Trump is an incompetent moron who is both indifferent to the use of chemical weapons and totally incapable of doing something about it anyway.
I think you’re wrong to blame the military. Their job is to give a range of options for the civilian part of the government to then advise the President. We don’t even know what was asked of them (at least I haven’t seen reporting on it). Donald Trump’s Administration will never be able to execute “policy”, foreign or otherwise, because the Occupant of the Oval Office can’t handle the complexity and doesn’t really care about anything other than “Trump Winning” and “Trump Making Money”, which is usually the same thing. He’s not even infesting the various government departments with ideologues to help him develop and implement policy because he can’t trust them. He even keeps his own NSC at arm’s length. He has unqualified, ignorant fools that he trusts surrounding him, and that’s how decisions are made. And that’s why they’re pretty much always awful decisions. If he has bad advice, that still comes back to Donald Trump and his feckless backers in Congress.
The National Review makes more sense than the Washington Post Editorial Page and a significant number of Democrats.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446563/trump-syrian-bombing-illegal-pointless
Comparing the Daniel Pipes piece at the National Review against the Kagan piece in the Post (Kagan endorsed Clinton) makes for an interesting comparison.
Kagan dreams of a wider war. Pipes defends Obama.
Strange days. Most peculiar.
Makes perfect sense from an Islamaphobic point of view for Daniel Pipes to support them killing each other and extending the life of the civil war.
Your link is to Kevin Williamson though.
Everybody’s missing a key element — maybe THE key element — of this tale.
BHO surely did want to do the exact same thing, but on one condition: that it be a bi-partisan, or at least -bi-branch, decision. But the GOP in the Senate refused to agree to a similar set of strikes in similar circumstances. They needed to make BHO look weak and feckless, and thanks to BHO’s weak and feckless Dem allies, the GOP’s mission was accomplished.
Today, the purpose of these strikes — the real purpose — is to show that Drumpf is no feckless weakling, unlike BHO.
Pretty sure that’s the whole thing. Daddy=good and strong, Mommy=weak and inept.
These guys’ moms should sue for slander!