Were Trump's Syrian Air Strikes A Ploy to Distract from the Fact He's in Bed with Putin?

There are few people I trust less than Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer.  Of those who is even less trustworthy, Vladimir Putin would head up the list.  It seems that I am not the only one who wonders about the true motivations behind Trump's air strikes against one Syrian airbase - taking out all of them would have been a more effective deterrent against future chemical weapons attacks - after apparently giving notice to Russia of the coming attack.  Anyone who believes Putin didn't have word passed immediately on to Syrian Dictator Assad is simply delusional.  So what was the real motivation?  Some believe that it was to change the narrative and interrupt the non-stop reporting on Trump/Russia ties.  And, true enough, Putin has played the game and outwardly challenged America actions and a gullible media is in some instances reporting an "end" of a Trump/Putin bromance.  The Independent, a British newspaper looks at this cynical - and probably accurate - analysis.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump's air strikes on Syria could be a "set piece" concocted in collusion with Moscow to '"kill the narrative he's in bed with Putin", MSNBC political analyst Chris Matthews has claimed.

The Hardball anchor suggested the attacks might have been set up or staged, in the hope of undermining Democratic claims that Russian hacking and espionage swung the 2016 US Presidential election in Mr Trump's favour.

An agreement to prevent clashes between Russia and America in Syrian airspace has now been suspended by the Kremlin, in response to the cruise missile bombardment which destroyed at least nine jets in a Syrian airbase.

[S]peaking on MSNBC, veteran analyst Chris Matthews said: "Maybe it's cynicism but i thought... if there was a way for [Mr Trump] to kill the narrative he's in bed with Putin it would be this.

"Take on Putin's warm freshwater port [in Tartus], take on his satellite, his loyal ally Assad. And that would be a way of saying I was never in bed with this guy, i never planned any kind of coalition in Moscow."

The Russian naval base in Tartus gives Mr Putin vital access to the Eastern Mediterranean basin, allowing for Russian warships and submarines to pass from the Black Sea into Western waters and potentially providing a route to untapped natural gas resources.

It's the only Russian naval base on foreign soil, and maintaining control of Tartus was perhaps the principal reason for Mr Putin's entry into the Syrian arena of war. 

Mr Matthews continued to speculate that Mr Trump and Mr Putin may have "have had a phone-call this evening, and they worked this thing out, and it was a set piece that was not meant to be particularly antagonistic to Moscow."

Russian forces were admittedly warned of the strikes 30 minutes before they took place, using the so-called "deconfliction line" used to prevent clashes between the two superpowers in Syrian airspace.

No Russian casualties have been reported, though their personnel were stationed on the base where six Syrian soldiers lost their lives, along with nine civilians in a neighbouring village.

Am I being too cynical?  Putin and Assad have no problem having people murdered and, in Assad's case that includes children.  Add in malignant narcissist, Trump, and sadly, I believe almost anything foul and duplicitous is a possibility. 

Are We Turning our backs on Syrian Atrocities?

The answer to the question posed in the title of this post is a resounding "yes" - at least in some circles.  In others, the horrors being done in Syria are used to justify a stance of "see, what Israel is doing isn't so bad." Neither approach is right and moral.  Just because one group is committing atrocities doesn't make it OK for a different group to engage in evil.  Michael Gerson, a sometimes Israel apologist, brings needed focus on the murderous Assad regime in Syria through a column in the Washington Post.  While religion plays a role in the nightmare in Syria as in the Israel/Gaza atrocities, in Syria the difference is that Assad is a brutal dictator who seemingly wants to become the Hitler/Stalin of the Middle East.  Here are column highlights:

For every dissident and defector I’ve encountered, there is a moment when observation begins to feel like complicity, when remaining a bystander involves culpability. 

A photographer in the criminal and forensics department of the Syrian military police recently told a group at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “My job on a daily basis was just regular accidents, burnings, drownings, routine things.” In late 2011, as the Syrian uprising intensified, his routine changed. The photographer was sent to the morgue at a military hospital to document the bodies of prisoners arriving from 24 regime intelligence branches and military units. Soon 50 to 60 mutilated, emaciated corpses were coming each day — so many they were kept in storage rooms and parking lots. “Some victims were brought alive to the morgue and killed,” he recalled. 

He was involved in archiving the pictures of corpses taken by all the military photographers. “Pictures of children,” he said, “pictures of the elderly, pictures of women. I saw pictures of my own neighbors, from my own village.” They were images not of terrorists but of a broad, populist movement. 

The photographer decided he “could no longer take part.” But when he approached the opposition to defect, he was urged to stay, continue his work and smuggle out the archive on thumb drives. The result is 55,000 high-resolution photographs taken of more than 11,000 victims between September 2011 and August 2013. The corpses, variously, bear marks from being chained; their eyes have been gouged; there are dark spots left by electric shocks; most are gaunt from starvation.

Why would the Syrian regime keep such meticulous records? The photographer, who goes for security reasons by the name Caesar, describes it as part of a bureaucratic routine in which “the higher-ups got proof their orders were carried out.” It is also the type of practice — witness Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union — employed by a government completely unconcerned with eventual accountability, because it believes it will win. As the Syrian regime assaults Aleppo, the last major city contested by the rebels, this belief is not unreasonable. 

The Syrian conflict will be remembered as a strategic watershed for American foreign policy. When the rebellion was a broad, non-radical uprising — the dead in Caesar’s photos — President Obama did almost nothing to help. When radical groups gained momentum, it became an excuse for further inaction, because America didn’t want to create jihadists. We got the jihadists anyway, who are now causing regional havoc.

Obama embraced the narrowest possible definition of U.S. interests in Syria — the elimination of chemical weapons — which has nothing to do with civilian atrocities by other means. If Obama’s Syria policy is the model or norm for future presidents on atrocity prevention, no atrocity will ever be prevented. And the anti-genocide movement is relatively quiet about it all.

This is the problem with impunity for mass atrocities. It encourages future horrors, which create cycles of terror and revenge, which destabilize whole regions and generate new threats. Which is why atrocity prevention is a core national security interest.

Both Assad and Netanyahu need to be removed from power.

George W. Bush's Poisonous Legacy

For long time readers it is no secret that I despise George W. Bush whom I refer to often as the "Chimperator."  Bush is an incurious man who lead America into a disastrous war in Iraq based on lies.  He, of course, was aided and abetted by the even fouler Dick "Emperor Palpatine" Cheney.  This loathsome duo then went on to authorize wars crimes and deliberate and blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions.  And to date, neither man has been held accountable for these crimes.  So now, Barack Obama is faced with a problem in trying to urge military action in Syria.  How can America be declaring moral outrage over the use of chemical weapons that reportedly killed 1400 people, when the men who took America on a fool's errand that cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives remain unpunished?  A piece in the New York Times looks at this continued toxic legacy.  Here are highlights:

He’s there in every corner of Congress where a microphone fronts a politician, there in Russia and the British Parliament and the Vatican. You may think George W. Bush is at home in his bathtub, painting pictures of his toenails, but in fact he’s the biggest presence in the debate over what to do in Syria.

His legacy is paralysis, hypocrisy and uncertainty practiced in varying degrees by those who want to learn from history and those who deny it. Let’s grant some validity to the waffling, though none of it is coming from the architects of the worst global fiasco in a generation.

Time should not soften what President George W. Bush, and his apologists, did in an eight-year war costing the United States more than a trillion dollars, 4,400 American soldiers dead and the displacement of two million Iraqis. The years should not gauze over how the world was conned into an awful conflict. History should hold him accountable for the current muddy debate over what to do in the face of a state-sanctioned mass killer.

The isolationists in the Republican Party are a direct result of the Bush foreign policy. A war-weary public that can turn an eye from children being gassed — or express doubt that it happened — is another poisoned fruit of the Bush years. And for the nearly 200 members of both houses of Congress who voted on the Iraq war in 2002 and are still in office and facing a vote this month, Bush shadows them like Scrooge’s ghost.

In reading “Lawrence in Arabia,” Scott Anderson’s terrific new biography of one outsider who truly understood the tribal and religious conflicts of a region that continues to rile the world, you’re struck by how a big blunder can have a titanic domino effect. The consequences of World War I, which started 100 years ago next year, are with us still — particularly the spectacularly bad decisions made by European powers in drawing artificial boundaries in the Mideast. Syria and Iraq are prime examples.

Until the Syrian crises came to a head, we had yet to see just how much the Bush fiasco in Iraq would sway world opinion. We know now that his war will haunt the globe for decades to come.
[W]hen the main cheerleaders for the last war talk about what to do now, they should be relegated to a rubber room reserved for Bernie Madoff discussing financial ethics or Alex Rodriguez on cheating in baseball.

Rumsfeld has been all over the airwaves with fussy distinctions about this war and his, faulting Obama for going to Congress for approval to strike. Like the man he served in office, he shows not a hint of regret or evidence that he’s learned a thing.

Liz Cheney, in a feckless run in Wyoming for the Senate highlighted by a sellout of her own lesbian sister’s right to marry, says she would vote against the resolution to use force in Syria. She’s made a career, such as it is, backing her father’s legacy of waterboarding, nation invading and pillorying supporters of diplomacy before war. 

And Senator Marco Rubio, robust defender of the Iraq war, has just cast a no vote on taking action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He did this for one reason: to fend off the Bush-spawned neo-isolationists who will play a big role in the 2016 presidential nomination.

There are people on the public stage who have genuinely agonized over lessons of the Bush disaster. They say, with some conviction, that they will never be fooled again.

Having set in motion a doctrine that touches all corners of the earth and influences every leader with a say in how to approach tyrants who slaughter innocents, Bush retreats to his bathtub to paint. 

Let's be clear.  Until Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are tried and punished for war crimes, America truly has little standing to take action in Syria.  Yes, what Assad has done is horrific.  But so was what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld did.  They still have far more blood on their hands. And they have received no punishment whatsoever.

Dead Iraqi child

Will Syria Be Obama's Fools Errand?

The cretinous George W. Bush, egged on by Emperor Palpatine Cheney, took America to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the result was thousands of squandered American lives and trillions of dollars waste just as if they had been formed in a huge pile and lighted afire.  Worse yet, all that wasted money was borrowed form China.  Now, Barack Obama may be about to start down the road in his own fool's errand although hopefully he is not justifying his actions with out right deliberate lies like Bush/Cheney.  Politico looks at Obama's decision to take a first step down the road in Syria.  Here are excerpts:

President Barack Obama has crossed a red line of his own on Syria — spurred by the fast flood of bad news on the ground and a spirited internal debate about national prestige under his own roof.

The Obama administration’s decision Thursday to provide military and political aid to anti-Assad fighters wasn’t merely a result of confirmation the Syrian regime used sarin gas on rebels — but a decision prompted by the realization that Syrian President Bashar Assad was on the cusp of gaining a permanent advantage over rebel groups and the fear of imminent sectarian bloodshed further spilling into neighboring Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.

“The decision was ultimately driven by the discovery Assad used [chemical weapons] but there were a number of other factors in place that were also important,” conceded an administration official with direct knowledge of the deliberations.

For weeks, Obama — chastened by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — deferred passing judgment on the regime’s use of the deadly nerve gas, even as U.N. and European officials publicly reported the use of chemical weapons against hundreds of rebels and civilians.

But the chorus of calls for action had been rising in recent days, from European capitals, administration officials and Hill hawks in both parties who called for a halt to a recent Assad counter-offensive aided by a surge in attacks by Iran-backed Hezbollah units.

The highest-profile spur for action came on Tuesday: Former President Bill Clinton, speaking in New York, cast Syria in road-not-taken terms, implying that Obama faced a moral crossroads comparable to the one he faced when he decided to not to intervene during the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s.

The one thing all of Obama’s aides were concerned about, sources said, was the perception that world’s sole superpower was standing by while European allies shouldered the burden of trying to stop a dictator from murdering thousands of his own people.

The president himself, people close to the situation said, has been agonizing over the decision, torn between his desire to do the right thing — and his bone-deep aversion to the kind of quick-trigger military intervention in Iraq that sidetracked his predecessor George W. Bush and resulted in the thousands of U.S. casualties.

I understand the desire to intervene.  But at the same time, I cannot forget the nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq.