Last week’s US missile strike on an airbase in Syria, perhaps the first of a series, has surprised many, perhaps most, with its return to old-fashioned visible US muscle power, against an entity, Syria, seen as a client/proxy/ally of Russia, a country Donald Trump was supposed to be in the pay of.
The strike itself is hardly inconsistent with Trump’s stated foreign policy. In the election campaign, he argued that the US should “start winning again”, but refrain from nation-building. He focused on Islamic State (or ISIS/ISIL) rather than Assad, but he also made it clear he was into “anti-barbarity” politics. IS was bad because it was cutting off heads, Assad is bad because he’s using chemical weapons. Method and appearance of murder are all, outcome very little.
There is very little else Trump could have done, as far as domestic politics goes, other than hit back after a chemical attack. The defining moment by which Obama was constructed as a weak president was his “red line” over chemical weapons, which Syria then used. Obama says he’s proud of resisting pressure, stepping back from a direct response from the US foreign-policy “playbook”. That strike was a test by Syria of what a US response would be. So, too, is this one. They have been so little fazed by the strike that they are not only continuing operations, they are doing so from the very airbase that was bombed.
That leaves Trump in a tricky situation. His administration has now become de facto proponents of the idea that “something must be done” about Syria. Assad may avoid using chemical weapons, but the large-scale bombings will continue, and so too will the photographs of atrocities. What then can be the response? More airstrikes? Anything less than increasing the pressure will look weak and ineffectual. But anything stronger and there will be no possibility of doing a deal with the Russians, as clearly occurred with this airbase strike. Simply by still doing what it is doing, Syria will make Trump look weak. The only possible course of face-saving action will be an airstrike against the Syrian government itself, in Damascus. That would bring the US into very direct contact with Russia.
Trump has thus stepped onto the escalator, the exact one that Obama avoided. Already people around his administration are talking about regime change in Damascus. In DC, the neocons are coming out of the woodwork, happy that it’s business as usual again. They’re emboldened by the removal of Steve Bannon from the National Security Council, Bannon being the main proponent of a withdrawal from over-extension (to prepare for the greater wars to come), and the reconsolidation of US domestic infrastructure.
Those of the alt-right are now clearing their throats and pointing out that they are as opposed to regime change and nation-building as they are to Obama’s multi-lateralism, a conflict that will widen (witness in the Oz, Greg Sheridan’s wargasm as soon as the strike occurred, followed by Jennifer Oriel’s piece this morning, which, one would have to say, is objectively pro-Assad). Meanwhile, the attack on Assad has drawn centrist liberal support behind Trump (the WSWS has a useful rundown), and further widened the split between centrist liberalism and the left in the US.
That illustrates one clear domestic purpose of the attacks: dispelling the growing disquiet around Trump’s links with Russia, as evidence of that becomes less and less deniable, and as former associates start offering testimony in exchange for immunity. For how can Trump be in the pay of the Russians, if he’s bombing their allies? Well, because the whole thing is staged and arranged of course, and we all know that. But what many of his supporters need is something to quell their doubts, and a simple answer for the critics. The strike against Syria gives them that. And the liberals have to suspend hostilities to endorse hostilities.
Does this strike create a danger of war? I don’t think so, for a minute. People appear to forget how cheek-by-jowl US and Soviet troops and proxies were in the Cold War — during the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars for example. Or that the US “accidentally” bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. And so on. Small skirmishes like this aren’t going to tip us into anything big.
But they’ll tip the US into something more. The Trump administration will either succeed immediately and bring Assad to heel — very unlikely — or look ineffectual as the war continues, or escalate, out of domestic pressure and neocon enthusiasm. At that point, a wider conflict may become far more likely. Whatever happens, Trump is burnishing the credentials of a president. But it may be that the president in question is Obama — who may well look, after a year or so of Trump doctrine, like Eisenhower, the guy who kept it all together, before the missiles rained down. All good fun, till someone gets hurt. Or half a million killed.
Liberals getting a chubby about all this are disgusting. The news that it was a flashy but pointless attack that achieved nothing makes it even worse. Is it any wonder that a world run by these butchers is full of horrors?
Though, a small silver lining, Bannon and the alt-right get their just deserts for cherry picking Lenin.
1 – Form vanguard party
2 – ???
3 – Revolution!
I laugh so hard when I see an unironic MAGA fan on the internet now. Woah look out, we got a badarse here, he’s saluting the flag and thanking the troops.
Guy, I’m trying to understand where you’re coming from here. You seem to be suggesting that Assad’s game plan (in unleashing atrocities Trump can’t or won’t ignore) is to try to force the US into direct confrontation with Russia. That would certainly be the opposite of Trump’s stated desire during the presidential campaign to arrive at a new détente with Russia. So, are you saying that Assad has calculated that Trump’s offer to Putin would be détente (i.e. with Nato stepping back somewhat in Eastern Europe), in return for regime change in Syria? That would make sense. But if so, surely Assad’s gain would be Putin’s loss. Why would Putin wear that (instead of, say, quietly ‘relieving’ Assad of his rule and installing a more servile pro-Russian ruler)?
WTF was Assad thinking? Chemical attacks will provoke an extreme response. And it’s not over yet, I’d say.
Is there any meaningful evidence that Assad’s forces did commit this chemical attack? Like the repeated assertions that Russia hacked Hillary’s emails, there seems no evidence beyond incessant repitition.
The Pentagon’s latest effort takes one’s thoughts back to 1964 — and “The Tonkin Gulf Incident” and subsequent carnage. It also has as much veracity. Johnson’s amoral act came a year or so after Kruschev had persuaded Kennedy to remove U.S. ballistic missiles from Turkey. Do Pentagon recidivists ever learn?
P.S.: Thanks for Sheridan’s “wargasm”.
I submitted this view on Guy’s previous piece of 6 April, which elicited no response so I’ll re-submit the view that the “rush to judgment” that “Assad used chemical weapons” was based on several YouTube videos. Some showed seemingly staged images of a room full of people milling about and wearing dust masks, intermixed with pictures from what looks like a quarry with a tunnel opening behind, and lots of people, some lying on the ground in their underwear, others hosing them down while wearing little or no protective gear. These are interspersed with images of the infamous “White Helmets”, you know, those that won an Oscar for good acting. Some acting as “rescuers”; others acting as “victims”, while cameras record them. All located on the Al Nusra/ISIL side of the front line, and identified as an NGO funded by the US State Dept, the British Foreign Office and the Govt of Qatar. In other words, like “weapons of mass destruction” before it, all the attributes of fake news contrived as cover for a deliberate attack on a sovereign state.
Fortunately there are alternative opinions on the internet, such as this British journalist based in Damascus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjOSZ6QgGgY
Well, dust masks look dramatic but are ineffective against chemicals, so that is fake. The “quarry” shots, if at least in part genuine, suggest that a “Moderate Rebel”/ISIL chemical weapons bunker was blown up, either by aerial bombs, or by accident. Either way, this had to be covered up with the “Assad gassed his own people” meme. Our dearly-beloved and state-funded ABC and SBS went right along with this narrative. I never watch the commercials; I expect they were even worse. What’s depressing is Trump’s knee-jerk attack on Syria, showing he is in reality a creature from the swamp he promised to drain, while our own Prime Miniature Bullturd, in supporting Trump, shows himself, it seems, as a de facto supporter of ISIL. I haven’t yet heard what Bill Shorten had to say.
“Good news”, if any such can be extracted from this fiasco, is that of the 59 Tomahawk missiles reportedly launched at Syria, according to some sources only 23 reached their targets. 36 were blown to pieces en route. The warhead of one landed in a turnip patch near Tarsus. 36 is the number of targets that can be destroyed by a single S-400 air defence missile. Careful where you tread, Prime Miniature.
Yes, Iskandar, I too think Guy may be buying into a bunch of evidence-free assertions (principally, that Assad intentionally used chemical weapons in 2013; and that did so again last week; and, less certainly, that Trump is in defacto collusion with the Russian state), and I too believe that critical journalism requires higher standards of certainty. Then, Guy can always claim to be a commentator on the consensus rather than a discoverer of information underpinning the consensus, I suppose.
That said, the near-total acceptance of these key assertions by the mainstream media worldwide now defines the political reality we live in at this moment. At a practical level (rather than a moral or legal level) it doesn’t matter whether Assad and Trump are culpable as alleged: All that matters is enough powerful people in governments and media worldwide say it’s so, and, for the sake of what happens next, that makes it so.
Partly, I think, this is on account of chemical weapons being widely regarded as the poor man’s nuclear weapon, such that any use of them provokes immediate fears of inadvertent escalation to nuclear WMD use, hence automatic worldwide condemnation with calls for urgent military responses (i.e. irrespective of the actual facts of the matter). And partly also, I think, we are seeing herd-pack behaviour. To run with the crowd and later be proven wrong is almost never costly, but to dispute the crowd and later be found wrong can result in unending ridicule. Hence Justin Trudeau of Canada last week initially demanding proof but within 24 hours falling into line and demanding action against Assad. Understandable, but not what I’d expected at all from Guy.
Yes, it is unusual for Rundle to accept these unsupported assertions at face value. And unlike him to respond in the comments section.
Sheepish maybe?
It really is getting boring reading Guy’s proof that he doesn’t adhere to Journalism 101 in asking simple questions like ‘and what is the proof that such and such event occurred?’ and ‘are my sources beyond reproach?’ but instead rushes off to suck at the tit of US media run by the oligarchs who profit by increased war spending and then blindly informs us that ‘Assad/Putin’ done it, just like the MSM including the ABC is doing on an hourly basis.
On a non MSM site today but one that has, to date, surprised with its accuracy, I’ve read that Russia will be installing a lot more S-300 and S-400 anti aircraft missiles ASAP. I’ve also read that the US Air Force generals have let it be known to their political ‘masters’ that they don’t want to send their planes into spaces protected by these missiles as they think their butchers bill would be catastrophic. This certainly doesn’t sound like Putin giving the OK to such an attack, more likely he is informing the Yanks that they will bleed if they continue with this stupidity.
I wouldn’t mind it if Guy listed his sources for such allegations but to do so without any attribution invites attacks on his competency.