Thursday night, the new administration, in a major policy reversal, launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to Shayrat airbase, which had launched a gas attack two days earlier. But first he called the Russians to warn them, and apparently they warned the Syrian government in time to get most of their airplanes off the base. Nevertheless, those 59 precision guided high explosives did so little damage to the airbase that the Syrians are using the airbase again two days later. Apparently, they didn't do much damage.
What is this about? Trump and quite a few others insist that seeing the children suffering from the gas attack changed his mind. The deaths of 100,000 other children, many of them also by gas attacks, had apparently been insufficient. Many people are saying that this is a change long overdue--that we should have attacked Syria in 2013 after a similar gas attack. Obama asked congress for permission and was refused.
Syria is in the midst of a civil war. A terrible drought led to economic tensions and Syrians had joined the "Arab Spring" demonstrations of 2010. Assad had attacked peaceful demonstrators and they were off to the races. Bush's idiotic invasion of Iraq 7 years earlier had created a particularly grim and media-savvy participant, which in Syria goes by a name which translates to Islamic State In Syria. The republicans were right to put the brakes on Obama's warlike impulse and Trump had been right to stay out, no matter how horrible the events are. There is no good that can come from participating in someone else's civil war. The best we can hope is to put our thumb on the scale a little...provide intelligence and weapons to the side we want to win, for example. There will be atrocities, and any participation makes us guilty by association. 65 years of meddling in the affairs of the middle east (starting with the 1953 coup in Iran) has resulted in a much less safe world and virtually no good for anybody.
I don't think it's about the Syrian children at all. It is a distraction. The probe of Russian interference in last years election is getting closer and closer to Trump himself, and a dozen or more close advisors are clearly guilty of some level of collusion. These people conspired with a foreign power to install their puppet as president. This is high treason. Trump and his allies have been trying to deflect and obstruct the best they can, but for the moment, our institutions were still in place and the noose was tightening.
In another little bit of incompetence, Trump had signaled to Syria that he wouldn't respond to their atrocities. He hadn't understood that he was doing that--he doesn't understand much--but once the Idlib attack happened, he did figure it out and realized he needed to correct the message. This particular correction served several other purposes, too: it suggests that he might not be as beholden to his Russian puppeteers as we'd been thinking (except why did he warn them and not actually hit anything of consequence?). It distracts from the outrage over the Gorsuch appointment. It gives him brownie points from the hawks who wanted to participate in the civil war. And most importantly of all, it deflects media attention away from the investigation of Russian meddling in the election.
It isn't quite a Reichstag fire, but if we fall for it, it may be enough.
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