Frankly, when the story of this sarin attack first broke, I fully expected Lord Dampnut to accept the shameless Russian lie ("it happened because of a bombing raid on a chemical weapons cache held by the rebels") and say something like:
"Well, this is terrible but we have no idea who did it. Our so-called 'intelligence services' claim it was Assad, but they don't really know. Remember how wrong they were about WMD in Iraq? Maybe it was Assad, but who knows?"
But first through Nikki Haley's superb performance at the UN, and then also through Tillerson, and finally by his own words at his joint press conference with King Abdullah, for
once he fully and unreservedly embraced
the truth... and put the blame exactly where it belonged...
Trump actually accepting facts...how weird is
that?
You would think out recent debacles would have taught us that
What the tragedy of Syria should have taught us, is the terrible cost that is paid when the United States refuses to act...
Our failure to move swiftly to support the rebels when the uprising first began, (establishing a no fly zone along the Turkish border, sending in training personnel and equipment to support the pro-democracy rebels who were the first to oppose Assad, etc.) created a power vacuum that was filled by the Islamist "JV team" on the one hand, and ultimately by the Russians on the other...
The result has been the creation of a Jihadist "Caliphate", hundreds of thousands dead, and the largest refugee crisis (six million and counting...1/3 of Syria's total population) since the aftermath of The Second World War...
This is the price tag for American inaction...
Trump was quite correct when he faulted Obama for this, (but as usual, Il Boobce is a
very poor messenger...he actually opposed US action at the time)...
When Obama got cold feet after he failed to have enough juice with the Brits to get them to join in the "line in the sand" military action he promised, (the first time in 70 years that a US government was unsuccessful in getting requested support from our closest ally) and then climbed down from his decision and came up with this bizarre idea that he needed a congressional resolution to take action, (something that no President in American history had
ever sought for a military operation of this limited scale) he committed the worst foreign policy blunder of his Presidency...
NO ONE in the political leadership on The Hill on either side was arguing that he needed Congressional approval for what he was proposing. In fact just the opposite; John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both publicly said they supported his proposed action, that it was within his prerogative as Commander-In-Chief, and saw no requirement for any Congressional approval...(the only ones arguing that congress needed to be involved were fringe morons like Rand Paul)
Then after that
completely unforced error, he followed it up with two weeks of him and Kerry making a strangely incoherent and contradictory case for the airstrikes... ("The attacks will be unimaginably small"..."no the US doesn't do 'pin pricks'"...
)
And then he capped it all off with the
biggest boneheaded play of all...
Signing on to a deal brokered by
Vladimir Putin...
Yeah
that'll work...
So that's how we got where we are, but as I said before, we are where we are...
The only good thing that can be said for that bogus deal is that it provided the justification for the action taken last night, (and any subsequent actions)
He's barrel bombed chemical weapons on his people almost non-stop since he bought into that "agreement"; this is just the first time he's gone so far as to use something like sarin...)
)
)
