Meanwhile in Iraq & Syria

[Smitty-48]

Assad gets a big fat zero out of the chemical attack last week.

Qui bono, is all I'm sayin'.

Like I said, his biggest problem is the morale of his own forces, the most likely way that he loses this, is that his own troops quit the field and make a run for it, by using the gas, he's saying;

"they didn't take all the gas away, we still got WMD in our back pocket, don't give up the ghost, we can take this to another level if we have to, if you run you're dead anyways, but make no mistake, before I let them overrun us, I'll use everything in the arsenal without restraint."

I don't think he has that much gas, nor the ability to deliver it even if he did, but he's trying to bolster the morale, show his own troops that he's still in charge, and he's willing to pull out all the stops at the breach, and he still has WMD as a big stick.

It makes sense, if you think like an Arab dictator with his back against the wall, enemies at the gates, worrying about his own troops going wobbly on him, because they think he's finished anyways.

[Fife]

Maybe so. I'm just sitting here with all kinds of holes in the "evidence," such as it is.

Declaring some kind of preemptive war is like sending a man to the gallows, IMNSHO, when it comes to how sure you are about the decision.

We had better be damn sure of our evidence, especially when the immediate result of the proposed action is adding strength to ISIS.

This deal stinks, bro. I'm starting to think more and more that Trump is a fucking dope.

[Smitty-48]

I think it's two seperate issues, Trump is just being an opportunist, Trump needed something to change up the narrative, and everybody knows overseas military distraction wag the dog is what you do, when you want to jingly keys the MSM.

That doesn't have anything to do with whether they used gas or not, the gas was just there as low hanging fruit, Trump was going to go to the military adventure lever eventually, this just happened to fall into his lap, near term, as a preview, because he hasn't got all his ducks in a row yet for the main event.

Gas or no gas, you're going to Syria in some fashion, because Trump said he'd destroy ISIS and told the Pentagon to make it happen, this is just the pre-season game, before the regular season starts.

There's no "evidence" required, for the main event, ISIS is there, Trump said he was going after them, he doesn't need to fabricate a justification, he ran on it, as an election promise, and got a mandate.

[Okeefenokee]

Assad gets a big fat zero out of the chemical attack last week.

Qui bono, is all I'm sayin'.

Like I said, his biggest problem is the morale of his own forces, the most likely way that he loses this, is that his own troops quit the field and make a run for it, by using the gas, he's saying;

"they didn't take all the gas away, we still got WMD in our back pocket, don't give up the ghost, we can take this to another level if we have to, if you run you're dead anyways, but make no mistake, before I let them overrun us, I'll use everything in the arsenal without restraint."

I don't think he has that much gas, nor the ability to deliver it even if he did, but he's trying to bolster the morale, show his own troops that he's still in charge, and he's willing to pull out all the stops at the breach, and he still has WMD as a big stick.

It makes sense, if you think like an Arab dictator with his back against the wall, enemies at the gates, worrying about his own troops going wobbly on him, because they think he's finished anyways.

This doesn't mesh well with five years ago when he was seeing mass defections. Remember that car bomber that got to within a few meters of his base of operations and killed a handful of his top lieutenants? Five years ago he had his back against the wall. The rebels went from a small annoyance out in the sticks to an occupying force in Allepo. That was when I would have expected him to pull out all the stops.

His biggest problem now isn't the rebels. It's the cornucopia of foreign fighters running here and there all over his country while a half dozen more nations are violating his airspace. If he has a need to maintain the appearance now, then that need was ten fold five years ago.

[ssu]

Well, if Trump would be a statesman, I guess he simply could have avoided this rather unnecessary show of force with a great statement and hence give some spine to the idea that his foreign policy would be different from a Clintonesque one, where you react with cruise missiles to events deemed horrific in the media ...because the US can do it.

Of course, Trump isn't that, but actually a rather weak politician.

Yet the whole rhetoric of Trump turning all neocon or that WW3 is imminent is RT propaganda line. Exaggeration.

[Smitty-48]

I don't think Trump's position has changed, he's always said that he would be going to war in the ME, you can't "totally destroy ISIS" without going to war in the ME, so the idea that Trump has flip flopped on military intervention in the ME, is silly, he promised military intervention in his campaign and got a mandate for it.

I don't think Trump is out to depose Assad, this was just a one off, his main target is ISIS, that will be the main event, this was just a sideshow.

[SuburbanFarmer]

It's almost as if a man that's willing to fight foreign rebels for humanitarian reasons (ISIS), would also be willing to fight other powers for humanitarian reasons (NK, Syria, African warlords?)

[Smitty-48]

Y'know?

What part of "We're going to start winning all the wars, starting with TOTALLY DESTROYING ISIS!!!" gave people the impression that Trump was a non military interventionist?

[ssu]

It's almost as if a man that's willing to fight foreign rebels for humanitarian reasons (ISIS), would also be willing to fight other powers for humanitarian reasons (NK, Syria, African warlords?)

Y'know?

What part of "We're going to start winning all the wars, starting with TOTALLY DESTROYING ISIS!!!" gave people the impression that Trump was a non military interventionist?

Trump has a history of demanding military interventions for humanitarian reasons (as below). I cannot reason why people think he would be different from the interventionist mold.

[Smitty-48]

The crazy thing is, the Afghanistan war is still going on, something like 8400 troops still there and now the Pentagon wants to send more, and it's not just the Taliban, ISIS has moved in there as well, guy's are still getting killed there, an Army SF soldier was killed today, and yet it's totally invisible, the media does not report on it, at all, it's kind of eerie how they've completely edited that war right out of the public consciousness, they just don't talk about it, ever.

Y'all are talking like "oh no, they're going back in", as if they ever came out, in order to go back, you would have to have left, but you never left, Marge, the foreign intervention never sleeps, even when the media is ignoring it, you're still there, 24-7-365.

Just goes to show, your real problem, is the media, if the media can make Afghanistan disappear, they could make it all disappear, if they didn't report on it, you'd all be relieved of the burden, and you wouldn't care, you only ever notice it if/when the media gets hysterical about it, if they don't get hysterical about it, it didn't happen.