Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

One day after I asked the question: It is not so easy when you are the president, is it?   Trump makes it look easy by firing 50 tomahawk missiles on the air base that launched the chemical attack.  I should have said it is easy to do a one and done attack.  The question is, does Trump have a long range plan follow up to this that will make a difference.  I doubt it.

In retrospect, I should have seen this coming.  Just because he and Tillerson said that we will leave Syria alone and look out for our own interest first, I should not be surprised that Trump would do this.  This is a relatively safe operation.  No U.S. military people are at risk.  The chances of civilian casualties are low even though there maybe fake civilian casualties on tv tomorrow.  But of course it is not going to change anything in Syria.  It won't even stop chemical attacks because the chemicals are still there.  Assad just have to use a different delivery system, maybe even other planes in other airfields.  So we basically spent tens of millions of dollars (Tomahawks are not cheap) to beat our own chest and shout we are strong.

But beating his own chest is something that Trump likes to do.  He is basically a immature young man still and this is perfect for him.  To him it is a video game but with real ammunition and destruction.  He talked about how seeing beautiful babies being killed by chemical weapons and it affected him to act.  Well,  in 2013 the attacks were bigger but he tweeted that we should not get involved.  So I doubt that he is doing this because of seeing the carnage.  I think it is an opportunity for him to get an easy victory after all the problems of the first 100 days.  It also draws attention away from all the Russian influence problems.  Like dictators all over, when in trouble at home, attack some enemy to arouse nationalism and get people behind you.  That is the reason for this attack, not humanitarian reasons.   If humanitarian reasons are in his mind, it would be more useful to the Syrians for Trump to lift the ban of refugees.

I find it interesting that it is reported that Trump gave the Russians a heads up before the attack because there were Russians on the base.  Wouldn't that risk the Russians tipping off the Syrians and move the planes.  Even if the Russians don't say anything the fact they high tailed it out of there would look very suspicious to the Syrians.  And what will Putin's response be?  Trump was also hosting Xi Jinping today.  What will China's reaction be?

The only thing that may be good in this is that it gives a warning to Iran, Syria and even North Korea that Trump can change his mind and attack any time. Dictators want to survive and  so they may back off some.  But they also know that history shows that the U.S. will always win the first strikes because of overwhelming military power.  But that does not mean mission accomplish as George Bush found out.