By “decisively” bombing Syria, Donald Trump, the clown, has suddenly become America’s hero. Rapidly jumping on the bandwagon, pundits and pols and average Americans left questions about the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia in the dust, as well as the health care debacle. Who wants to bet the polls will show a surge in support for The Donald?
Trump was acting out America’s foundational myth when he ordered a missile attack on Syria. Americans, responding from psycho-social memory, swooned. Trump became the knight in shining armor who rescues the damsel in distress, the frontiersman who rescues the maiden kidnapped by Indians. Americans rush to applaud because it is the myth on which America was founded. We are the good guys who defend the weak (read “women and children”) against the bad guys.[1] With one violent blow. No messy rescuing refugees for us.
As much as I want to punish Assad for his chemical weapons attack, my question is “Has the bombing of one airport stopped him?” No one claims there were chemical weapons there. Which means he still has them and can use them again in four years, two years, next month, tomorrow. Did we wipe out some planes? Damage runways? That’s questionable, particularly considering that the U.S. gave Russia advance notice of the strikes. Any reason to believe they didn’t pass along that wee bit of information to their long-time partner, Assad? My second question is “What now?”
While the chemical weapons attack killed 80 people, the six-year long war has taken the lives of 470,000: 207,000 civilians, 24,000 children, 23,000 women, and displaced 11 million more. Over 90% of civilian deaths were caused by the Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance.[2] Nor was this the first chemical weapons attack since the one in 2013 that took the lives of 1,300. Assad has been using chlorine gas against civilians throughout the war and continues to do so.
The media and politicians rush to spin this as an Obama failure. He didn’t act out our foundational myth, though no one seems to recall that he intended to and pursued diplomacy only after Congress refused to give him authority for air strikes. Instead of doing nothing, he worked out a deal with Putin and Assad in which Assad would get rid of his chemical weapons. He sent a lot of them out of the country, but either held some back or made more. Trump didn’t destroy any, as far as a we know. We say Assad’s a bully and Obama was wrong to trust him. After the bombing, we’re still left with the bully. Unless we bomb Syria back into the Stone Age (as we did Iraq) and drive him from power (as we did Hussein and Qadafi), the situation on the ground in Syria remains pretty much the status quo. And if we do bomb Syria back to the Stone Age? We can see where that got us in Iraq. The rise of a ruthless, headless group of fanatics who revel in killing innocents – wherever.
[1] See Faludi, Susan, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co. (2007), Chapter 8.
[2] http://sn4hr.org/wp-content/pdf/english/207_thousand_civilians_were_killed_by_hands_of_the_
Syrian_alliance_Iranian_Russian_en.pdf (PDF: 207K Civilians Killed by Syrian Alliance)