By firing off five dozen Tomahawk missiles at a military
airfield, our “America First” president may have plunged us into another Middle
East war that his countrymen do not want to fight.
Thus far Bashar Assad
seems unintimidated. Brushing off the strikes, he has defiantly gone back to
bombing the rebels from the same Shayrat air base that the U.S. missiles hit.
Trump “will not stop
here,” warned U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday. “If he needs to do more,
he will.”
If Trump fails to back
up Haley’s threat, the hawks now cheering him on will begin deriding him as
“Donald Obama.”
But if he throbs to the
war drums of John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and orders Syria’s air
force destroyed, we could be at war not only with ISIS and al-Qaida, but with
Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.
A Syrian war would
consume Trump’s presidency.
Are we ready for that?
How would we win such a war without raising a large army and sending it back
into the Middle East?
Another problem: Trump’s
missile attack was unconstitutional. Assad had not attacked or threatened us,
and Congress, which alone has the power to authorize war on Syria, has never
done so.
Indeed, Congress denied
President Obama that specific authority in 2013.
What was Trump thinking?
Here was his strategic rational:
“When you kill innocent
children, innocent babies — babies, little babies — with a chemical gas … that
crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line. … And I will tell you, that attack
on children yesterday had a big impact on me … my attitude toward Syria and
Assad has changed very much.”
Two days later, Trump
was still emoting: “Beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very
barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”
Now, that gas attack was
an atrocity, a war crime, and pictures of its tiny victims are heart-rending.
But 400,000 people have died in Syria’s civil war, among them thousands of
children and infants.
Have they been killed by
Assad’s forces? Surely, but also by U.S., Russian, Israeli and Turkish planes
and drones — and by Kurds, Iranians, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, U.S.-backed rebels
and Shiite militia.
Assad is battling
insurgents and jihadists who would slaughter his Alawite brethren and the
Christians in Syria just as those Copts were massacred in Egypt on Palm Sunday.
Why is Assad more responsible for all the deaths in Syria than those fighting
to overthrow and kill him?
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Are we certain Assad
personally ordered a gas attack on civilians?
For it makes no sense.
Why would Assad, who is winning the war and had been told America was no longer
demanding his removal, order a nerve gas attack on children, certain to ignite
America’s rage, for no military gain?
Like the gas attack in 2013,
this has the marks of a false flag operation to stampede America into Syria’s
civil war.
And as in most wars, the
first shots fired receive the loudest cheers. But if the president has thrown
in with the neocons and War Party, and we are plunging back into the Mideast
maelstrom, Trump should know that many of those who helped to nominate and
elect him — to keep us out of unnecessary wars — may not be standing by him.
We have no vital
national interest in Syria’s civil war. It is those doing the fighting who have
causes they deem worth dying for.
For ISIS, it is the
dream of a caliphate. For al-Qaida, it is about driving the Crusaders out of
the Dar al Islam. For the Turks, it is, as always, about the Kurds.
For Assad, this war is
about his survival and that of his regime. For Putin, it is about Russia
remaining a great power and not losing its last naval base in the Med. For
Iran, this is about preserving a land bridge to its Shiite ally Hezbollah. For
Hezbollah it is about not being cut off from the Shiite world and isolated in
Lebanon.
Because all have vital
interests in Syria, all have invested more blood in this conflict than have we.
And they are not going to give up their gains or goals in Syria and yield to
the Americans without a fight.
And if we go to war in
Syria, what would we be fighting for?
A New World Order?
Democracy? Separation of mosque and state? Diversity? Free speech for Muslim
heretics? LGBT rights?
In 2013, a great
national coalition came together to compel Congress to deny Barack Obama
authority to take us to war in Syria.
We are back at that
barricade. An after-Easter battle is shaping up in Congress on the same issue:
Is the president authorized to take us into war against Assad and his allies
inside Syria?
If, after Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya and Yemen, we do not want America in yet another Mideast war, the time to
stop it is before the War Party has us already in it. That time is now.
