What Does the US Bombing Syria Accomplish?
by John Lawrence, April 11, 2018
Now Trump wants to send a missile strike to bomb Syria because Assad unleashed a chemical attack that killed innocent civilians. Modern warfare is war against civilians. Any attack against civilians chemical or otherwise is deplorable, but that is what war in the 21st century consists of. And that goes for the million civilians killed by the US in the Middle East too. Trump sending a missile strike to Syria will only kill more civilians, and what would it accomplish? The fate of Syria has already been decided. Assad, Russia and Iran won. The US lost. The purported chemical attack was a mopping up operation against a small pocket of resistance to Assad's regime. What strategic goal will the US accomplish by sending a missile strike and killing more civilians? Answer: nothing.
So the US, although irrelevant as a player in Syria and increasingly the whole Middle East, is just throwing its weight around there just because we can do it with no goal in mind. A slap on the wrist to Assad? Assad has already won. Is it we're just showing our moral superiority by reacting to something so horrible Assad and Russia and Iran have done? We'll show them. We'll kill more civilians the conventional way - with conventional bombs, not chemicals. So we'll send a couple million dollars' worth of missiles over there which will accomplish nothing except Lockheed Martin will probably get another contract for replacement missiles and bombs. After all we can't let our stock get too low.
Politico reports:
Experts have suggested that plans for Trump's promised strike against Syria in response to the latest chemical attack are complicated by an apparent lack of an overall strategy to address the ongoing conflict there. Because the first strike failed to deter the use of chemical weapons, a second strike would likely be more severe, potentially including the use of American warplanes, a riskier step because of the threat one could be shot down, as opposed to the cruise missiles the Trump administration launched last year.
The Syrian government has denied responsibility for the chemical weapons attack and Russia, its close ally, blocked a United Nations Security Council resolution Tuesday that called for an independent investigation to establish whether or not the Assad regime had deployed such weapons against a civilian population. ...
Trump’s Wednesday morning warning to Russia seemed a response to remarks from Alexander Zasypkin, the Kremlin’s ambassador to Lebanon, who said Tuesday, according to Reuters, that “if there is a strike by the Americans, then...the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired.” Zasypkin said his comments about a U.S. missile strike echoed remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian military chief of staff.
So the only strategic goal that the US might achieve is to get into a war with Russia over an attack that killed 40 people? Nice going, Trump. A fitting culmination to the mind boggling insanity and monumental bungling starting with George W Bush's lying us into war in Iraq which only resulted in Iran taking over Iraq. Then came the incompetent bumbling of the whole Middle East strategy resulting in practically the whole Middle East being controlled by Iran and now the slaughter of innocents in Yemen by our ally Saudi Arabia carried out with US bombs and weapons.
Wouldn't it have been better to give peace a chance? Do Americans even care about this latest travesty?
