President Trump, with his military advisers, and with the participation of France and England, carried through with his warning to President Assad that his use of poison gas would have serious consequences. A year ago a similar attack destroyed much of Assad's delivery capacity. This time it was the chemical weapon manufacturing and storage facilities. Apparently the attack was carried out with great precision and without involving civilian casualties or involving Russian assets which would have complicated the matter.
President Trump was specific about his threat and followed through with it in an astute manner. This was in contradistinction to President Obama who issued the same warning to Assad but did not follow through. He and his surrogates explained at the time that the reason for this omission was that he had obtained the agreement of the Russians that they would see to it to remove chemical weapons from Assad's arsenal. Events have proven that President Obama's compliance with and trust in the Russians was misplaced. Unfortunately he allowed the Russians to become deeply embedded in the region.
I have for some time now stopped paying much attention to TV news shows, including those on Fox News, finding them to be excessively focused on boring Washington political infighting. I tuned in this weekend to find out the details of this attack because of its potential importance. On the Jesse Watters show on Saturday, the night after the attack, I watched a Democrat commentator complain that while he had no disagreement with the attack, that President Trump was inconsistent because he had expressed his intent to get American forces out of Syria. This was a pretty far reach to be critical but not unexpected. It didn't tell me much.
On Sunday morning I tuned into Fox News Sunday which I had always considered to be "straight news" as opposed to the obvious repetitive anti-Trump bias on the other networks. There I saw Chris Wallace repeatedly press the question as to why Trump responded to chemical weapons and not to Assad's use of conventional weapons. I watched as Jonah Goldberg, a long time conservative "never-Trumper" smugly accused Trump of responding mostly to things he saw on TV.
The world was so revolted by the pervasive use of poison gas in WW1 that such weapons have been considered beyond the pale ever since. Every person with normal sensibilities understands the consequences of letting that cat out of the bag. Thus the negative reaction of both Presidents Obama and Trump to Assad's use of poison gas. On the other hand the Syrian civil war is a morass, with the anti-Assad forces being a very mixed bag. Trump's desire to extricate American troops from that situation as soon as is feasible is probably shared by the large majority of Americans. Chris Wallace's apparent misunderstanding of this basic distinction suggests to me that he is being provocative for the sake of provocation. Goldberg's misplaced attitude of superiority seemed ridiculous.
None of these people had to face the real decision about the event, the importance of it relative to overall national policy, what should be our response, how and with whom it should be carried out, what might be the collateral consequences of our actions, how would our friends and adversaries respond, how should it be announced to the world. To my mind the thing was carried out expertly all around. Good for Trump. Back to the waste basket for the TV news yappers.
