As most readers are probably aware, President Trump ordered a missile strike on a Syrian air base recently, and the Navy fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at the base in retaliation for a Sarin gas attack that’s alleged to have been committed by Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Beyond this, the “facts” in the news about this event are murky. Starting with who committed the attack and why. There’s little evidence one way or the other over whether it was Assad’s forces that perpetrated the attack or soldiers loyal to ISIS and/or other groups such as the al-Nusra Front, a group that’s essentially al-Qaeda by another name. It’s been a persistent issue that many of the “moderate rebel” groups in Syria are simply ISIS and al-Qaeda with other labels.
One fact that was not heavily reported in the case of Trump’s missile strikes is that there were no casualties on the ground from them. In fact, the United States gave both Syria and Russia advance warning of the attack, and Syria moved its warplanes well out of the way before it occurred. Had the attack killed Syrian or Russian soldiers, it would have been treated much differently, and it might have escalated the situation to a more critical state.
In essence, the attack appears to be more for show than anything else. Certainly, it had the effect of jarring Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was dining with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate at the time of the attack.
And it would be naive to think that the timing of the attack — just as Jinping was visiting — was not uncoincidental, as the U.S. has issues with China regarding both the South China Sea and North Korea at the moment.
For the president to launch a unilateral attack on such short notice likely “sent a message” — not only to Xi, but to other leaders around the globe, who might have initially thought Trump was hesitant to take military action anywhere in the world.
Of course, not all leaders condemned Trump’s strike or were critical of it. The king of Saudi Arabia — who would like to see Assad ousted from power in place of Wahhabist Sunni opposition forces — praised Trump for the action.
And this praise was just some of the kind words coming from globalist and neoconservative leaders — leaders that included Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Republican Senator John McCain, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and others.
CNN practically gave the president the broadcast equivalent of a standing ovation, as globalist commentator Fareed Zakaria declared that with his strike, “Donald Trump became president,” somehow seeming to imply that Trump might have held some other position in the minutes and days before the attack.
In fact, it was this cheering of the globalist crowd that should have Trump supporters worried. Syria is probably the world’s worst flashpoint in terms of the globalists’ agenda to keep selling arms and destabilizing that region, forcing refugees to flee and military defense contractors to keep soaking up more of the U.S. budget, concerns that have raised the ire of Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky as well as his father, former Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, both of whom were critical of the strike.
Rand Paul repeatedly pointed out that the United States had not been attacked by Syria. While President Trump has promised to strengthen the American military, he also made a campaign promise to remove the U.S. from international conflicts (and possibly NATO).
It’s worth noting that the elder Paul said on his Liberty Report broadcast, “It doesn’t make any sense for Assad under these conditions [which include Syria winning the war against ISIS lately, with early discussions of peace talks being reported] to all of a sudden use poison gases – I think there’s zero chance he would have done this deliberately.”
Four years ago, in 2013, another major chemical attack in Syria was initially blamed on the Assad regime, but a subsequent UN investigation found evidence pointing the other way, at the Syrian opposition forces.
The leader of that investigation has said of this new attack, “if it was Sarin that was stored [at the missile factory that was allegedly bombed], and conventional munitions were used in the area, there is every possibility that some of those [chemical] munitions were not consumed, and that the Sarin liquid was ejected and could well have affected the population.”
Currently, no major Western news organization has reporters on the ground in Syrian conflict zones, so all news about attacks in the country usually come from one of two sources — a Syrian man based in London running an organization called the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), and the “White Helmets” — ostensibly a Red Cross-like humanitarian organization, but one that’s funded by the United States through a company called Chemonics, which has been accused of receiving no-bid aid contracts worth millions of dollars in Haiti, among other abuses.
It’s also worth noting that the position of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seemed to have changed several times both before and after the crisis. Before the chemical attack occurred, Tillerson had said that “the longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people,” implying that for the Trump administration, dealing with ISIS was the primary concern, rather than addressing globalist assertions that Assad is a totalitarian dictator.
But just hours before Trump’s strike, Tillerson’s views on Assad seemed to have evolved as he stated, “Assad’s role in the future is uncertain, clearly, and with the acts that he has taken, it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.”
Three days later, Tillerson’s views seemed to have changed again, with the Secretary of State saying on CBS’ Face the Nation, “It’s important that we keep our priorities straight, and we believe that the first priority is the defeat of ISIS.”
At the same time, the globalists’ mantra that Assad is a despot who “kills his own people” — a charge correctly attributed to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein — rings hollow, because unlike Hussein, Assad was not a college dropout born to a family of shepherds; rather, he was the privileged son of his nation’s longtime leader and was schooled at a British postgraduate institution (Assad became a trained eye surgeon at London’s Western Eye Hospital).
He married his UK-born and King’s College-educated wife Asma in 2000 and was both elected and re-elected (as recently as 2014) in elections that were widely determined to have been fair and free of corruption.
Assad was never supposed to have been president of Syria; his original plan was to become an eye doctor, but his brother Bassel, who had been chosen to succeed his father Hafez as the leader of Syria, was killed in a car crash in 1994, thus casting Bashar into his leadership role unexpectedly.
The opposition to Bashar began in earnest in 2000 because he had cracked down on political agitators in his country affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. In short, equating Assad with Saddam Hussein (or another area strongman, Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi) is false; Assad is much more intelligent, worldly and wise.
At the same time, Assad’s deceased father Hafez holds a place of controversy in world history, because while Syria was once a recipient of U.S. aid, in 1983, it was discovered that the elder Assad had not only funded the disastrous attacks on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 American troops.
Even worse, in the process, he had engineered one of terrorism’s most feared tactics that had never effectively been used before on such a wide scale: the suicide bombing.
In the wake of the horrific Beirut assault, U.S. President Ronald Reagan removed all U.S. troops from the region. Not only was Syria responsible for the attack in Beirut, it’s been suspected that the country was also the mastermind of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.
At the time and for years afterward, this attack was blamed on Libya — with U.S. President Bill Clinton even going as far as demanding a $2.7 billion-dollar settlement payment and the handing over of two men supposedly responsible for the bombing in the late 1990s.
The Lockerbie bombing and other terrorist attacks of the 1980s were blamed on Libya as a way to justify military action against Gaddafi, who was seen as the more dangerous ‘bogeyman’ of the region (and likely much easier to topple). Still, Gaddafi clung to power, despite U.S. military strikes on Libyan targets in 1981 and 1986.
Later, Gaddafi appeared to have appeased the U.S. and other Western powers in 2003, when he committed to giving up weapons of mass destruction, paving the way for renewed ties with the U.S. and other Western powers.
But when the Arab Spring movement came in 2011, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama decided the moment was ripe to try and oust Gaddafi, and they supported opposition forces in that country to do just that. Gaddafi was killed by rebels in his country in late 2011.
In Syria, Bashar Assad likely watched with horror at what happened to the Libyan strongman and decided that Russia would likely be his country’s (and his family’s) heroic savior. For Russia, Syria represents the only footing the country has in the region, and the Syrian government is an important strategic ally for Vladimir Putin’s regime. It’s fairly safe to say that without a Russian relationship, Assad would likely have been forced from power long ago.
Although Assad’s father certainly made an enemy of the United States — and many would say “payback” for the previous anti-American actions was long overdue — it’s also safe to say that Assad is not the same man as his father (who was never elected by the Syrian people), nor does he hold many of his father’s past political views.
Like Iraq, Syria technically was and is not a Muslim country; the government is secular and has opposed violent Islamist extremists in the past. Prior to the Arab Spring, Bashar Assad was considered to be one of the more moderate and responsible leaders in the Middle East. He has been accorded honors for strengthening Arab unity and bringing peace to his region (prior to 2011) by both left-wing and right-wing foreign governments.
But there are reports that companies allied with globalist interests wanted to run a pipeline through Syria — a pipeline that Assad was vehemently opposed to. This presented a convenient argument for Obama to target Assad’s government in the Arab Spring movement and to support opposition forces, which slowly became more and more militarized and violent with the United States’ endorsement (and some might even say orders).
Where does all of this leave President Trump? While Trump rehashed the “leader who’s killing his own people” storyline in public, it’s more interesting to see how Secretary of State Tillerson has responded.
When Tillerson once again seemed to want to make ISIS the priority rather than the removal of Assad, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida reacted, saying, “In this case now, we have very limited options, and look, it’s concerning that the Secretary of State… said that the future’s up to the people in Syria on what happens with Assad.”
This prompted Tillerson to criticize Rubio’s remarks, which would seem to place Rubio squarely in the camp of globalists like Senator John McCain.
Despite being 80 years old, McCain made a trip to Syria as recently as February of this year. The range of people he met with and what was actually discussed is unknown, although it wouldn’t be surprising if there were strong connections to ISIS.
Unfortunately for the Syrian people — who have suffered through some of the world’s worst violence in the last six years, this conflict doesn’t appear to have a quick or easy ending in the near future.
