By Dave Lindorff
It’s entertaining to read and watch the collective horror being expressed in the US media and the Congress as President Trump unexpectedly calls for a quick end to US military involvement in Syria, where for years US forces and CIA-trained fighters have been wreaking havoc and death and sowing chaos in a doomed effort to oust Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad from power.
There’s the New York Times, still grimly trying to gin up a new Cold War with Russia, huffing in an editorial that the president is ignoring his own advisors like National Security Director John Bolton (this is a bad thing?) and the recommendations of his generals and his Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (isn’t Trump the commander in chief?). There’s Sen. Lindsay Graham, whom the Times says feels Congress has been “blindsided” by the president’s decision to pull out 2000 US troops from Syria within 30 days — the same Graham who never was troubled by US presidents sending troops into other countries without Congressional approval, but who for some bizarre reason doesn’t like having them brought home without permission.
I even heard a reporter and a host on NPR yesterday agreeing that the president, in ordering the US out of Syria, was “ignoring the wishes” of his generals in the Pentagon, whom we were told, “want the US to stay in Syria for years” to “provide stability” in the region.
Really. Stability!
Have these people looked at the photos of Syria over the years of US involvement in that nation’s brutal civil war? Have they seen the cities bombed to rubble by US aircraft? The hospitals struck? Have they observed the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming out of that country desperate to flee the violence often caused by the US directly, or by forces backed by US special forces and CIA trainers — forces that include elements of the same Al Qaeda movement that the US is supposedly fighting in places like Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in our country’s endless “War” on terror?
I say it’s entertaining to listen to and to read the horror expressed in the corporate media over this sudden Trump volte-face on Syria, but really, it’s not that funny.
Who knows why Trump is suddenly turning from wantonly launching waves of Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syrian urban targets to calling an end to US military operations in that benighted land. Whatever the reasons, though, it is a long-overdue right move.
Some articles have noted that the US intervention in Syria was begun by President Obama with a bombing attack in 2014, which is true. These articles have gone on to sometimes add that Obama’s invasion was an “illegal” action because it was launched without Congressional approval. This is actually wrong. It is an illegal US war, but not because of a lack of Congressional authorization but because it violates international law…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/credit-where-credits-due-trump-does-something-right-for-once/