Even if you wanted to justify bombing Assad for the latest chemical attack, it’s difficult to believe that the Trump admin’s reasoning is trustworthy, or thought out beyond the strike. There have been ongoing chemical attacks in Syria since 2013, this is just the latest of many.
Obama has bombed the ME under the aegis of the 2001 AUMF (which has issues, but it is what it is). Except Libya, where he just blew it, overstepped his bounds badly, and lived to regret it. When Assad used chemical weapons, Obama went to Congress to try to get authorization to strike Assad. Perhaps you don’t remember:
The GOP worked overtime to block this, and the voices now joining in the war chants to praise bombing were once histrionically opposed to the same action against the same actor for the same reason. For example, Ted Cruz, who is now suddenly interested in humanitarian crises involving the brutality and chemical weapons against Syrians by their gov’t was completely flippant and dismissive in 2013:
Virtually every other current GOP supporter was wringing their hands when the Pres. belonged to the wrong political party (and had the audacity to be black to boot).
Trump himself is the Platonic Form of hypocrisy:
et al.
Many of their reasons were because they were callous cretins who didn’t believe Syrians were human beings. Some justifications were the valid fear that supporting Assad’s overthrow would leave a power vacuum that might not be filled by anything better. And some of their reasoning was concerns over strikes on Assad giving air support to ISIS. That’s actually a much more legitimate concern today, since Russia and Assad have worked diligently to eliminate moderate rebels and minimize strikes on ISIS, since it makes their propaganda much easier.
So saying “the reason for bombing are actually true” is being generous to people whose reasoning was consistently and strongly against the actions now supported with the sole change in the situation being the political party of the leadership. Even if you were naive enough to think they really were concerned about humanitarian issues, the refugee ban from Syria makes it abundantly clear just how naive and wrong that is. Trump cares about the suffering of the Syrian people enough to bomb them but not enough to let them escape the bombing.
No, I think Trump’s revealed his reason before:
Given he’s got record lows in approval ratings this has every appearance of wagging the dog. In this case it also gives a false sense of him taking a stand against Russia (though Trump informed Russia of the bombings before the press or Congress), and I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that this attack will be used as a lame excuse to try to paper over his campaign’s prior collusion with Putin during the election.
They’re already trying to use the attacks to bully the American people into authoritarian bootlicking:
