(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Last night, US President Donald Trump ordered the US Navy to conduct missile strikes against a military airport near the Syrian city of Homs in response to what he said was a chemical attack made by the Assad government in against civilians in the village of Khan Sheikhoun in the province of Idlib.
While the Russian Defense Ministry already slammed the attack, describing its combat efficiency as “quite poor,” it will be premature to say that the Trump administration used 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroye a material storage depot and few old MiG-23 aircraft.
There should be some “non-military” reasons behind Trump’s actions. Let’s take a brief look at them:
Trump faces a very complicated political situation inside the United States. His administration is under a constant pressure from the mainstream media and the global elites that see him as an enemy. Our friend, TheSaker wrote about this issue here and here. Furthermore, acrroding to some experts, Trump is slowly losing this standoff.
Thus, the Trump administration used a pretext of alleged chemical attack made by the “Assad regime” against civilians in Idlib province to show own strength and get some additional points in the ongoing US internal political game. Just look at the reaction in the US media:
“We now have a president who said something and backed up his words with action.” –@FredFleitz pic.twitter.com/A5BrxnaHR3
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) April 7, 2017
Or the New Your Times’ article on the issue (source):
The images were heartbreaking: Children gasping and choking for breath, their mouths foaming. A grief-stricken father, cradling the lifeless bodies of his two children, swaddled in white blankets. But they were also familiar, a harrowing flashback to 2013, when the Syrian government unleashed the last major poison gas attack on its own people.
This time, though, a new American president was seeing the pictures and absorbing the horror.
Donald J. Trump has always taken pride in his readiness to act on instinct, whether in real estate or reality television. On Thursday, an emotional President Trump took the greatest risk of his young presidency, ordering a retaliatory missile strike on Syria for its latest chemical weapons attack. In a dizzying 48 hours, he upended a foreign policy doctrine based on putting America first and avoiding messy conflicts in distant lands.
At the same time, the idea to blame Assad for the chemical attack in Idlib was used because Trump had not been able to gain any major PR victory against ISIS in Raqqah and western Mosul. The both areas remained in the hands of the terrorists despitie the increased US military efforts.
Furthermore, the “war on terror” itself (especially if this way is far away from the US) does not allow to consolidate people and elites. The possible war on the “bloody Assad regime” and the confrontation with “Putin’s Russia” are much more useful topics for this goal.
On the other hand, some “Desert Storm”-like operation in Syria (in case of limited loses in manpower and equipment, for sure) with usage of expensive military means (like Tomahawk cruise missiles) would allow the United States’ military industrial complex to gain eye-watering revenues and to circumstantially boost the US economy itself.
But did Mr. Trump really evaluate the cost of his political subterfuge and forecast all possible consequences?
