Syria used sarin gas on civilians. There are few things as terrifying and atrocious as chemical weapons. It is absolute insanity to use nerve gas, never mind the other war crimes committed by the Assad regime.
A extreme claim against something is not proof of the claim itself. Regardless of it happening this kind of FOR THE CHILDREN social shaming is unacceptable.
Lets not jump the gun on repeated military campaigns.
Also please don't down vote me because my opinion is different.
Dying from gas is no more horrible than those.
I shall hope that this will signal a renewal in the current administration's efforts to rely on actual government intel services for strategic knowledge, as opposed to listening to talking heads on particular mainstream news and taking them at their word...
Basically, either Hussein was incompetent or he was trying to play a game of brinkmanship with the international community that he lost. Whether or not his actions justified invasion by the us is debatable (I do not believe so). Also the us repeatedly blatantly misrepresented Hussein to paint him as collaborating with "terrorists". but the fact is he did have wmd.
Also, just checking the news updates and it appears that the President did not clear this strike with congress, but instead informed the Russian authorities about his intentions before issuing the order. Is there any more clarification on this?
"Russia said the deaths were caused by a Syrian strike on a terrorist chemical lab, but the United States, other nations and human rights groups rejected that claim as baseless."
I find Trump's sudden reversal on this very suspicious. This seems to be mainly a politically motivated action that 1 - makes him look tougher than Obama on the 'red line' issue and 2 - deflects from the Russia investigation.
Things will get interesting (in a very bad way) if Assad calls the bluff.
I'm not saying we shouldn't intervene, I don't see how the international community can let something like this stand, but how can he justify being against intervening after the previous chemical attacks when he was a candidate, but order intervention after chemical attacks as president? Russia and China are going to have a field day arguing this point in the Security Council. It seriously weakens the US position.
What remains surprising to me is that this is still considered an extreme and/or paranoid attitude by many otherwise educated people. Is it really so difficult to believe that entities like Associated Press or the Washington Post, privately held entities, serve specific interests? Or that the power elite, a small group that holds 95%+ of the world's wealth, would put those resources to use in shaping public opinion to their ends?
Yet even suggesting the possibility, that you can't necessarily believe what you read in the biggest newspaper (or, shocker, the press bureaus), will yield uncomfortable looks shot back and forth, like you might be strapped with a suicide bomb. I suppose it is a modern day taboo that we can't trust the central institutions in our society.
I can't - I don't have the resources or expertise to set up a global media conglomerate.
Can you ?
I could try a start up, but I would need to take venture money and that comes with giving up some control...
Pretty soon we are going to reach the conclusion that there are maybe a couple of people in the world who could, in theory, create a media outlet able to compete with the established ones.
So not 'anyone'.
How many will die this time?
"The U.S. strikes —59 missiles launched from the USS Ross and USS Porter — hit the government-controlled Shayrat air base in central Syria, where U.S. officials say the Syrian military planes that dropped the chemicals had taken off. The U.S. missiles hit at 8:45 p.m. in Washington, 3:45 Friday morning in Syria. The missiles targeted the base's airstrips, hangars, control tower and ammunition areas, officials said.
The attack killed some Syrians and wounded others, Talal Barazi, the governor of Syria's Homs province, told The Associated Press. He didn't give precise numbers."
The question for Trudeau is - when Russia says no, then what?
I would caution against believing any media reports until a similar analysis is done for the current incident. Assad has no reason for jeopardizing his current favorable position.
> Most significant, he [Obama] failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.
> When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
I think many of us are asking the same thing: Is the intelligence we're being fed cherry picked.
It's unsettling that the government and the media does not have to be accountable to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is what the general public expects.
What happens to those people who mislead us, and are we finally going to smarten up?
US military intervention in the Middle East. What could go wrong?
People have attributed Machiavellian goals to Trump's childishness before, and it turned out he was just being childish. I have zero problem believing he saw the pictures of gassed children and directly instructed Mattis to smack Assad.
Honestly I see this as Trump being the broken clock right twice a day. Putin has long used his status as a nuclear power to muscle his way around (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, etc) as he knows that other nations will think twice about shooting at his forces, so long as his actions remain reasonably limited and he expands his influence slowly. It's about time someone called him on that.
As for whether the Syrian government actually launched the strike, keep in mind that the US, for all its flaws, has the best equipped and most expansive intelligence apparatus in the world. Whatever Trump thinks, I assure you THEY do not want another Iraq-like mistake and almost certainly crossed every t and dotted every i on this.
