Many of the reasons have now been posted and discussed on DU, but in case you haven’t seen them:
America is the cause of most of the instability in the Mideast. We don’t understand the countries there, don’t respect the religion, and yet keep intervening to destabilize their governments. (This has been tragic for Iran and Iraq). Not sure ISIS and other extremists would even exist if we had never exercised our imperial ambitions in the area. 45 has gone ahead and further stirred up a hornet’s nest with no understanding of the ramifications.
He informed the Russians before the strike and they told Assad and by the time our missiles arrived all the useful targets had been shipped out. This makes it a phony, PR stunt.
The day after the US strike Assad airplanes bombed the same city, using the same planes and airstrip that had been used to drop the chemical weapons. As a result the people who had been chemically harmed are now in worse, not better condition.
As an article in Vanity Fair says, "Assad’s taunting Trump by quickly reopening Shayrat Airfield leaves the White House with a dilemma. For one, the symbolic nature of the administration’s attack has apparently emboldened Russia. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Moscow said it plans to buttress Syria’s air forces, and announced that it would suspend an agreement between the U.S. and Russia, intended to minimize the possibility of in-air collisions. [This could lead to a kind of war with Russia]
45’s ratings have been hovering between 34% AND 39%. It is a well-known tactic for Presidents to go to war at such times to appear strong and to give a dose of adrenaline to nationalistic supporters, to get the bad stories off the front page and make a big show. You’ve heard of the movie "Wag the Dog”?
As Obama explained last year in the Atlantic:
It was his administration’s “assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a U.N. mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it.” It now appears that is precisely the situation confronting President Trump.
This is why we all distrust so much this huge PR event coming out of 45. Plus, it cost millions but seems to have hurt the very people it was supposed to help. It was cynical as hell.
And could open us up to Trump impulsively putting us into a ground war.
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