President Donald Trump, supported in large part because of his campaign promise to keep the U.S. out of foreign wars, seems to be marching to the beat of the warmongers rather than his electorate. Has he been fooled by what Patrick Buchanan writes “has the marks of a false-flag operation”?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
By firing off five-dozen Tomahawk missiles at a military airfield, our “America-first” president may have plunged us into another Middle East war that his countrymen do not want to fight.
Thus far Bashar Assad seems unintimidated. Brushing off the strikes, he has defiantly gone back to bombing the rebels from the same Shayrat air base that the U.S. missiles hit.
Trump “will not stop here,” warned UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday. “If he needs to do more, he will.”
If Trump fails to back up Haley’s threat, the hawks now cheering him on will begin deriding him as “Donald Obama.”
But if he throbs to the war drums of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio and orders Syria’s air force destroyed, we could be at war not only with ISIS and al Qaeda, but with Syria, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.
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A Syrian war would consume Trump’s presidency.
Are we ready for that? How would we win such a war without raising a large army and sending it back into the Middle East?
Another problem: Trump’s missile attack was unconstitutional. Assad had not attacked or threatened us, and Congress, which alone has the power to authorize war on Syria, has never done so.
Indeed, Congress denied President Obama that specific authority in 2013.
What was Trump thinking? Here was his strategic rational:
“When you kill innocent children, innocent babies—babies, little babies—with a chemical gas . . . that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line. . . . And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me . . . my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”
Two days later, Trump was still emoting: “Beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”
Now, that gas attack was an atrocity, a war crime, and pictures of its tiny victims are heart-rending. But 400,000 people have died in Syria’s civil war, among them thousands of children and infants.
Have they been killed by Assad’s forces? Surely, but also by U.S., Russian, Israeli, and Turkish planes and drones—and by Kurds, Iranians, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, ISIS, U.S.-backed rebels, and Shiite militia.
Assad is battling insurgents and jihadists who would slaughter his Alawite brethren and the Christians in Syria just as those Copts were massacred in Egypt on Palm Sunday. Why is Assad more responsible for all the deaths in Syria than those fighting to overthrow and kill him?
Are we certain Assad personally ordered a gas attack on civilians?
For it makes no sense. Why would Assad, who is winning the war and had been told America was no longer demanding his removal, order a nerve-gas attack on children, certain to ignite America’s rage, for no military gain?
Like the gas attack in 2013, this has the marks of a false-flag operation to stampede America into Syria’s civil war.
And as in most wars, the first shots fired receive the loudest cheers. But if the president has thrown in with the neocons and War Party, and we are plunging back into the Mideast maelstrom, Trump should know that many of those who helped to nominate and elect him—to keep us out of unnecessary wars—may not be standing by him.
We have no vital national interest in Syria’s civil war. It is those doing the fighting who have causes they deem worth dying for.
For ISIS, it is the dream of a caliphate. For al Qaeda, it is about driving the Crusaders out of the Dar al Islam. For the Turks, it is, as always, about the Kurds.
For Assad, this war is about his survival and that of his regime. For Putin, it is about Russia remaining a great power and not losing its last naval base in the Med. For Iran, this is about preserving a land bridge to its Shiite ally, Hezbollah. For Hezbollah, it is about not being cut off from the Shiite world and isolated in Lebanon.
Because all have vital interests in Syria, all have invested more blood in this conflict than have we. And they are not going to give up their gains or goals in Syria and yield to the Americans without a fight.
And if we go to war in Syria, what would we be fighting for?
A New World Order? Democracy? Separation of mosque and state? Diversity? Free speech for Muslim heretics? LGBT rights?
In 2013, a great national coalition came together to compel Congress to deny Barack Obama authority to take us to war in Syria.
We are back at that barricade. An after-Easter battle is shaping up in Congress on the same issue: Is the president authorized to take us into war against Assad and his allies inside Syria?
If, after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, we do not want America in yet another Mideast war, the time to stop it is before the War Party has us already in it. That time is now.
Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority and Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
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In my opinion, while I do not know whether the banksters control North Korea, the world elites do. They want a belligerent “crazy” in the region so that we all keep playing their game, as in always being on the brink of a crisis. Acting with reserve and prudence means that we are in control, not them. Reacting, or what I call reactivism, is stupidity and lets the elites run the show and take home the paycheck, and the baby and the bath water that we throw out.
Russia should be treated as an ally. Israel should be our enemy because it just plain is. They who are who got us in this mess and keep goading us to stay there. Trump and the rest of the world should tell Israel to stick it up their Netanyahu!
China should be a partner, for the most part. Because of our now nearly inescapable dependency economically on them. So they want the South China Sea and are colonizing it for strategic advantage. What is different between that and what the West has been doing for centuries? They are doing it without blood and conquest, and in my opinion, without anything to be guilty about. Not so with the US in the Middle East.
What did Iran do to us? Or to anyone else for that matter? They support the Palestinians, but we should not be treating Israel as our left and only remaining kidney after having given our right to the NWO elites. These Shylocks only want their second pound of flesh! We owe them nothing the debt we have with them is like with the Fed, created out of thin air!
Sanity, people!
Awesome points Roger! You forgot to mention that there are only 3 countries (at least that I know) that are yet to be controlled by the international bankers….Syria, North Korea and of course Iran. Hillary took out Libya so they are now in the banksters grasp.
Let’s hope that the Trumpster knows what he is doing and has effectively called N. Koreas bluff by getting China to put down their threats and putting Russia (and the Deep state) on notice that he means what he says (tweets) !
War for business interests, the war cry, no pun intended, of Lt. General Smedley Butler, a name lost in American history. This is in part due to history being poorly taught, and in part because he was a whistleblower. He pointed out America’s wag the dog activities from the run up to the Spanish American war through WWI. War Is A Racket. Read it for $6 and learn.
Darn mattoids anyway!!!!!!!!!!
I submitted the letter below for publication in my local free newspaper, the Winona Post:
When will we ever get a US president who does not lie us into wars? Short answer – when we elect someone who tells the truth and surrounds himself with those who tell the truth. Is that too much to expect?
I had just a little hope that Trump would be different, being that he recognized that the media lies and that they are the enemies of the American people. Well there are other enemies of the American people. Such as those moneyed elites who manipulate the world and especially American hegemonic foreign policy.
Trump is playing us just like every president since JFK, the last president who showed any independence, and they killed him for it.
This present act of war on Syria. Totally unjustified. Assad gave up the last of his stockpiles of chemical weapons in 2013. Those entities that were monitoring the situation there confirmed as recently as a few months ago that it was the terrorists – and ISIS – being supported by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for the overthrow of Assad that possessed chemical weapons. The Syrian government was set up to attack the weapons depot where they hid them. It was a false flag all the way.
Why do they, the elites who control everything, want war and not peace in the Middle East? Why do they want the US to bear the brunt of it and the expense of it? Because they can. Because they know that the Fed will create enough money out of thin air to pay for these wars. That the military industrial banking and media complexes can and will make a killing, literally, off it. The red blood on their hands means little when they are also so full of green.
High end estimates of those already killed in the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan – 4 million! Do we really want to continue this? Nobody in their right mind thinks that things are better in that region because of the things we have done. America since 2001? The warfare state, the most dangerous influence against peace in the world. We should be ashamed of ourselves! We should call our leaders on such evil!
There is more at work here besides the greed of these elites. They want to effect global rule, total control. Syria and Iran and Russia stand in their way, so they are in their gun-sights and nuke-sights. Nuclear war is coming if ordinary Americans don’t do what they can to stop this insanity – now!