Trump’s egomaniacal stunts are such that he will probably order bombs to begin landing on Syria this Sunday night. Because that’s when ABC News has scheduled what all of Washington anticipates will be a blockbuster interview with former FBI director James Comey about his dealings with “Mafia Don” Trump.
That interview will be based on Comey’s damning tell-all, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. But Trump knows all too well that Comey’s bombshell revelations would prove no match for his “nice, smart bombs” exploding in Syria.
And he’d be right; the media would focus on the latter like moths to flames. To be fair, though, bombshell revelations about Trump and his presidency are as predictable at this point as salacious details about Stormy and her porno films.
(“Trump, May, Macron: Don’t Bomb Syria. Withdraw World Cup from Russia,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 11, 2018)
As it happens, the media spent much of today gobbling up advanced excerpts of Comey’s book, preempting Sunday’s interview. Therefore, I hope I’ll be forgiven for asserting that this media frenzy explains Trump ordering strikes tonight.
President Trump said on Friday he had ordered strikes on Syrian targets, seeking to punish President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical attack near Damascus that killed more than 40 people.
Mr. Trump said Britain and France had joined the United States in the strikes.
(The New York Times, April 13, 2018)
And, sure enough, the media turned on a dime from Comey to Syria – just as I predicted and Trump hoped they would. But I trust I’ve made clear why this is just another tragic launch of folly, which I’ve decried in related commentaries as an exercise in feckless masturbatory violence. Indeed, it will do no more to improve the lives of Syrians than 15 years of war did to improve that of Iraqis.
I’ll spare you my indignant venting on the perverse moral code that led to that misguided war in Iraq and is now playing out in Syria. I just urge you to consider the manifest absurdity of Western leaders standing by as Assad kills hundreds of thousands with conventional weapons but claiming a moral compulsion to intervene when he kills hundreds with chemical weapons.
I’ve been pleading for years for Western leaders to reconcile this moral inconsistency in such commentaries as “Actually, Isn’t Killing with Gas (Syria) more Humane than Killing with Guns (Egypt)?” August 23, 2013.
That said, you should be wondering why nobody has heard a peep from the world’s second-most powerful nation. Well, the following explains China’s conspicuous refusal to serve even as a peace broker, let alone participate in this escalating military conflagration:
China has so cultivated its self-serving and self-preserving policy of non-interference, it would not lift a finger to stop ISIS from conquering every country in the Middle East, so long as ISIS did not impinge on its sovereignty and was willing to supply its demand for oil.
In other words, if China (instead of the United States) were the only world power capable of stopping the Nazis during WWII, Hitler would have realized his dream of turning all of Europe into a fascist paradise (e.g., free of Jews, blacks, and gays). This informs my abiding admonition about weak/poor countries, especially in Africa and the Caribbean, heralding China as a more worthy superpower patron than the United States.
(“‘All the World Is at War’ Hardly Means World War III,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 30, 2015)
Related commentaries:
Trump May Macron…
World is at war…
gas vs guns…
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