Musicmystery
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Kirata
quote:
ORIGINAL: Kirata
This is nuts. There has been no investigation, and the accusations against Assad fail to pass the smell test. The fighting in Idlib has been going well for the government. It did not require a chemical attack to force a breakthrough. The rebels, on the other hand, need to gin up outside help against the Syrian government forces and the Russians.
The justification being offered for the U.S. strike appears to be this:
Syrian fixed-wing aircraft dropped chemical weapons on civilians in Idlib earlier this week, two U.S. military officials told NBC News. The U.S. military saw the aircraft on a radar and watched them drop the bombs, the officials said. ~Source
Yeah, no. Radar would not detect that the munitions were chemical. That's a conclusion after-the-fact.
Russia on Wednesday blamed the poisonous gas contamination that activists say killed about 100 people — including 25 children — on a leak from a chemical weapons cache hit by Syrian government air strikes . . . "Syrian aviation made a strike on a large terrorist ammunition depot and a concentration of military hardware in the eastern outskirts of Khan Sheikhoun," he said in a video statement, referring to the rebel-held town in northern Syria where the deaths occurred Tuesday. ~Source
This strikes me as a more plausible explanation. But then the question becomes, did the Syrians know that the target included a chemical weapons cache? If they knew, and bombed it anyway....
K.
Some musings in The NY Times about the risks to Trump:
During last year’s campaign, Mr. Trump argued strenuously that Mr. Obama’s decision at the time was a symbol of American weakness that should never be repeated. In that respect, the attack on Thursday night was almost preordained.
But there are also considerable risks for Mr. Trump in the next few weeks, once the immediate satisfaction of making Mr. Assad pay a price for acts of barbarism wears off.
The first risk is that his gambit with Mr. Putin fails. The Russian leader may have strongly preferred Mr. Trump to his rival, Hillary Clinton, in the election. But Mr. Putin is not likely to enter into an agreement that threatens his influence over Syria, and thus his main foothold in the Middle East. Syria is home to Russia’s main military base outside its own borders.
A second risk is that Mr. Trump, in taking a shot at Mr. Assad, undercuts his own main goal in the region: defeating the Islamic State.
If Syria collapses, it could become a haven for Islamic terrorists, the exact situation that Mr. Trump is trying to prevent.
It is unclear whether Islamic State fighters, already put on the run months before Mr. Trump took office, are in any condition to exploit an even more splintered Syria. But as David H. Petraeus, the retired Army general who designed the Iraqi surge, often notes, one of the lessons of the past decade is that if a power vacuum is created in the region, some variety of Islamic extremists will exploit it.
The third risk is that Mr. Trump has no real plan to bring peace to Syria. The American-led negotiations to create some kind of political accord — which was John Kerry’s mission for his final 18 months as secretary of state — collapsed.
Mr. Tillerson has shown no desire to start a new one. And Mr. Trump’s proposed budget makes cuts to the very programs that would provide relief to the homeless, beleaguered Syrians who have survived six years of civil war.
Clearly, the conflict that led Mr. Trump to take military action for the first time in his presidency is not the one he was looking for.
During his campaign, he dismissed the notion of humanitarian interventions, and in an interview with The New York Times last year, he could not define the conditions that would even tempt him to use the American military to defend a foreign population from a vicious dictator. It simply did not fit his definition of defending “America first.”
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RE: U.S. Attacks Syria - 
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about the child victims of the the chemical attack this strike was in retaliation to 
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