April 4. Trump is informed that the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas against insurgents, killing 89.
April 6. The U.S. Commander in Chief is horrified by the sight of children gassed to death. He gives the okay to sent 60 Tomahawk missiles to crater the airfield from which the plane carrying the nerve gas took off.
But something doesn't smell right, and it's not the sarin gas. Let's take a point-by-point look at the supposed Assad attack and Trump's response.
Assad is winning the six-year civil war that has taken the lives of 470,00 of its citizens. Now victory for his government is in sight. Then, according to Washington, Assad orders several planes to gas a nonmilitary objective. Reports filtering out of Syria, Russia, and human rights organizations make no mention of rebel deaths.
The known causalities are a Syrian brigadier general along with many other members of Assad's army. The rest are noncombatants including the oft-cited women and children.
Further, the planes implicated in the gassing are Russian fighter jets. Their high stall speed of roughly 200 miles/hour makes it impossible to spray an effective concentration in a defined area.
Additionally, sarin is 26 times more lethal than cyanide. The death toll of less than 100 is suspiciously low. It appears that the quantity of gas employed was insufficient to achieve any military advantage but more than enough to bring the world down around Assad's ears.
To believe that Assad was responsible for the gas attack is to assume that; (1) he launched a gas attack on civilians with no discernible motive; (2) he sabotaged his efforts to win the civil war; and (3) with malice and forethought he murdered his own soldiers.
On the other hand, for the gas attack to be initiated by any one of the dozens of rebel groups makes eminent sense.
Then there's the cost of Trump's reaction.
A Tomahawk missile is tagged at $2 million. Multiply that by 60 and add in the ancillary costs for programming the weapons, practice firing, and fuel for the two destroyers to correctly position themselves, and it sums to something like $140 million.
It may seem crass to bring this down to dollars and cents, but to a nation that's awash in a debt of $20 trillion such an expenditure with questionable results seems ill advised especially for a businessman president.
After the attack, there was talk about replacing Assad accompanied with inflammatory commentary about what a ruthless fiend he is. Then it occurred to the lords of war: Who are we going to replace Assad with? A question that was never asked before the Iraq War (2003-2010) or Libyan War (2011).
Toppling Iraq's President Saddam Hussein cost $4 trillion, estimated to climb to $6 trillion over the next four decades, the lives of 4,500 U.S. servicemen, and 174,000 Iraqi, 70 percent of whom were civilians.
Ousting Libya's President Muammar el-Qaddafi cost $1 billion and an estimated 25,000 Libyan deaths. No U.S. fatalities were reported.
Picking a leader from the legion of anti-Assad groups might result in a replay of the Iraqi and Syrian debacles. The devil we know is better than the devil we don't know. With Assad, we have an ally against ISIS and a government that is protective of all religions, including Christianity. For a Mideastern de facto dictator, that's saying quite a bit.
Making the best case for Trump, we can speculate that he was given faulty or biased intelligence by his generals. But if you will pardon my cynicism, asking a general if we should send a fleet of Tomahawks raining down on Syria is like asking a barber if one needs a haircut
As for the worst case, Trump was shooting from the hip with more moral outrage than reflective thought. Leading with the heart rather than with the head is best left to romantics.
Even the president's strongest supporters, those who backed him during the Republican primary---Pat Buchanan, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, plus many other ardent followers such as this writer---ruefully admit that the airfield blitz was a boner.
It is, however, ironic that the biggest bomb was not the aggregate of 59 tons of TNT delivered courtesy of Tomahawk jets but rather Trump's explosively big blunder.
Sincerely,
Bob Scroggins
New Milford, PA