Cowboy up and lob a few missiles?

© 2017 Peter Free

 

07 April 2017

 

 

Having chastised former President Obama's dithering — with regard to Syrian government-sponsored gassing(s)

 

President Trump undoubtedly felt that he had to act when President Assad's military forces allegedly did it again.

 

The American commander in chief retaliated promptly with about 59 ship-launched missiles. These were, we are told, righteously aimed at Evil Assad's Homs air base.

 

Take that evil-doers!

 

 

On the positive hand

 

We can credit President Trump with being decisive, pragmatic and somewhat unpredictable.

 

 

Strategically, however

 

There appear to be no workably intelligent long-term plans involved in this retaliation.

 

The Russians are still there — presenting a nuclear-armed obstacle to doing everything the American Way. And everyone else with an interest in pursuing America-sassing goals is also.

 

This means that the Allegedly Dithering Obama's plate of reasonably taken second thoughts, even in Trump's impulsive hands, is still full of legitimate doubt.

 

 

In the long run

 

Blowing things up American Style has not worked in any major strategic instance since the end of World War II.

 

In retrospect, American policy seems to consist of killing people, just to be killing them. How this brand of blood-spilling thoughtlessness differs from Assad and Putin's violent connivings beats me.

 

Tit-for-tat-ism (for the most part) does not go anywhere morally or geopolitically admirable. At least not in strategy's Sun Tzu world.

 

 

At best

 

With his missile strike, President Trump just strengthened the presumption that he is an impulsively unthinking person of (arguably reckless) action.

 

From my elderly perspective, these last 70 years, we Americans have acted too much and thought too little.

 

I am not persuaded that President Trump's break with Obama on the Syrian issue is a wisely taken one.

 

Some situations are just so complicatedly bad that it is wiser to sit them out than to hazard a problem-worsening intervention.

 

 

Where is the benefit?

 

Wanting to feel better about a hopelessly evil situation does not warrant making it — or its potentially spreading manifestations — unpredictably worse.

 

Dithering about impossible situations is not always bad.

 

 

The moral? — Flurries of erratically aimed punches usually do not stabilize resentful peoples

 

President Trump's Syrian strike may make Americans and some Syrian rebels feel better.

 

But by itself, and even followed by more of the same, Peace and Babies are unlikely to benefit.

 

The American launched missile strike will enhance America's reputation in some eyes. But it is just as likely to undermine it in numerically more (violently active) others.