Trump’s Aggressions in Syria Will Have Long-Term Consequences

By Scott Lazarowitz

As I have noted in response to the latest U.S. government aggressions in the Middle East, Donald Trump’s short-sighted military actions in Syria are not based on rational thought but on emotionalism, his feeling terrible about the children and other innocent victims of the chemical attack in Syria this week. But this is purely selective emotionalism, given that he doesn’t seem so concerned about all the innocent victims of his own drone bombings that he has been authorizing since he was sworn in as President.

Trump is also not concerned for the probable long-term results of his warmongering now. History indicates that the situation will only get worse from here, as we have seen with Iraq.

And there are other examples of Trump’s selective emotionalism and concern for Syrians. For example, where is Trump’s concern for the innocent victims of the head-choppers and thousand-lashers in Saudi Arabia? Should he bomb the Royal Saudi King’s palace? What about the starving victims of Venezuela’s Maduro? Should Trump bomb Caracas? (But since when is U.S. foreign policy ever consistent?)

As with his terrible economic advisors who have been advising Trump to support ObamaCare Lite and trillion-dollar infrastructure squandering, Trump’s national security and “defense” advisors are just as bad, and worse. Matthew McCaffrey at the Mises Institute explains how Trump’s “economic worldview could only ever have led to militarism and conflict.” So the new warmongering should be of no surprise.

Although while he has suggested some hints of non-interventionist thought during the campaign, now we can see the kind of influence that his entourage of military generals can have on his “thinking.”

According to Reuters, a “U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity,” said that “[Syria’s Bashar] Assad has repeatedly shown that he is willing to use whatever chemical weapons he has retained or reconstituted to attack and terrorize his own people,” even though those who have made that assertion have not presented any evidence of it.

In a statement rationalizing his military strikes on Syria, Trump said, “Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the life of innocent men, women and children,” as a matter of proven fact. Yet, there has been no evidence provided by anyone. And the government groupies of the mainstream media do not seem to be asking why Assad would intentionally gas his own people? What did he have to gain from that? What proof has there been that Assad is the true culprit?

Although, there have been claims of evidence made mainly by the Islamist anti-Assad rebels as pointed out by Justin Raimondo, who lists some of the hoaxes committed by those “rebels.” So really, there is no reliable evidence against Assad on this recent chemical weapons attack.

And what about the Trump drones terrorizing innocents in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere? According to the U.K. Guardian, the Tuaiman family in Yemen is typical of people in those areas who now experience the terror of Trump’s escalation of drones from once a week to every day, especially given Trump’s campaign threat to kill “terrorists” (in a total absence of due process), as well as their families. Trump’s bombs in Syria and Iraq have already resulted in a huge increase in numbers of civilians murdered.

And speaking of chemical warfare, I guess Trump has not learned from, or perhaps doesn’t even know about all the terrible things that the U.S. military did to the people of Iraq over these past 15 years, actually 26 years now, since 1991. As Eric Margolis referred to, the U.S. military used white phosphorus in its invasions and bombings in Iraq, especially Fallujah.

The people of Iraq have suffered not only from the U.S. military’s use of chemical weapons but from depleted uranium and other contaminants which have polluted the Iraqis’ water supply since the first U.S. government war on Iraq in 1991. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos wrote for The American Conservative of “babies born with two heads, one eye in the middle of the face, missing limbs, too many limbs, brain damage, cardiac defects, abnormally large heads, eyeless, missing genitalia, riddled with tumors,” and a doubled rate of childhood leukemia.

The bombing during the 1991 first war on Iraq also negatively affected U.S. soldiers, many of whom complain of health problems now as well.

In the current bombing of Syria that Donald Trump has initiated, the U.S. military claims that their Tomahawk missiles, profitably produced by Raytheon, have pinpoint precision, so that they will not harm civilians.

That precision bombing technology is what we witnessed from the proud warmongers of the U.S. government’s first war on Iraq in 1991:

But, James Bovard noted in this article how during that first 1991 war the U.S. military went on to intentionally bomb Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers. Those illicit actions were followed by the U.S. government’s sanctions to prevent the Iraqis from rebuilding that infrastructure. That was for the stated purpose of disabling the society as a whole as well as subverting “civilian morale,” as the Air Force Col. John Warden put it, who was quoted in that Bovard article.

The destruction of Iraqi water treatment centers and the sanctions during the 1990s led to high rates of cholera, typhoid and infant mortality, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands by the mid-1990s, from the U.S. government’s first war on Iraq that then-President George H.W. Bush claimed would not be “another Vietnam.”

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.

Image Credit: TheAntiMedia.org