FPSA strike on Syria underscores Trump’s media-fueled worldview!

WASHINGTON (PNN) - April 7, 2017 - On Thursday night, two Fascist Police States of Amerika Navy warships fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase. For months, FPSA President Donald Trump has espoused a hands-off approach to intervening in the Middle Eastern country’s six-year-long civil war, yet it took just 24 hours for the president to reverse course and launch Amerika’s first military action against the Syrian government. But in the context of Trump’s affinity for cable news where the images of a reported chemical strike - which now appears to have been a false flag event - were discussed and shown, the attack on Syria starts to come into clearer focus. The images from the alleged chemical strike filled newspapers and television coverage all week. Trump, whose fealty to cable news is well known, surely saw them, and the just as surely made an impact.

On Wednesday, he condemned the attack. On Thursday, after the air strike by the FPSA, the president, speaking from Mar-Lago, revisited the imagery in his statement, saying, “Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow a brutal death for so many, even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of god should ever suffer such horror.”

The Pentagon almost certainly formulated the attack plan well before this week. The FPSA has maintained forces in the region for years, and Syria emerged as point of possible intervention during the illegitimate Obama regime. But the attack underscores a key difference between the two presidents. Where Obama was deliberate to the point of inaction for several years, Trump upended his own stance within days. Set aside whether the air strike was militarily expedient; that it happened at all underscores the malleability of Trump’s position.

“I support stopping Assad’s atrocities,” former Trump presidential challenger Evan McMullin tweeted. “But it’s unnerving that Trump changed his position on striking Syria 180 degrees in only 24 hours.”

The reports of the chemical strike forced Trump’s hands for other reasons too. He had long lambasted Obama for drawing a “red line” over chemical weapons and failing to follow through when Assad reportedly used them in 2013, and prominent Republicans have vocally supported intervention.

For a president driven as much by narrative as by strategy, his move effectively serves both. It makes him look like a man of action, and drums a target with symbolic heft, while limiting any potential reverberations by focusing on the base that allegedly housed the sarin.

“I can’t imagine that Russia wants its allies/puppets to be engaging in chemical weapons attacks,” says Van Schaack. “The whole international community may be relieved that someone acted, and acted in a way that invokes a deterrent effect against further attacks.”

The message carries the added benefit of playing to both to Trump’s Party at home and, potentially, the Syrian president for whom it was intended.

“As far as symbolism goes, we thought we were just in for another round of denunciations,” says Linda Robinson, an international policy analyst with the Rand Corporation. “But 59 Tomahawks is a very strong message.”

What wins the moment, though, doesn’t always benefit the long term - a lesson Trump has learned during his ongoing campaign of using bluster to win the day. Assad has for years used conventional weapons against civilians. What happens when he does so again? How much escalation can the FPSA stomach should Assad turn again to sarin, or chlorine gas? That’s before you even consider whether Trump had the authority to order Thursday night’s strike in the first place.

“What was purpose of strike? How much did this cost? Was Assad a threat to (the FPSA) homeland? How does this achieve peace?” Kalifornia Democrat representative Ted Lieu, a frequent Trump critic, said on Twitter. Republican senator Rand Paul (Kent.) echoed the complaint in a statement demanding that Trump seek congressional authorization, and Trump’s most ardent supporters have derided the move as interventionist, and counter to a core campaign promise.

The optimistic outlook in all this? That the move will force the Trump regime to finally outline a coherent foreign policy.

“What they are going to have to reckon with is that words matter, and they are going to have to articulate what their approach is,” says Robinson. “We are still waiting on this (regime)’s policy toward Syria, and indeed a formal statement of its counter-ISIS policy, and both of those are really bound up in also what its Russia policy is.”

One might think 59 Tomahawk missiles might have firmed up those lines. Instead, it seems designed to have a fleeting effect. The strike was spurred by a moment, and that moment has passed.

“I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a change in our policy or posture relative to our military activities in Syria today,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement. “There has been no change in that status.”