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Posted on 04/16/2018 10:23:08 AM PDT by WisconsinRep

The President’s Syrian Mistake
The war-hungry neocon crowd just keeps repeating the same discredited dirty trick


The moment Donald Trump became president-elect, the political and governmental establishments of the United States, in particular the intelligence agencies, commenced nonstop efforts to stall, co-opt and dilute the policies on which Trump ran, and was ultimately elected.

On trade, immigration, tax policy and regulatory reform President Trump has managed to accomplish more than many of his critics and even some of his supporters had thought possible. It is vital to note that some of the president’s policy advisors and even White House aides have tried to kill or dilute many of the policy changes and reforms Trump was enacting. Fortunately, they failed.

They tried to reverse the president’s position on climate change, they tried to dilute his tax cuts, they tried to kill the tariffs he enacted, they tried to undermine his travel ban and there are some who continue to insist that the southern border wall cannot be built.

But more than any of the other policy areas, it is in national defense and foreign affairs that President Trump faces the most ruthless and ubiquitous of would-be usurpers: the so-called neoconservatives. The neocons are dead-set on maintaining their vice grip on American foreign policy and continuing to impose on this country their messianic international designs and risky interventionist schemes that seek to use American military might as the tool of their dubious globalist objectives.

The track record of the neocons is as clear as it is dismal and disturbing. This aberrant sect that has burrowed itself within America’s defense, intelligence and diplomatic hierarchies has given us endless war, 100’s of thousands, if not millions, of human beings slaughtered, and trillions of dollars siphoned out of the pockets of America’s taxpayers, present AND future, only to be squandered on aimless overseas misadventures and prolonged military occupations of hostile 3rd-world countries.

Compounding the injuries and costs they have inflicted on the American people with their hubris-driven overseas military interventions, the neocons have systematically, and in many instances illegally, decimated many of the most fundamental safeguards against tyrannical government that comprise the essence of the Constitution of the United States. The rise of the neocons has been directly proportional to the erosion of civil liberties in the United States of America.

The militarists and spooks who serve this neocon agenda color, hype, fabricate and dress up the intelligence given to the president to induce him to abandon his non-interventionist ideals. They abuse their official capacity to promote a political agenda.

President Trump has great reverence for the institutions of our military, and particular affection for those who serve in America’s armed forces. Unfortunately, the president has not recognized the extent to which the Pentagon was, like every other arm of our federal government, cynically politicized under Barack Obama.

Obama’s apparatchiks methodically promoted and empowered personnel whose leanings are decidedly globalist, while retiring if not purging those suspected of having Republican leanings or a traditionalist conservative view of American military power, whereby our fighting forces exist for our national defense, not as an international police force.

The President gives his foreign policy advisors a presumption of honesty they do not deserve. The pardon of Scooter Libby, who was the immediate underling of perhaps the ultimate neocon warmonger Dick Cheney, merely highlights the president’s failure to recognize how the neocons will simply invent a false narrative and spoon feed it to their handmaidens in the pliant corporate media in furtherance of their war agenda.

The very notion that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad would launch a chemical attack defies logic, on the face of it. Assad’s Russian backers asserted to the world community that Assad has no chemical weapons. For Assad to randomly launch a chemical weapons attack, he would not only have to defy the international community but also embarrass his patrons, effectively making liars out of them on the global stage.

Assad currently has the upper hand against the Islamic fundamentalist rebels seeking his overthrow. After the president’s missile strike one year ago, in retaliation for Assad’s alleged (yet still unproven) use of chemical weapons, Assad clearly knows the dire consequences and international condemnation that would result from any use of chemical weapons. Not only would such an act amount to a war crime, but it would also reveal that Assad does, in fact, possess these heinous weapons.

Why would Assad ever do this? Why would he take such an unnecessary and provocative action, just days after President Trump announced his intention to withdraw American troops from the area, as soon as possible?

Use of chemical weapons by Assad would only serve those who wish to further enmesh the United States in Syria’s ongoing civil war –a development that Assad undeniably wishes to avoid, not provoke. In fact, such a move by Assad would play right into the hands of those who seek his downfall and want an escalation of American involvement, not those who support President Trump’s desire to limit the misuse of American military power as an illegitimate tool of ‘regime change’.

To be blunt, the sudden, inexplicable use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad would be highly convenient only to those who seek to execute the foreign policy not of Donald Trump, but of the miserable failure he defeated in the 2016 election, Barack Obama’s bellicose foreign policy underling, Hillary Clinton.

The last time Assad was accused of using chemical weapons, the bloodthirsty presidential loser Clinton called for the bombing of Syrian airfields, and is on record as rejecting her former master Barack Obama’s decision not to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria. Such a dangerous and provocative insinuation as Clinton was pushing would certainly antagonize the Russians and create the constant risk of direct military conflict with a heavily-armed nuclear power, if only by accident, that could quickly spin out of control.

Just as the warhawks around the President are selling him a bill of goods on Syria, they also seek to keep the U.S. mired in Afghanistan, perpetuating what is already the longest continuous military conflict in American history, at nearly 17 years and still going.

They are constantly pushing for more and more sanctions against Russia, to punish offenses they can’t even prove were committed by that nation, and are constantly instigating against the Chinese, just as the president seeks to deepen the dialog with each of these countries, towards a strategy of playing the two nations off against each other, while securing from each the most favorable trade deals possible for the United States.

As far as the new strikes in Syria are concerned, let’s not forget how these same underhanded elements incessantly pushing America towards aggressive militarism abroad used the same exact allegation, also totally-unfounded, that Assad had used chemical weapons as their way of stampeding the president into ordering the first airstrikes on Syria, almost exactly one year ago. Even General Mattis had to finally admit, many months after the airstrikes, that there was no proof that Assad had, in fact, used chemical weapons.

This war-hungry neocon crowd just keeps repeating the same discredited dirty trick. They are clearly intent on taking our country to war and undermining Donald Trump’s efforts to de-escalate America’s perpetual military presence in hostile foreign lands, and perhaps even facilitate peace, for a change.

I will continue to support the President but in a few weeks, or perhaps months, it will likely become clear that the alleged chemical weapons attack attributed to Assad was, in fact, a fraud…a ruse…and, ultimately, that these military strikes against Syria were a grave mistake.

Let us hope the neocons have no other dirty tricks up their sleeves, before the president can get a handle on the situation and ascertain the truth of the matter, before he — and our country — are pushed further down the road to yet another fruitless, destructive war…or worse.

Meet Roger Stone: The man who believed Eliot Spitzer's madam would make a great president.

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