Tom Luongo<\/p>\n
Last night\u2019s attack on Damascus was chilling.\u00a0 No question.\u00a0 It dredged up the worst possible scenarios from our subconscious and for a few hours made them real.\u00a0 Now that the dust has settled, and we see what\u2019s occurred (and what hasn\u2019t) it\u2019s time to draw some conclusions.<\/p>\n
First thing\u2019s first.\u00a0 I reiterate what I said earlier in the week.\u00a0\u00a0Trump is finished.\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0Read my article carefully, then overlay two things I didn\u2019t talk about.\u00a0 One, Trump is impulsive and easily manipulated.\u00a0 Two, Trump is ultimately a coward and an appeaser, just like The Saker pegged him to be after bombing Al-Shairat last year.<\/p>\n All bullies are cowards.\u00a0 That\u2019s why they bully.<\/p>\n Because of these personal defects, he gave his resignation speech last night. \u00a0Be it later this year when he\u2019s impeached\/forced to resign for a war crime or in January 2021 after losing to a baked potato, the anti-interventionist crowd who elected him will remember this for a long time.<\/p>\n I want to remind you of what happened last year with Al-Shairat.\u00a0 Trump bombed it while having dinner with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping.\u00a0 A light show of sound and fury which ultimately did very little damage.\u00a0 But, it did not signify nothing.<\/p>\n It signified that Trump is out of his depth in foreign policy.<\/p>\n A few months later Seymour Hersh, one of the few journalists left in the U.S.,\u00a0published his expose of what actually happened<\/a>\u00a0which led to the decision to bomb Syria.\u00a0 It was at this point I realized Trump wasn\u2019t fit to conduct foreign policy.\u00a0 Trump wanted to go to war fully and was talked out of it by his military advisers, namely Gen. James Mattis.<\/p>\n Mattis gave Trump the option he took.\u00a0 A big light show which the Russians allowed to occur so Trump could get some relief from his detractors and satisfy himself that he did something in response to what he perceived to be a morally reprehensible act.<\/p>\n No 4-d chess. No back door coordination with the Russians.\u00a0 Just a man with a deep sense of morality that needed to feel powerful.<\/p>\n Now fast forward to last night.\u00a0 Same story.\u00a0 Different circumstances since now Trump is even more isolated, more paranoid, more betrayed at every level by his political opposition. Do you think he hired John Bolton because he\u2019s become more nuanced in his foreign policy approach?<\/p>\n If you do, then you aren\u2019t just an idiot.\u00a0 You are an heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots.<\/p>\n Sometimes when we do this type of analysis we forget about the men we are actually dealing with versus who we are personally.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to overlay our own abilities onto a public figure and think that if we can see this, he has to be able to.<\/p>\n But, that\u2019s the wrong approach.\u00a0 Trump is what he is.\u00a0 And re-reading Hersh\u2019s account from last year reminded me of what we\u2019re dealing with here.<\/p>\n They were dealing with a man they considered to be not unkind and not stupid, but his limitations when it came to national security decisions were severe. \u201cEveryone close to him knows his proclivity for acting precipitously when he does not know the facts,\u201d the adviser said. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t read anything and has no real historical knowledge. He wants verbal briefings and photographs.<\/strong>\u00a0He\u2019s a risk-taker. He can accept the consequences of a bad decision in the business world; he will just lose money. But in our world, lives will be lost and there will be long-term damage to our national security if he guesses wrong. He was told we did not have evidence of Syrian involvement and yet Trump says: \u2018Do it.\u201d\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n His refusal to act against his domestic enemies who are obviously guilty put him in the position he\u2019s in now, having to trust the word of the worst people in U.S. policy-making, the John Bolton wing of the establishment.<\/p>\n To survive last year, Trump made a deal with them.\u00a0 The military would be in charge of foreign policy.\u00a0 Trump would get to play president working on domestic issues.\u00a0 But, during that time things got even worse.<\/p>\n Yes, he got some major domestic wins.\u00a0 He outlasted his opposition long enough to reveal the depths of their depravity and mendacity.\u00a0 But, all that time the center of the foreign policy establishment in Washington closed in on him.\u00a0 And the siren\u2019s call of moralistic intervention to stop Iran and\/or Russia was consistently impressed on him.<\/p>\n So, here we are again.\u00a0 Trump\u2019s enemies know how to get him triggered to do\u00a0something stupid and against his good instincts.\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0Then compound this by telling him the Russians are the problem.\u00a0 They are lying. \u00a0They\u2019ve betrayed him too.<\/p>\n He has a near obsession with being the anti-Obama.\u00a0 It defines so many of his actions.<\/p>\n It\u2019s why he\u2019s willing to tweet out a complete reversal of what he advocated for in 2013, for Obama not to bomb Syria.\u00a0 He was right then.\u00a0 But, as president, he\u2019s defined Obama as his shadow, everything he\u2019s not.\u00a0 And with good reason, Obama is likely behind much of the opposition he\u2019s dealing with every day.<\/p>\n These things build up over time.\u00a0 They paralyze a man as self-absorbed as Trump.\u00a0 He\u2019s no angel, but he was the best option we had in 2016.\u00a0 Our options were Hillary Clinton or him.\u00a0 We chose Trump.<\/p>\n But, make no mistake, we still elected DONALD TRUMP.<\/p>\n And that leads me to where we are now.<\/p>\n Yesterday I wrote that I thought Mattis and Trump were trying to run out the Neoconservatives clock on bombing Syria.\u00a0 I was half-right.\u00a0 Trump had already gone fully over to the neocons approach and Mattis talked him out of it.<\/p>\n Bolton pushed for a broader attack hard and Mattis put the kibosh on it because he\u2019s the adult in the room.<\/p>\n If not, the Neocons would finally have the war they\u2019ve been salivating for these past forty plus years.\u00a0 But, things have changed.<\/p>\n Russian anti-missile systems are too strong for us to deal with.\u00a0 It would take the kind of saturation bombing reserved only for Defcon 1 scenarios to attack Syria with the intention of \u2018winning.\u2019<\/p>\n The Syrians claim to have shot down 70% of the incoming missiles using old Russian anti-missile batteries, S-200\u2019s, Buks, etc.\u00a0 Even if they are exaggerating and only shot down half of the missiles. \u00a0It only makes the next steps clearer.\u00a0 Russia will sell Assad S-300\u2019s now.<\/p>\n Looking at the results of the attack last night I fully believe it was another \u2018Goldilocks Option\u2019 from Mattis like last year.\u00a0 While we may not have informed the Russians the attack was coming, France may have.\u00a0 Moreover, France may have backed out of actually firing missiles at all.<\/p>\n If this was a serious attack on Damascus, which I don\u2019t believe,\u00a0then Syrians wouldn\u2019t be dancing in the streets\u00a0<\/a>for having survived the U.S.\u2019s impotent chest-thumping.<\/p>\n They would be mourning their dead.<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t hit any Iranian, Russian or Hezbollah installations.\u00a0 The Israelis will be incensed.\u00a0 In fact, this was a no-winner outcome.\u00a0 Everyone was weakened by this to some degree in the short term, except the target of the attack itself, Bashar al-Assad.<\/p>\n Assad will now move on to the next victory in the campaign to re-form Syria.\u00a0 While Mattis just gave the rebels carte blanche to stage another chemical weapons attack in Dara\u2019a, which is the next likely area to be cleansed of \u2018rebels.\u2019<\/p>\n But, that\u2019s where Mattis is smarter than Trump. \u00a0He knows that even if one of Assad\u2019s commanders went off the reservation and used chlorine gas here, something I give a 5 to 10% probability of, it\u2019s not worth World War III over.\u00a0 He knows that horrible things happen in war.\u00a0 And that leaders and civilian populations cannot be held accountable for the deficits of one man or small cadre of men.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no real option for us to go deeper into Syria, despite what the Israeli lobby and the Neocons in the U.S. want.\u00a0 This attack didn\u2019t help them.\u00a0 By doing this Mattis continues to let Trump blow off steam, make his points and hasten the day that we can actually get out of the Middle East.<\/p>\nMattis of Grave Import<\/h2>\n
The Big Show<\/h2>\n
Only Winning Matters<\/h2>\n
Trumped Himself<\/h2>\n