Quote:
Originally Posted by horses4courses
Interesting that it was stressed from the outset
that this was a joint operation involving our allies
from the UK and France, wasn't it?
Are we actually supposed to believe that the US has no
regard for the image it portrays to the rest of the world?
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This is all image... anyone who doesn't get that doesn't understand geo-politics.
Syria is nothing more than a proxy war. Nothing more, nothing less. It's also a proxy war that we are losing. We know we are losing it. We don't care. Losing is fine since Syria holds nearly zero strategic significance to us.
Syria does hold significance to Iran and Russia though which is why we are happy to coordinate with rebels and maintain a presence there. It hampers and undermines the efforts of our rivals forcing them to invest significantly more resources than they would like to.
As far as the lead up to the strike though Trump behaved highly irrationally. The tweets were completely unnecessary as the United States had already set the precedent that use of chemical weapons would trigger an armed American response. All the tweets did was put Russia on blast that it can't defend its interests or allies. Any strike conducted would have demonstrated that without damaging their image as much as a twitter bash. It was a stupid move because now it will require them to respond in some larger way to maintain its own prestige and credibility.
Finally to the strike. This was essentially a NATO effort to send a message to Russia and it's proxies. Militarily nothing of any real significance was destroyed or likely even degraded. It was merely a show of force that the United States and it's NATO allies can strike at will into the heart of a state of the art Russian Air Defense system and there really isn't a damn thing they can do about it. To that effect it served it's purpose.
We got to swing our big stick.
Good write up on the issue here...
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/f...-stakes-syria/
