Hypothetically speaking, of course, not pointing any fingers, he who hires a prostitute?
Personally, I don’t think Clinton45’s administration would be (or COULD be) this much of an embarrassment so it wouldn’t NEED a wag.
You think Hussein is a Muslim name? :rolleyes
Let me introduce you to Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Hussein . Or Sadqa Hussein, who was a dayan, and mohel. and so forth.
Disclaimer: I’m talking out my ass from a perception of some nebulous concept of “honor” on the part of the US…
I don’t believe we, as a general rule, set out to target people in the course of international disputes (in the destruction of terrorist organizations, on the other hand…). The actual target here would have been the infrastructure that supposedly has been enabling Assad to carry out bombing of his citizens- in this case, the airfield from which these bombing campaigns were being launched. Provided the airfield has met with nearly total destruction, this strike was successful, with minimal loss of life.
Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s mommy sure didn’t give the name “HUSSEIN” to her little boy for any JEWISH reason.
This is a warning for trolling. Knock off this bullshit.
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Imagine voting for a US president during WWII who had a middle name of ADOLPH and was a German apologist .
sorry, I’ll drop it but THEY asked why and I replied.
Perhaps you didn’t see the previous warning - so I’ll give this a pass. Let me be clear, Navy draftee - you specifically, Drop this line of discussion about Obama, middle names, ethnicity of middle names, or any other related bullshit.
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It pretty much is a Muslim name though despite finding a couple of odd ones out.
As others have said, this was an asset strike, not intended to kill any personnel. I’d be surprised if no Syrian personnel at all were killed, and it looks like a few died; but we took precautions precisely because we weren’t looking to kill a bunch of people.
This is a very simple thing, we wanted to inflict costs on Assad for his behavior. I’ve been a major Trump critic from the beginning, but the reality is this is basically U.S. foreign policy 101. Obama was a departure from this way of thinking (and actually mostly in a bad way, we regressed significantly under Obama in terms of our global standing), while Trump is a pretty stupid guy I think he followed competent advice from McMaster and Mattis, who basically picked a very normal play out of the playbook.
In the 1980s when one of our ships was sunk by an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf, Reagan decided to retaliate by executing a strike on Iranian assets. Our forces issued warnings leading up to the strike and told all personnel in the area to evacuate, and then later did the strike. The concept was similar, countries don’t like having expensive shit blown up. Even just a few MiGs is big money for a relatively small country like Syria, and the supply depots, hangars and etc ‘aren’t nothing’ either.
We’re basically trying to stake out a line in the sand where we say “if you cross over this line of acceptable behavior, we’re willing to make you suffer these costs.” The hope is that Assad will be deterred from using chemical weapons. I think it was a reasonable gambit. Keep in mind that Assad hasn’t really needed chemical weapons that much, I question why he uses them at all.
If Trump uses this as a pretext for serious involvement (on the ground) in Syria, or as a reason to seriously pursue regime change, that would be a big problem. But if he’s just planning to do things like this to deter egregiously bad actions, that is basically SOP. Obama was the deviation here, not Trump. I mean even Hillary has advocated this–and more, she actually still advocates a “no fly” zone and destroying Assad’s air force, which is way more aggressive than what Trump has done here.
Nah, ~60 tomahawks isn’t that, for one the payload on a tomahawk is relatively small. When we invaded Iraq in 2003 we launched like 500 on day one, then followed up with major airstrikes. That’s what a shock and awe attack would look like. Aircraft carry much larger bombs, if we had say, launched cruise missiles to disable Syria’s Anti-Aircraft weaponry then bombed the air field with heavy bombs from planes it would’ve actually destroyed the runway and other such things–these larger explosive can literally leave craters in the runway.
Yep, to be honest the West Wing explored this really way and in an accessible way for laymen. In Season 1, the President’s personal physician (who is a naval officer) is on a plane to the Middle East to do some charitable medical work abroad. I believe the plane was a private plane that also had some Israeli officials on it and etc; for reasons not delved into on the show, Syria shot the plane down killing everyone on board. When Bartlett meets with the Joint Chiefs, they come up with a plane to blow up Syrian intelligence centers, some communications depots, and some airfields. Jed is furious because he had a personal relationship with the dead doctor, and basically says these plans are bullshit and he wants something with meat. So it isn’t like he’s just “docking their allowance.”
A few hours later they come back with a plan to blow up Syria’s main civilian air port, which would cause a massive humanitarian crisis and inflict huge chaos and costs on the Syrian state. In going over the extreme plan, Bartlet then realizes that going so far just isn’t possible. One of the key moments is when Bartlet asks “what is the virtue of a proportionate response?” particularly if the Syrians had already factored in it might happen. The CJCS just responds that “it isn’t virtuous, it’s all we have.”
It’s such a good scene as it relates to this because it’s basically true, on some level Syria probably suspected there could be some level of response like this, because this is about “in line” with how the U.S. would traditionally respond to such a thing. I have to wonder if at least part of Syria’s motivation was to test Trump to see if things were going to be like they were under Obama, or if Trump would respond differently. Russia and Syria have to act butthurt over it, but I think both entities largely viewed this as a bit of gamesmanship in which they wanted to see how Trump would respond, now they know.
I will give Trump credit when credit is do–he did good not to follow some of the more extreme plans I’ve heard other members of his administration were advocating. Like taking out the entire Syrian Air Force and implementing a No-Fly zone, those are such egregious acts of war that we’d be very entangled in the conflict at that point, with significantly greater chance of trouble with Russia. It’s also likely such a move would prolong the civil war. The reality is Assad is winning the war, for better or worse. He’s a monster, but so are most of his enemies. At least when he wins the shooting will stop. I wouldn’t want Trump to do anything that I think would prolong the war, but I’m fine with Trump reasserting our traditional position that we view international agreements (to which Syria is signatory) and norms about chemical weapons use as serious, and we will regard them differently from conventional attacks.
The Pentagon and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights are pretty reliable. Don’t even read Syrian Government or Russian reports on the strike, these are the same people who claim the chemical weapons attack was a leak from the insurgent’s chemical weapon factory that the regime destroyed, despite overwhelming and clear evidence to the contrary.
Martin Hyde, damage assessment since WW2 and since has been typically over optimistic as to damage inflicted on the enemy. The question is not their truthfulness, they might honestly believe what they are saying, the question is their accuracy, it’s very easy to look at a target being hit and see smoke and flames and think “yeah that’s destroyed” when in reality that is only superficial, and I am talking generally not specifics example of last night.
This guy’s Twitter account seems to have the best imagery of the damage I’ve found yet.
Unfortunately(or fortunately) I can’t access Twitter at work. Brief description, please?
I see this a lot, but I’m not clear on what is its basis. I tend to think that it reflects the person’s own dislike of Obama, and them projecting that other people also think poorly of Obama, and therefore their opinion is justified.
Double irony if the same person has also implied somewhere along the way; “we’re American, we don’t have to care what the rest of the world thinks.”
Got any evidence that world opinion of the U.S. fell under Obama? That it did so “significantly” ?
There are some pictures showing where the strikes hit (and kind of showing how precise they were, which throws into question in my mind some of the claims of where others went). Here is one of the posts on damage:
Not Martin, but ‘opinion’ does not equal ‘standing’. I think the US ‘opinion’ by the average European (or Canadian or most other western nations) was MUCH higher under Obama than Bush or Trump today. But standing? Yeah, I think I agree that the US’s standing among our allies slipped a bit under Obama. And, ETA, I voted for Obama and really liked him as our President…and would have voted for him for a 3rd term if he would have been able to run.
Russia did nothing. Doing nothing. Plausible conclusion: Putin has decided that a deal to exploit Russia Northern oil reserves is worth more than a naval base in Syria. A little cooperation at the right moment, those pesky sanctions are removed, and Putin makes a ton of money.
There is an image of a couple of burned-up aircraft (look like SU-22 to me, but the damage is pretty severe, and I’m far from an expert) inside of “hardened aircraft shelters” with what appears to be holes punched in the roof (mangled rebar hanging down).
Another image of a hardened aircraft shelter with smoke and fire coming out of it, and a third image of what looks like fuel tanks that were destroyed.
Another couple of pictures with burned-up aircraft inside of shelters, and then some satellite photos showing quite a few smudge-looking burn marks, presumably where TLAMs impacted. The Tweeter gives this summary:
Are you implying they couldn’t have gotten more?
I’m theorizing that this is all a ploy to show Chairman Xi that Trump would do the same thing to North Korea if China doesn’t reel them in.