When Children Play With Cruise Missiles

                Americans love blowing things up.  When Donald Trump launched a few dozen cruise missiles into Syria, some otherwise sane commentators said he immediately became ‘presidential.’  How?  By all accounts, he decided on this course of action after seeing cable news footage of the barbaric chemical attack on children authorized by Syria and, by extension, Russia.  It wasn’t a part of a deliberate plan to seriously intervene in the humanitarian crisis there, a crisis his refugee ban makes worse everywhere in the world.  It represented a retreat from remarks he and his Secretary of State made days earlier.  In fact, the Trump administration, far from playing cowboy hero in this drama, enabled the attack on those civilians by signing off on any serious political intervention.  Trump wasn’t making a serious point; he was throwing a tantrum.

                The last thing Syria needs is more explosions.  Obama has been castigated for not blowing things up in Syria, but he may have done something that Americans have a hard time understanding.  He may have realized that there is no simple answer to the problem and until there is a consensus both globally and in this country about what should be done, the best action is to wait.  During the campaign, Gary Johnson didn’t even know where Allepo was, let alone what to do about it.  Congress denied Obama’s attempt to request for action, not that his policies for the region were all that great.  What do we think we want to do in Syria?  What outcome do we seek, and what process are we willing to follow to achieve it?  We’ve made such a mess of the region, it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it.

                Some people are happy that Trump acted against Putin.  Russia is playing a losing hand in Syria.  They are propping up a Shia dictatorship while millions of Sunnis live on their borders.  Putin is facing increasing dissent inside Russia and the likelihood of growing unrest and terrorism from the Muslim population they are repressing.  Let Putin play that hand.  Let him dig his own grave with his policy in Syria.  Of course, it will be brutal and ugly and difficult to watch, but without an international and domestic agenda that is willing to invest in the decades it will take return the prospect of a safe and productive life to the Syrian people, there is little else to do.

                The ONE thing that Trump could have done to alleviate the suffering in the region is to massively increase the role we play in settling refugees.  He has done the opposite.  He made Syrian refugees, most of them women and children and all of them products of a two- year vetting process, a pawn in his populist rants during the campaign.  He made them part of his ‘Muslim ban’ to protect us from some imaginary danger these refugees posed.  Nothing on that front has changed.  His administration is part of the Eurocentric backlash against people of the region who are part of a diaspora we created  in our quest for oil.  If he was concerned with the humanitarian crisis, the munitions of the United States Armed Forces was a curious choice to address it.

                Trump likely made things worse.  He hasn’t stopped the conventional slaughter by Syrian and Russian ground forces.  He may even have made it worse.  Like everything else he does, the fallout will be someone else’s fault.  Maybe instead of seeing his actions as ‘presidential,’ we should see them for what they really were.  The world’s most dangerous child playing with the world’s most dangerous weapons.  I hope you enjoyed the fireworks.