With the media, "believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see" is prudent. After having been dragged along by the nose in the case of Iraq's (non-existent) WMDs, the world should know better than to eat any old narrative presented, including this one about chemical weapons attacks.<p>What remains surprising to me is that this is still considered an extreme and/or paranoid attitude by many otherwise educated people. Is it really so difficult to believe that entities like Associated Press or the Washington Post, privately held entities, serve specific interests? Or that the power elite, a small group that holds 95%+ of the world's wealth, would put those resources to use in shaping public opinion to their ends?<p>Yet even suggesting the possibility, that you can't necessarily believe what you read in the biggest newspaper (or, shocker, the press bureaus), will yield uncomfortable looks shot back and forth, like you might be strapped with a suicide bomb. I suppose it is a modern day taboo that we can't trust the central institutions in our society.
Independent report by MIT researchers conclusively refuted US claims that the 2013 sarin attacks were conducted by the Syrian Government after analysis of the rocket trajectories: <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin" rel="nofollow">https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin</a><p>I would caution against believing any media reports until a similar analysis is done for the current incident. Assad has no reason for jeopardizing his current favorable position.
And so we jump into a 20-sided civil war that Russia also has a strong vested interest in (that airbase was being used by Russia to stage some of its operations -- interestingly enough, no Russian stuff was destroyed)<p>US military intervention in the Middle East. What could go wrong?
It's really disgusting when domestic politics spills out into the outside, resulting in wars and misery. I wish this vestige of imperialist times, the practice of "short victorious war" would finally die off.
So there are a lot of sinister theories floating around these comments... might I be so bold as to propose that this is simply what it looks like?<p>People have attributed Machiavellian goals to Trump's childishness before, and it turned out he was just being childish. I have zero problem believing he saw the pictures of gassed children and directly instructed Mattis to smack Assad.<p>Honestly I see this as Trump being the broken clock right twice a day. Putin has long used his status as a nuclear power to muscle his way around (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, etc) as he knows that other nations will think twice about shooting at his forces, so long as his actions remain reasonably limited and he expands his influence slowly. It's about time someone called him on that.<p>As for whether the Syrian government actually launched the strike, keep in mind that the US, for all its flaws, has the best equipped and most expansive intelligence apparatus in the world. Whatever Trump thinks, I assure you THEY do not want another Iraq-like mistake and almost certainly crossed every t and dotted every i on this.
Why can't U.S. have a leader like Trudeau?<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jslaternyc/status/850164875368296450</a>
From the transcript of his speech about the attack, it sounds like the intelligence community has pretty solid evidence and proof that the aircraft taking part in the bombing left from the particular airfield that was targeted by the cruise missile strike.<p>I shall hope that this will signal a renewal in the current administration's efforts to rely on actual government intel services for strategic knowledge, as opposed to listening to talking heads on particular mainstream news and taking them at their word...
I am generally anti-war, anti-Trump, anti-Republican... so you can imagine my surprise at the sense of relief this act has given me. Assad has been stomping on innocents in his little part of the world without substantive rebuke for far too long. What's the point of the US's ideals if we don't stand up to the bullies of the world? I know intervention leads to horrors, but refusal to act to stop war crimes is almost as morally reprehensible as committing them yourself. Anyone else thinking along the same lines right now?