Whatever happened to the War on Terror? In Syria, we seem to take the terrorists' side | Mulshine

(Above: I was at the inauguration listening to Donald Trump pledge an "America-first" foreign policy that would end the regime-change efforts by his predecessors that caused chaos in the Mideast.  But with that strike in Syria he's taking the side of Islamic rebels against the government.)

It looks like the War on Terror is over.

Terror won.

That's the only possible conclusion after reading the accounts from reporters who got into that city in Syria where that alleged poison-gas attack took place.

You know, the one that led President Trump to mount a counterattack on Twitter that had more impact than the actual missiles he fired.

At the time Trump took action, no Western journalists had visited the town of Douma to investigate the story behind the video that sparked the attack. But when British war correspondent Robert Fisk visited the town, he could find little evidence to support the reports of a poison-gas attack.

Fisk, who has been covering the Mideast for four decades, wrote of interviewing a Dr. Rahaibani, who runs the clinic where the disputed video was made.

The doctor told him there was a lot of conventional shelling on the night in question, and "huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a 'White Helmet', shouted 'Gas!", and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia - not gas poisoning."

(Below: The Syria debacle was entirely predictable back in 2012; I know because I predicted it.)

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who has questioned the legality of our presence in Syria, also said he is skeptical about what happened in Douma. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, the Kentucky Republican said Syrian President Bashar Assad would have to have been "the dumbest dictator on the planet" to order such a strike while Trump was proposing to the pull the U.S out of Syria.

"I haven't seen evidence he did do it," said Paul.

The counter-narrative we're hearing is that the people interviewed by Fisk lied because they did not want to incur the wrath of the Syrian government, which took control of the town a few days after the alleged gas attack.

Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson also told me he is skeptical of the video.

Which side is telling the truth?

We don't know for certain.   So why didn't Trump wait for the results of that international study before committing to that entirely symbolic  attack on some empty buildings?

I have no idea. But I do know that we've reached a point in the so-called "War on Terror" when the Washington crowd initiated a strike against a government that was fighting a group of rebels that most Americans would regard as terroristic.

State Sen. Mike Doherty of Warren County, a West Point grad who was the first prominent Republican in the state to support Trump, said The Donald seems to have forgotten his campaign promise to stop meddling in the Mideast.

"We're on the side of people who take women as hostages, put them in cages and parade them around in flatbed trucks," said Doherty said. "Where's the outrage about that?"

The London-based Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph have released videos of the cages in which women in burkhas were held captive by Jaish al-Islam rebels before they were chased from Douma by the army.

And the British news media also carried accounts of the rebel group imposing a level of oppression on the civilian population almost as bad as the Islamic State's practices.

Of course, we don't know for sure whether those accounts are genuine either. That's why Trump was right when he said during the campaign that we shouldn't be trying to sort out the Mideast, Doherty said.

"He got elected because he said he was going to end incursions into the Mideast," Doherty said. "Why did he surround himself with people who didn't support him, like Nikki Haley and John Bolton?"

Haley is Trump's U.N. ambassador and Bolton is his national security adviser. (Both are ardent interventionists who've pushed policies directly opposed to those Trump endorsed during the campaign.)

The pair pushes the view that the U.S. role in Syria is not merely to rid the country of ISIS, as Trump promised, but to pursue grander geopolitical goals regarding Russia and Iran.

But if there's one thing we've learned since 9/11, it's that the Beltway leadership of both parties is entirely incompetent when it comes to achieving geopolitical goals.

Back in 2001, the Mideast was relatively calm and those Al Qaeda attacks were seen as an aberration.   Thanks to the Beltway's brilliance, we have since seen the rise of the Islamic State, a group that made Al Qaeda seem almost reasonable by comparison.

(Ron Paul asks, "Do we really want to be al-Qaeda and ISIS's airforce? Is that going to keep us safer? I remember when al-Qaeda was actually considered our enemy, not an ally in overthrowing the last secular government in the Middle East.)

Far from the original goal of eradicating terrorism, this has been the geopolitical equivalent of a botched surgery that spreads cancer cells around the body instead of eradicating them.

Let's quit while we're ahead.

Or behind.

ADD - CLUELESS 'CONSERVATIVES' ON  THE SYRIA STRIKE: Every time I write on the topic of Syria I get responses from clueless wannabe "conservatives" who still haven't figured out that the U.S. is taking the side of the terrorists in this war to overthrow the secular government of Syria started by the Obama/Clinton regime.

So is Trump, of course. This missile strike puts him on the side of Jaesh al-Islam against the government that is trying to drive this terror group from Syria.

Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson pointed out to me that it's highly likely that some of the Islamic radicals occupying Douma were almost certainly trained by the CIA as part of Barack Obama and  Hillary Clinton's effort to field a force of  "moderate rebels" to fight against the Syrian government.

Trump had it right in the campaign when he promised to stop trying to oust secular dictators like Assad, for the obvious reason that those dictators need dictatorial powers to keep Islamic radicals in check.

We saw what happened when Saddam Hussein was ousted in Iraq. Almost immediately the U.S. was fighting radical Sunni rebels in the provinces while fighting radical Shia rebels in Baghdad.

You would have to be downright stupid to think that deposing Assad would result in anything different.

Unfortunately virtually everyone inside the Beltway is downright stupid.

There's a simple cure for that. Instead of mounting that Twitter-inspired missile strike, Trump should have stuck to his campaign promise and gotten us out of Syria. Failing that, he should have followed the constitution and asked for a declaration of war in Syria.

Then maybe we'd get a real examination of what happened in Douma. At the moment there is not sufficient evidence to draw a conclusion, as Rand Paul pointed out in an interview with Wolf Blitzer. It's possible the civilians were poisoned by one of the rebels' own poison-gas arsenals.

Then there is this video from another media crew that went to Douma.

It's possible of course that this reporter and Fisk were told lies by the local residents. But sorting that out is not America's job.

Any conservative who believes in the Constitution would have to conclude, as Paul does, that the U.S. has no business in Syria without a declaration of war:

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