It’s the Testosterone, Stupid 0

In The Sacramento Bee, Marcos Breton tries to make sense of Donald Trump’s positions on Syria and of the press’s reaction to his raining robotic death from the Syrian sky. A snippet:

If Trump was so moved by innocent kids being slaughtered in a six-year civil war, why not fast-track the process for Syrian refugee children to be admitted into the U.S? He has said nothing of the kind and is largely being given a pass.

Instead of criticizing Trump for attacking Syria on humanitarian grounds after seeking to block Syrian refugees, CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria praised Trump’s Syria bombing as “the moment he became the President of the United States.” MSNBC anchor Brian Williams marveled at the “beauty” of the bombs dropped on Syria as the cameras rolled. This soft media coverage evoked the lack skepticism at the start of an Iraq War in 2002 that ultimately was waged on the false pretense of Iraq harboring “weapons of mass destruction.” We can’t make that mistake again. We can’t pretend that Trump is suddenly strong for dropping 59 bombs on Syria after he and others painted Obama as weak, despite the fact that Obama dropped 12,192 bombs on Syria in 2016, according to the McClatchy Washington Bureau.

I fear that any attempt to make sense of what Donald Trump does will fail. There is no ore in that mine.

In a related piece, Steven M. tries to understand why the U. S. press seems to like war so much (at least when it’s not their children in harm’s way), despite the history of America’s failure to achieve its goals in almost every aggressive military endeavor* since World War II (in which, remember, the United States and its allies were the attacked, not the attackers).

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*Just for a few examples, Korea (a stalemate at best), the Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam and Southeast Asia, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. I’m going to a concert this afternoon, so I don’t have time to link them all up, but you can do the research easily enough.

The significant positive outcomes for the U. S. and the West during the last six decades–notably the fall of the Berlin Wall and the raising of the Iron Curtain–were achieved thankfully short of war.