Syria – Adding Fuel to the Fire Beckons War
Cari Casas
It hasn’t been a 100 days into Trumps presidency and the question fostered in to every American’s minds lately is, are we prepared to go to war?
In the last few days, the Syrian government used chemical weapons on the Syrian citizens which the white house reported took 70 lives, many of them children. It was the gruesome and horrific photos from the attack that influenced Trump to take action against the Syrian government by launching 59 missiles to the regimes airbase. It was the same air base that was used to launch the poisonous gas attack on its own people.
In 2013 the Syrian government enacted the very same chemical attack on the citizens and Trump publicly criticized former President Obama for opting in soft power to deter the regime in stopping retaliations against the Syrians citizens fight for freedom. Although, the strike put people’s minds at ease it was done at what cost. The Pew Research Center found a “wide margin of 58% to 36%” of the American people approved of the President’s decision to deploy the attack but a “margin of 61% to 32%” of the American people assured Trump has no clear plan dealing with Syria. Major news outlets like MSNBC anchor Brian Williams called the attack a “beauty of weapons”. With these facts, it’s important to note we have a President who feeds off of public praise and he just got a whole lot of it. Amid after the attack, the air base we launched an attack felt little to no damage after reports showed the Syrian regime was able to still continue carrying out airstrikes from the base. Secretary Tillerson visited Moscow to have a two hour meeting with Vladimir Putin himself, the President of Russia to call on Bashar al-Assad to step down as President of Syria. In backlash of Tillerson’s request a Russian diplomat used his platform to list failures of the United States efforts to depose dictators, and called the rhetoric of US Senators opinions on Syria “hysterical”.
Currently, American’s should be afraid we heavily rely on President Trump to make the right decisions for our nation but fails to answer the basic questions of whether the missile strike was a warning shot and against what, if it’s against chemical weapons or a regime change, and how this will affect our already fragile relationship with Russia. This no longer becomes a political issue when families are afraid their children could be drafted to fight in the next world war. Reality is Trump abused his powers by acting on his emotions with no legal justification, suppressed the approval of Congress who can only approve declaration of war and tarnished any chances of peaceful diplomacy. A meer tweet from the President stating “things will work out fine with the US and Russia” should not be deemed acceptable during these high times.
