Cruising for distance

The problem with the the American political system is how partisan it has become over the last decade.  In the end of the Obama Administration, the Democrats could not pass any legislation because the Republicans would kill it on principle, even when the Democrats proposed Republican ideas, the Republicans refused to pass them.  That is how idiotic the Partisanship had gotten.  Now there is a Republican President and behaviours that they criticized until they were blue in the face are considered good things.  If Obama were to go for a golfing weekend once a month, he was said to be wasting taxpayer's money and he was bad for doing it.  Now they have a president that goes for golfing weekends every weekend and they don't blink and say it is not an issue.  

Anyone can read my blog and tell that I have a decidedly liberal point of view.  So you might assume that I am against trump and everything he does because I am partisan.  I am not.  I disagreed with a lot of what Obama did.  I thought it was a horrible thing that he won the Nobel Peace Prize just because he was not George Bush.  He devalued every other person who ever got a peace prize when he accepted it.  

When the Syrian Government used Gas on its citizens earlier this month, the American liberals were upset that he was not doing anything and then they were upset when he did something.  They, the liberals of America, lost all self respect when they did that.  They were showing themselves to be just as partisan as their political opposites.  I, on the other hand, was initially happy that he had done some action.  Later on, my feelings were tempered by other news reports.  That is, when I got more information I allowed the information to guide my thoughts—that is what you are supposed to do, if you are rational and not absorbed by your political views.

What was the additional news?  1) Military Advisors told the President that the Tomahawk Cruise Missile was not the right weapon for the job.  Cruise missiles are precision weapons meant to fly under radar and carry a low explosive yield, they are slow and damage the area, but do not destroy large targets.  The missiles damaged a few Russian built jets, which effectively destroyed them, but it did not destroy all of the jets and all of the structures on the airfield and it did not destroy the tarmac.   If they had Carpet bombed the airstrip they would have completely destroyed the airport.  There would have been no structures left and the jets would have been shredded.  In the last days of the First Iraq War, the United States carpet Bombed the fleeing Iraq Soldiers as they retreated from Kuwait.  They killed about 100k in that one operation.  They did not carpet bomb the airport.  

2) It was interesting that it was mentioned that since this President is the first President who has not given up control of his wealth and put it into a blind trust, that we know that he had a lot of stock in the manufacturers of the Tomahawk Missile and the stock jumped after he used those missiles, he used 94 of them and they cost a million dollars each.  So in addition to being weak, they were expensive.  It has been pointed out that any sufficiently diverse portfolio will have many different companies in it, but if it were a blind trust, the president would not know if his portfolio did or did not contain those stocks, so it would not matter, but since he did know what stocks he owned, was it a factor in his choice of ordinance?

3) The military operation took place in the middle of a scandal where it was suggested that his campaign and administrations had strong links to Russia.  The military operation, it has been suggested to be proof that he is not being controlled by Russia.  Russia is the Syrian Governments largest ally.  So the military strike looks to be the actions of a government that it is not being controlled by Russia, except, that it was a very weak attack and that it cause no lasting damage; the airfield was in full operating strength and launching attacks within 24 hours.  

Then there was the attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan, just yesterday. They used a bomb called a MOAB, the biggest non nuclear bomb, ten tonnes of explosive power.  The bomb was used in a region of caves and tunnels and reportedly killed 36 Taliban soldiers.  The bomb was said to have a blast radius measured in kilometers.  The government said that there were no civilian casualties.  Reports out of the region, where there are said to be many villages and it is in one of the principle wheat growing regions of the country, say that all the windows were blown out in all the houses near the explosion, that locals thought it was a major earthquake.  My cynical mind says that as reports come out of the region it will be told that the death toll of the bomb will rise, that they will all be Taliban soldiers, men women and children.  

I am not saying that a MOAB was the right choice of weapon for the airfield in Syria.  I am saying that there is a range ordinance that could be used, that have been used, to kill people and destroy the war making abilities of terrorists and the ones that the American President used to destroy the airfield where chemical weapons were deployed from, was a minimal effort.  One that enriched his bank balance and distanced his government away from Russia wile causing the least amount of damage possible.