gracchusdixit

In the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to launch a missile attack on an inconsequential and ill-defended airbase in Syria after that country’s use of toxic chemicals against its own citizens, the chorus of praise from nearly all quarters was instantaneous and deafening.  Members of Congrss from both sides of the aisle pushed and shoved to jump on board.  In the Senate, those steadfast cold warriors, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, heretofore consistently critical of Trump, applauded his “decisiveness.”  Our principal European allies—the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—rushed to express their support.  And wonder of wonders, both Sunni Muslim regimes throughout the Middle East and the government of Israel, which customarily loathe one another even on the best of days, joined the chorus.  Most exuberant of all were the journalistic pundits on television and in print, who pronounced that, by dint of authorizing the launch of several dozen Tomahawk missiles, unmanned but loaded with 1,000-pound warheads, Trump had finally become “presidential” or even—to quote one particularly feverish commentator—“heroic.”

All of this rhetorical huffing and puffing skirts the rather uncomfortable fact that Trump’s unilateral decision to attack a sovereign nation is simply illegal.  Bashar al-Assad is undoubtedly a moral monster, but he poses no threat to the United States of America.  As a consequence, there is no credible legal argument for what Trump decided to do.

The slavish praise for this decision also begs—indeed, it obscures—several questions that are far more consequential than Trump’s “presidential” persona.  Why was this attack authorized?  What was it intended to accomplish?  What did it actually accomplish?  And what happens next?  Despite all the applause, the answers to these questions remain entirely unclear.

Donald Trump would like us to believe that he was so horrified by the images of  innocent women and children writhing in pain that he changed his long-standing opposition to any involvement in the Syrian civil war and felt compelled to act.  This is both implausible and hypocritical.  For years, Trump has been turning a blind eye to the countless horrors of that war as well as the desperate state of its victims.  He repeatedly lectured Barack Obama—via Twitter, of course—against getting involved.  Indeed, just days before missile attack, Trump’s Secretary of State absurdly proclaimed that it was up to the Syrian people to decide the fate of Bashar al-Assad.

Even if we take Trump at his word, even if we accept that, out of the blue, he suddenly changed his mind and decided to help the victims of Syria’s civil war, this attack was no way to go about it.  On the contrary, even as he spoke emotionally about the horrors done to “God’s children,” his administration was proposing to slash our already paltry spending on foreign and humanitarian aid and trying to shut down the admission of Syrian refugees.

Some, particularly “hawkish” Republican politicians like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Marco Rubio, would like us to believe that this attack had some substantial purpose—either to “punish” Bashar al-Assad or to damage the military capabilities of his regime.  If that is the case, then this raid was an expensive fiasco.  No chemical weapons were destroyed, nor was the Syrian air force disabled or even deterred.  Within 24 hours of the attack, Syrian planes were taking off from the very air base American missiles had supposedly obliterated.  There is, moreover, no sign whatever that Assad has been chastened.  On the contrary, he remains as defiant as ever.

Still others, particularly the professional chatterers on television, would like us to think that this attack was designed to “send a symbolic message” of American resolve and military might, not only to Assad, but to the Russians, the North Koreans, the Chinese, and God knows who else.

There are two problems with this facile notion.

The first is that the missile attack Trump authorized accomplished exactly nothing.  If it delivered any sort of “message,” it was that American military might is badly managed or feckless.

The second is that, long before this attack, American military power had lost all credibility in the Middle East.  The invasion of Iraq remains an unmitigated disaster.  The war in Afghanistan is now almost 20 years old and shows no signs of resolving itself anytime soon.  The rise of ISIS is largely the result of our own bungling, and even if we succeed in suppressing its so-called “caliphate,” the snake of Islamic resistance will continue to writhe, wriggle, and bite.

In short, none of the justifications for this attack holds up under even the slightest scrutiny, and those who have rushed to praise it have done the country, and the truth, a disservice.

Underlying all this, Trump’s decision has all the earmarks of a “wag the dog” deception, designed to divert attention from the abysmal record of his presidency thus far and the still unanswered questions about his involvement with the Russians.  Some cynics have even suggested that Trump and Putin colluded to create this diversion.  I am not inclined to go that far, but with Trump, one can never be sure.

That said, and far more consequentially, the drumbeat of support for this attack demonstrates the extent to which our nation and our national identity have become militarized.  In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, Dwight David Eisenhower, a Republican and the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, warned against what he described as the “military-industrial complex,” a nexus of financial interests that included the Pentagon, major industrial corporations, and political lobbyists.  Today, his warning seems more prescient than ever.  But it does not fully encompass the danger we now face.  “Ike” warned us against a “complex” that was primarily financial and economic.  The “complex” that threatens us now is more fundamental.  It is both psychological and cultural.  It speaks to the way we imagine ourselves and our role in the world.

Americans have come to accept the proposition that every major geopolitical problem can, and should, be solved with a military response, that war and force and aggression are the only instruments that can overcome seemingly intractable obstacles.  We have become the victims of the trap famously expressed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow:  “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  The problem, of course, is that we have decided to spend all our money on hammers, while very few of the world’s problems are nails.  Syria is no exception.