Trump Bombs Syria While Still Fighting to Keep Out Thousands of Refugees
Early Saturday, the U.S., along with Britain and France, carried out three airstrikes in Syria. Donald Trump ordered the strikes in response to accusations of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's forces using chemical weapons, although this sort of escalation has seemed inevitable ever since the president named warmonger John Bolton as his new national security advisor. Currently, there's a lot of conflicting information about the results: While the Pentagon says that it's unaware of any civilian casualties, Syrian state TV is reporting that at least three civilians have been wounded. According to CNN, director of the Joint Staff, Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, reports that "none of the aircraft or missiles involved in this operation were successfully engaged by Syrian air defenses," while Russian military claims that as many as 71 of the 105 missiles were shot down.
Regardless of what really happened, Trump is celebrating. He thanked France and Britain via tweet, and then declared "Mission Accomplished." Of course, if Trump didn't stop forming short-term memories after the late 80s, he'd realize that "mission accomplished" is a loaded phrase that doesn't really inspire confidence, since the last triumphant, all-caps time a president used it was at the start of a decades-long, still-no-end-in-sight war in two different countries.
War fetishists in Congress are already drooling for more and egging Trump to step things up. But what comes next isn't clear, partly because Trump's cabinet doesn't seem to have an actual strategy yet and partly because Congress seems split over whether the airstrike was technically legal. In many ways it feels like a repeat of the strikes Trump ordered in April 2017 after seeing pictures of "beautiful babies" killed in another suspected chemical attack.
We've been over this before, but if Trump really cares about people fleeing brutality in Syria, or if he's at least invested in appearing to care, there's a incredibly simple thing he can do: allow Syrian refugees into the U.S. While his attempt to outright ban them from the country has stalled, the U.S. has only allowed in 11 refugees from Syria in 2018. Since October of 2017, only 44 Syrian refugees resettled here. By contrast, in Barack Obama's last year in office, more than 15,000 refugees were resettled, which is still a paltry number compared to the 6 million people displaced since the civil war there began and far below what other developed countries have committed to.
Even before Trump took office, the U.S. had admitted a disgracefully low number of Syrian refugees, and since then he's preferred to attack and demonize them for cheap political points, pretending that they're a security threat and a social drain by sidelining any evidence to the contrary. But, to be fair, it's unrealistic to hold Trump and his administration to basic moral standards here, when they consistently fail to live up to them on every other issue, too.
