U.S. Air strikes in Syria

Evil must not be allowed to triumph out of fear, they are not attacking combatants but defenseless civilians including women and children - there's strength in #s and all the other pussy countries in western europe (with the exception of England) should unite with the US in taking action.

We should bomb the hole damn Muslim World. To hell with them brown looking sons of bitches.

Praise Gawd

We knew it was only a matter of time, Trump wanted to make a point. Let's see what happens next !

We attacked an airbase with 50 cruise missels (Tomahock) @ about a million dollars each . Kind of a symbolic gesture but each one has a 1000 lb. bomb in it. Quite a mess I'm sure. So 50 million bucks - I guess my $.16 worth made a point.

Part of the problem is if Syria's leader is taken down then good chance Muslim extremists may take over and that would be worse.

Nuke Assad!
Nuke Assad!
Nuke Assad!

Trump took action. Hopefully Syria cuts out all use of chemical weapons now so we can all go back to making our economy great again.

As @Papi said, if you weaken Assad you end up strengthening ISIS. But I'm sure Trump had a very detailed long-term policy roadmap in place. Not like he just responds to what he sees on TV...

More like 1.4M, @Gawker

More like 1.4M, @Gawker

More like 1.4M, @Gawker

It's good to have a president again! Obama was a weak weak man! Countries will listen when Trump talks..
With Obama Russia, China, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and many countries did whatever for 8 years..no one feared Obama

Fucking phone

I don't know. 50 cruise missiles isn't that loud a message. Assad may thinks it's just the price he has to pay.

Now if they had sent a tactical nuke over...

Send them SJG as punishment

"Part of the problem is if Syria's leader is taken down then good chance Muslim extremists may take over and that would be worse."

And that's why I wish we would just stay out of it.
Assad is brutal dictator but he's occupying and fighting isis and as long as he's around they will be weakened and he hasn't posed a threat to us. Get rid of him and we have another unstable situation that turns into a bigger breeding ground for terrorists than it is now.

I see the point of a limited strike to tell him to not use chemical weapons but history says if he is deposed something worse will take his place.

Random: "Send them SJG as punishment"

That might be a war crime. Not that they would ever put an American on trial for one, but...

I strongly support sending the creep over there! :D

SGJ probably get held ransom by ISIS until they found out no was going to pay jack.

Maybe he'd recruit them into his fabled organization. More goats than they could imagine! Front pen make out session feeding them grass with real GoatFriendExperience then retire to the back pen when their pants are ready to come down then take them back to the tent to spend the night. They would be drained!

Papi: The guy has gassed civilians on a number of occasions, so how do "extremists" differ? Why does anyone see a difference between Isis and hezbollah, assad etc.? Having said that we should decide, asa nation, if we are isolationists, or the policeman of the world. In or out. Cannot be both. Wake me up when we decide.

Great. Every club in the US flooded with Asperger-afflicted idiot jihadis trying to make out with strippers in the front room.

Stamp collecting never looked so good.

I'm conflicted. In the one hand, I agree that intervention potentially invites attacks, is very costly, and creates the hazard of unintended consequences. Conversely, if America wants to be the moral authority and global leader, then we must intervene.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing. With great power comes great responsibility. Those who have the ability to act, also have the responsibility to act. Do these quotes and platitudes apply to the modern era and real world?
The American Century happened because America intervened in World War I. The Second World War happened because the allies did not help Germany rebuild. Cold War aside, the relative peace happened after WWII because the allied powers helped the axis powers rebuild. However, recent history shows that Muslims are not as open to representative government as the Japanese and Europeans were.
Bottom line: The use of chemical weapons against a civilian population is an atrocity. It is a criminal act, even in wartime, and all involved should be charged with a crime against humanity. The use of cruise missiles was not merely symbolic, it did destroy the airbase and degrade Assad's ability to attack again. However, if we are to have learned anything from the mideast conflict dating back to the Soviet invasion if Afghanistan, it's in for a penny, in for a pound.

You now know that this takes the whole Trump agenda and removes it from front and center , the wall , health care reform, the Russia investigation, it's no longer the focus. Let's see how this goes down and more important, what this ends up as Are we going to be at war in the Middle East for another round ? I understand the feel good aspect of attacking Assad but what is going to happen as a result of this action, that is much more worrisome.

"GoatFriendExperience" is brilliant!

There are no easy answers to Syria. Limited strikes will probably have little impact. But a large intervention would cost the lives of thousands of American troops and use up billions of dollars. And when we leave, Syria would become another Iraq.

In my opinion there is only one was to defeat them (all in that area of the world) and that is to marginalize them. True energy independence for the rest of the world and I do not mean just drilling for oil. Develop cheap efficient solar & wind and an inexpensive way to store the electricity. Currently no matter how inexpensive they are they are unreliable so storage is a must do. Develop fusion and thorium reactors for electricity. If properly designed they are many times safer than current fission plants, have little fissionable material that could be used for nefarious purposes and produce little toxic residue.
Once the world is no longer dependent on the middle east for oil their money and therefore their power base is gone. No money, no weapons, no more worrying about offending the tin pot wacko dictators in the area. You simply tell them: behave or we will not send you food!
We tolerate their behavior because they have something we (the west) needs, once we do not need it anymore we can simply tell them to behave or else. I realize that this is oversimplified but until they no longer have a knife at Europe and Japan's throat we can never truly get tough. Have you noticed that "oil producing" countries are mostly ruled by crooked dictators. Venezuela, Nigeria, Libia, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia for example. Without oil revenues they could not support terrorists and could barely feed their subjects.
Only Russia has enough military to worry about and no oil mean Israel's economy would be the strongest in the middle east. No oil = no money = no power.

+1 "GoatFriendExperience". Yep SJG probably gets lots of those.

Trump took a page out of Putin's playbook: When you are wildly unpopular, blow the crap out of someone and people will love you, especially the less informed and educated.

That being said, I'm not opposed to retaliation for poison gas attacks against civilians. Pity the gas attacks were ordered by Putin through his puppet Assad, but we can't exactly bomb Moscow so we attack Syria.

My, god, love the way suckstar(37) contradicts himself in two paragraphs. Trump's just doing this because he is unpopular! No wait, retaliatory bombing for poison gas attack are justified! Can't make up your mind, huh, suckstar?

Donald Trump tweet from September 2013:

"AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!"
7:20 AM - 5 Sep 2013

...maybe, instead of bombing, we should allow Syrian children to find refuge here?

...and maybe the geezer should have asked Congress first instead of acting on emotion.

Only pussies ask permission to bomb people.

ROFL

How can 50 cruise missiles hit a target this large and cause only 7 causalities? Were they warned off the base?

To avoid a confrontation the Ruskies were warned, you have to figure that they in turn warned the Syrians. Anyway this wasn't about killing people it was about weakening Assad and sending a message.

I wonder if Trump is gonna get Syria to pay for the missiles

I see the Russians in retaliation cut the hotline I call bullshit all the way around. I am starting to think Trump is just looking to change the conversation. This by itself changes or fixes nothing, but it stops the talking heads from talking about the Russian connection and distracts from the healthcare fiasco and the rest of his crap.

@25 wrote: " I am starting to think Trump is just looking to change the conversation"

It's possible that Trump's trying to "change the subject," but it seems more likely that he lives in the moment and reacts to whatever he sees on TV.

If you're trying to understand motives, why would Assad use chemical weapons when he could just continue slaughtering people with conventional weapons, and not draw attention? What's Assad's motivation to provoke Trump and the US?

"... why would Assad use chemical weapons when he could just continue slaughtering people with conventional weapons ..."

IDK - maybe b/c he doesn't give a fuck about those people - and using chem weapons is more effective and more demoralizing?

"... What's Assad's motivation to provoke Trump and the US ..."

IDK - maybe b/c he did it b/f and pretty-much got away w/ basically a slap on the "war-criminal wrist"? Maybe b/c of Trump's previous anti-involvement comments he thus calculated Trump would do even less than Obama? Maybe b/c Vladimir told him "don't worry Donny's my boy; he good people and won't get in yo biz"

"I wonder if Trump is gonna get Syria to pay for the missiles"

Quote of the month from Papi!!!! LOL

When asked if Syria "stepped over a line" in regards to Obama's quote and subsequent failure to punish Syria, WITH Trump's hearty endorsement I might add, Trump said they stepped over MANY red lines. A few days later the attack.

While it scares me that Trump actually does anything besides tweet, in this case I think it was good for him to make our enemies think before their next war crime. Just like Putin does.

"Trump took a page out of slickwilly's playbook: When you are wildly unpopular, blow the crap out of someone and people will love you, especially the less informed and educated."

There you go i fixed it for you. You continue to flash your hypocrsicy and hate anything not done by a liberal. Everything you're complaining about here are things you would support if the Clinton's or nobama were behind it. Remember wag the dog?

OSU....THIS is what 4 years of college taught you? Or did you not graduate.

Okay, seriously: point out my hypocracy. I don't like when you address "liberals" as I don't identify with any particular cult.

@OSU: you spelled "hypocsicy" wrong. It's hypocrisy; next time think of "hissy" as in "hissy fit."

This isn't so much liberal v. conservative, anyway. Very likely Hillary would of taken military action, too. The real issue is that Trump seems to have change his mind within a period of two days in the most impetuous way, without consulting Congress or the United Nations or without having any rational long-term plan in place. Pretty scary having such a novice making military decisions.

Hillary went on record within the past 24 hours as saying she would have done more against Syria and as we know if she was in charge and hit Syria you would have supported it.

An earlier version of your hypocrisy is when I brought up your false compassion for your comment that you wished your wife was killed in the World Trade Center attack and you responded saying you weren't compassionate.
A month or two later you posted about yourself being a compassionate person and I brought up your previous comment saying you weren't compassionate regarding your wife. Your genius response was oh you were surprised that I remembered that.
The above are 2 points in time when you lived up to your false bullshit. There are others that have been brought to your attention by myself and others but of course a brilliant educated guy like you either chooses not to remember them or maybe it's because you're one of those less informed and educated people you spoke of above in this thread and you can't remember shit.
And now you say you don't identify as a liberal. Funny!
I saw that past u-tube vid Mikey posted of you playing guitar, calling it atrocious hacking would be kind, it's on par with your comedic attempt at a comeback. Hopefully you have a real job to fall back on because being a bad guitar playing bad comic hypocrite liberal can't pay much.

Random you never had a spelling mistake? No of course not you're too busy manufacturing such gems as Hillary voted for Goldwater.

I'm done playing with you 2 fools for now, I have some real work to do!

"... The real issue is that Trump seems to have change his mind within a period of two days in the most impetuous way, without consulting Congress or the United Nations ..."

Gassing babies should change anyone's mind.

w.r.t. Congress - they are good for nothing except campaigning and keeping the status-quo to make sure they get reelected every term cycle - and the UN; you're better of consulting the boy-scouts; UN is corrupt and filled w/ bureaucrats that are unable to disentangle themselves from the mountain of red-tape.

Ah, so as I've seen in the past in TUSCL, the conservatives struggle to answer a direct question. Next.

This issue is neither conservative or liberal, my question for those who support this is simple, if this is a one of, how does it change anything in Syria ? And to the other more skeptical folks like myself how will this affect us, here in the United States ? Mr. Trump needs to address us and explain what he is doing in our name, until he does that he will not get my support, only my skepticism.

I recognized right away that this was Trump's chance to look Presidential. I knew he would do something. But this was more and faster than what I had expected.

Nikki Halley had been the first prominent Republican non-candidate to bash Trump during the campaign. But she comes across good as UN Ambassador. She has credibility because of how deftly she'd handled the Confederate flag issue.

By contrast, Jeff Sessions is always an embarrassment.

That Syrian airbase, those are not just hangers, those are concrete aircraft sized bunkers.

democracynow.org

SJG

2017 Ventana LE, Diesel front engine, 34 min size.
newmarcorp.com

But, it still has popouts on both sides. These increase cost and weight, and unless you pop them out, they constitute a movement encumbrance. Not good for use outside of motorhome parks.

Disrupt Sex Trafficking
abolitionistmom.org

These have gone up all over bus stops. Especially used is the picture with the boy looking at the computer screen, "Now Recruiting Next Gen Sex Buyers".

This campaign puts out a distorted view of pornography. Trying to impose a hearts and flowers view of sex.

And as far as actual sex trafficking, by far the place a child is most likely to be sexually abused is the family home, and the most likely abuser is a biological parent.

Yep, looks like suckstar37 is another guy who ties himself up in contradictions pretty easily.

^^^I think the problem is they watch too much news, and don't apply the logic test to what they hear the talking heads say, it seems to be a contradiction, but its mostly in their mind, don't think their comprehension skills are up to par, as a result they spin from opinion to opinion like a spinning top.

^^^In other words what that other idiot accused me of, cognitive dissonance, is really what is going on here.

My money says this was a false flag, meant to convince Trump to back some Machiavellian power play while the Chinese leader was visiting. The only problem is: 1) he took Susan Rice and her self inflicted gunshot wound out of the news cycle; 2) he's now being publicly cheered by the lowest lifeforms on this planet (Schumer, Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, CNN... I swear I'm gonna vomit), 3) he's totally alienated his base; 4) with Bannon's totally coincidental nothing to see here move along dismissal from the NSC, it looks like the Neo-Cons and RINO's are displacing the Tea Party conservatives and nationalists who got him into office; 5) he's now partially validated above mentioned lower lifeforms and their fake Russian threat narrative... I hope he proves me wrong and he comes out on top after this transparent power play, but that pos Priebus needs to go now. Gahhhhh

@25 wrote: "This issue is neither conservative or liberal, my question for those who support this is simple, if this is a one of, how does it change anything in Syria ? "

Planes are taking off from the same runway. Bombing by Assad has resumed. Assad gets to show the world that he stood up to a superpower.

It was not an example of leadership. Nothing has changed in Syria.

Tonight we commemorate when a deity used its omnipotence to target a civilian population to settle a political dispute. I'm glad the Middle East has moved beyond that in modern times...oh...wait...

I think it might be best if Syria was just given to Russia. Let them deal with all the non-sense in that part of the world, and take ISIS off the map.

I'm trying to figure out what that post meant, rockstar?
Are you pro-slavery? Because passover celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery?
Are you anti-semitic? Lamenting that the Jewish religion exists even to celebrate passover?
Are you atheist? Why can't you live without faith, without mocking those who have faith?
Or is it something else?

@Rockstar so you support the Jews being slaves in Egypt that is an asinine response even from an atheist or any other.

I was only commenting on the irony that targeting a civilian population in a political struggle is evil, whether it's Assad or God Himself.

I make ironic Christian jokes too.

I'm not going to debate His nature.

Speaking if mankind waging war, I was taught that historians agree the "total war" concept began with the Napoleonic wars. Regardless of how that concept was executed from 1810-2007; all civilized nations have agreed that chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction. The focus should be on the use of WMDs against an area populated with civilians. That changes everything. I think the response from the US did not go far enough. The airfield from which those strikes were launched should have been obliterated. Trump is not playing a game of "wag the dog". Assad used WMDs against women and children. Trump is doing what he said he would do, which Obama never did.

That is sort of lame to read that after 50+ cruise missiles the US didn't succeed in disabling the airfield's ability to launch further strikes.

I join the conservatives in saying using some or our overpriced toys from time to time isn't a bad idea when warranted and poison gas against civilians is low lying fruit. I do worry on Trump's ability to now decide the right path to go next.

I don't know if the situation is as perilously precarious as it feels, but I would worry about anyone's ability to choose wisely. With Russia allied with Iran and red China with NPRK on the other side of the continent, it's more worrisome than I can put into words.

@Rockstar Maybe you can clarify irony for me but how is slavery a "political dispute" sorry but there some issues that demand a response, not commenting on Trump , but your equivalence is ridiculous.

Fighting legal slavery is a political dispute, at least until supernatural powers step in. Then it's a whole 'nother thing!

Slavery was legal in the US not all that long ago, and those who opposed it were criminals. BTW, Exodus never happened; there were no Jewish slaves in Egypt at that time.

^^^ I see so you are saying there is no such thing as moral clarity or a higher calling and human laws are beyond reproach. That's a bit simplistic wouldn't you say puts your thinking on a level with gammanut's that's my take on your answers.

So now Internet Tough Guy Donald Trump is saying Assad is on the way out and Russia needs to align with him rather than Assad. How's he gonna do that? Who's gonna put in (Putin?) in his place?

Slavery in the USA ended several generations ago, it is a non-issue. Even then, opposition to slavery was not criminal. Freedom of thought was not regulated in America, as it is now.

Although, whether in Ancient Egypt, Civil War America, or modern ISIS-held territory, slavery is not a legal or political dispute, it is a moral dispute. I would also argue that God has always intervened, through Moses in the Book of Exodus, through the generals and soldiers of the Civil War ( I think Lee may have taken a dive during the Battle of Gettysburg), WWII, and even through the slow recapture of ISIS territory today.

I don't honestly think you back slavery, Rockstar, but I do think you need to quit trying to defend your indefensible comment.

Also while we are on it, why aren't former lovers Trump and Putin not getting along now? All show or a real tiff?

Boy, has this thread gone off the rails!

The comment wasn't about slavery; it was about Syria using the Biblical deity's tactics by targeting an innocent civilian population in an otherwise POLITICAL dispute. I fail to see how any intelligent person would think the morality of slavery was the subject. Oh well, it's just TUSCL anyway..

That's okay, Rockstar. I've been told that even if you don't believe in God, He believes in you.

I actually have two deities, but neither is the one in the Bible.