I haven’t seen any polls yet, and it’s a bit early anyways, but I think we’ll see Trump’s approval rating improve. Some children died, and everyone’s protective instincts kick in – as they should. So when someone does something about it, there will be a surge of approval.
But it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do in a world with enough firepower to render it uninhabitable to the human species. Especially when the closest thing to superpower #2 considers Syria to be an ally.
The pretextual argument against this view is that a single airstrike isn’t “war,” and anyway, the War Powers Act gives the president the authority to do this kind of thing. The real argument is simper: presidents have done this stuff forever, and Congress has never worked up the gumption to stop them.
Actually, it’s worse than that: as near as I can tell, Congress actively doesn’t want to exercise its warmaking authority. It’s too politically risky. They’d rather have the president do it unilaterally, and then kibitz from the sideline. This is why I don’t really blame presidents from authorizing attacks like this. Congress could stop it anytime they want via the power of the purse, and they never have.
Kevin points me on to David French:
Assad has been engaged in one long war crime since the onset of the Syrian Civil War, and his gas attacks are hardly his deadliest. There has been a casus belli for war against Syria on a continuous basis since the onset of Assad’s genocide, but the existence of a legal and moral justification for war does not always render war wise or just. Nor does it remove the need for congressional approval. There is no reason to forego congressional debate now, just as there was no reason to forego congressional debate when Obama considered taking the nation to war against Syria in 2013.
Congressional approval is not only constitutional, it serves the public purpose of requiring a president to clearly outline the justifications for war and his goals for the conflict. It also helps secure public support for war, and in this instance it strikes me as reckless that we would not only go to war against a sovereign nation, we’d also court a possible military encounter with a great power like Russia without congressional approval. The nation needs to be ready for (and consider) all the grim possibilities and consequences. If Trump wants to go to war, he should take his case to Congress.
Very reasonable. Fareed Zakaria:
.
@FareedZakaria on Syria strikes: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” last night
If we’re going to take Trump’s words at face value, and assume that he was so affected by images out of Idlib this week that he changed his mind about U.S. policy towards Syria, fine. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder about the scope of Trump’s change of heart, and ask whether his new assessments may include a fresh perspective on refugees, too.
President Trump’s official rationale for initiating the first American airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria struck humanitarian notes, complete with reference to the “beautiful babies” who “were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.” Mark Landler of the New York Times reports that “Trump’s heart came first” in ordering the attack. On its face, that’s a striking turnaround from a campaign season track record that was not only generally supportive of Bashar al-Assad but much more broadly dismissive of humanitarian considerations in general.
This is the Trump who once mocked the very notion of international concern about poison gas attacks. “Saddam Hussein throws a little gas,” he said at a December 2015 rally, “everyone goes crazy, ‘oh he’s using gas!'” …
Still, the overall pattern is unmistakable and represents critical context with which to understand Trump’s turn against Assad. Embracing the Gulf states’ worldview would dramatically improve Washington’s relationship with some of its closest regional allies. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it risks drawing the United States deeper into a series of conflicts around the region.
Jeff Stein on Vox provides some coverage of Trump’s allies’ reactions, which are mostly negative, and sums it up:
But Republican Party officials are ecstatic with Trump’s intervention. Fox News, which is closely associated with the Republican Party establishment, has not openly turned against the intervention the way personalities like Cernovich and Watson have.
But other Trump supporters, including the alt-right — which has its roots in the deeply anti-interventionist paleoconservative movement — thought Trump was the kind of Republican who opposed military intervention. Not everyone thought this was a correct assumption.
So perhaps Trump is trading public far-far-right support for Congressional far-right support? It may be a fruitful trade in that it might actually delay various investigations. And the rest of the public? Some independents will like it because it’s vengeance for the children, the rest will wait with a sense of foreboding. Put me in the latter camp with a large dose of doubt and wondering which of his statements are lies – or if any at all are truthful.
I would have preferred the possibly apocryphal Israeli approach to these problems – a Mossad agent with a pistol.
