On Monday, President Donald Trump condemned the chemical weapons attack that took place in Syria on Saturday, killing dozens of people, and added that he would be deciding which course of action to take as early as Monday evening.
“We’ll be making that decision very quickly probably by the end of the day. But we cannot allow atrocities like that,” Trump said. When asked if U.S. military action was a possibility, he said, “Nothing is off the table,” Reuters reports.
Trump called the use of chemical weapons a “heinous attack” during a Cabinet meeting and added that he’d be speaking with military leaders to decide who was responsible. Trump also called out Russia as a possible culprit, noting that it still needed to be determined whether Russia, Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, Iran or all of them together were responsible. Trump added that he would be speaking with generals over the next 24 hours.
Both the Syrian government and Russia have denied involvement in the nerve agent attack in Douma, a besieged town in eastern Ghouta, near Damascus. Russia has even gone so far as to blame Iran for the attack.
If the attack was carried out by the Syrian government, then this would prove that Russia has fallen short of its promised commitment to rid Syria of chemical weapons.
“The first thing we have to look at is why are chemical weapons still being used at all when Russia was the framework guarantor of removing all the chemical weapons,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told reporters, Reuters reports.
Trump has already claimed that whoever was involved in the attack, which left some 60 dead and thousands injured, there would be a “big price to pay.”
Reuters notes that on Monday “unidentified war planes struck a Syrian air base near Homs, killing at least 14 people, including Iranian personnel. Syria and Russia accused Israel of carrying out the attack.”
Look, it’s admittedly all murky, but here is what we do know: Trump is a cowboy who wants desperately to be taken seriously. Let none of the congregation forget that this was the same man who, shortly after taking office, dropped the largest nonnuclear bomb on Afghanistan.
Also let us never forget that while Trump was dropping the MOAB on Afghanistan, he was also signing shit to stop funding for Planned Parenthood.
There is money in wars and there is also distraction, and something is telling me that as proof of Russian collusion in the U.S. presidential election closes in, what better way to prove that you aren’t in bed with a country than to go to war with one of its allies? I don’t want to get all Alex Jones-y here, but something tells me that we are going to war and it will be beneficial only to the Trump administration and his real play cousin, Vladimir Putin.