Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
At the end of
William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, part 2,
the dying King Henry IV — who took power by staging a palace coup against his cousin, Richard II, and spent virtually
the whole of his reign fighting back against attempts to get rid of him and put
Richard’s designated heir on the throne — summons his son and heir, Prince Hal,
to his deathbed for some last-minute advice. Among the things Henry IV tells
his son to do as king is “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” — that is, to
stop the revolutions and reunite the country by aiming its military at another
country. And he doesn’t need to tell his son what the other country should be: France, which England
had been trying to conquer since the reign of Henry IV’s grandfather, Edward
III, over 50 years earlier.
Not that the new
King Henry V’s military adventure in France went well. Like U.S. President
George W. Bush’s military in Iraq almost seven centuries later, Henry’s forces
won a few quick victories, including a major one at the Battle of Agincourt
that essentially led Henry V to declare, like Bush, “Mission Accomplished.”
Then Henry V died, leaving a two-year-old son as his heir and a lot of feuding
nobles in his court who fought over which one would get to rule until the baby
prince was old enough to do so himself. The English army in France got bogged
down in a long war of occupation against a native resistance led by a woman
named Joan of Arc, and not only were they driven out of France, within two
decades England was bogged down in a bloody civil war, the Wars of the Roses,
and France had recovered enough that both
sides in the English civil war sought French help.
But at least
temporarily, Henry V was able to unite his country behind his rule by following
his dad’s advice to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” And, at least so
far, so has U.S. President Donald Trump. On Friday, March 31, the Trump
administration looked like it was in pretty sorry shape. It was beset not only
by internal conflicts between Trump’s top personal advisors — Reince Priebus,
Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — but by ongoing
investigations by the FBI and both houses of Congress into whether the
government of Russia not only attempted to influence the U.S. election in
Trump’s favor but had the help of Trump’s top advisers in doing so. Within a
week, all that had changed: not only had the Republican majority in the U.S.
Senate abolished the filibuster on Presidential appointments to get Right-wing
judge Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, which would have been a major victory
in and of itself, but Trump had fired 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles from a U.S.
destroyer into Syria to destroy, or at least damage, an air base that had
allegedly been used by the Syrian government to attack one of their own cities
with chemical weapons.
Instantly, the
pundits that had been blasting Trump and saying his days in the White House
were numbered were now hailing him as “Presidential.” There doesn’t seem to be
anything quite like starting a war to boost a new President’s popularity
ratings. It wasn’t always thus — back when both Presidents and Congresses took
seriously the division of responsibility in the U.S. Constitution that it was
up to Congress to decide when the U.S.
would go to war, and only after
that decision was reached would the President be the commander-in-chief of the
forces fighting it, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had
to drag the country kicking and screaming into the Civil War, World War I and
World War II, respectively.
But since then
starting a war has been a virtually sure-fire booster for Presidential
popularity — although, maddeningly if you’re a U.S. President, keeping one
going has had the opposite effect. Ronald
Reagan’s numbers went up when he invaded Grenada even though few Americans
could have found Grenada on a map before the U.S. sent troops into it. Likewise
George H. W. Bush’s popularity went up when he led a coalition to retake Kuwait
from Iraq, and his son George W. Bush’s went up when he (like Henry V) invaded
a country that had been on his nation’s long-term shit list, started a war to
overthrow its government and won a few quick victories. And Trump has made it
to the “Presidential” list with his attack on Syria — though given that Assad
has upped his ante and launched more
chemical attacks since Trump’s April 7 raid, it’s anybody’s guess what the
long-term consequences shall be and whether Trump and his advisers will be able
to keep the U.S. attacks on Syria limited or whether they’ll grow into a
full-scale war.
The civil war in
Syria between the government of President Bashar al-Assad — who inherited the
country in 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad — and a wide
variety of rebels, including fighters aligned with al-Qaeda or ISIS (“Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria”) has been going on for at least six years. It has
forced at least five million people out of the country, most of them stuck in
squalid refugee camps in Turkey or Jordan. President Trump’s predecessor,
Barack Obama, attempted, carefully and gingerly, to let a few thousand of those
refugees settle in the U.S. Trump slammed the door on that and named Syria as
one of the six or seven countries whose citizens would not be allowed to travel or emigrate to the U.S. until
his administration could put what he called “extreme vetting” programs in place
(even beyond the extreme vetting Obama’s government had put them through) to
make sure they’re not terrorists.
Obama followed a
confused policy on Syria, refusing to commit U.S. ground forces to any side of
Syria’s three-way civil war but running a multi-million dollar “training
program” to build up an army of so-called “moderate rebels” who could take on
both Assad and the al Qaeda-ISIS factions of the resistance to him. The program
was a fiasco: the first training class produced 55 fighters and the second
graduated 72. And after Assad launched a poison gas attack against Syrian rebel
strongholds in 2013 that was far deadlier than the one Trump’s raid was
responding to — it reportedly killed over 1,000 people instead of just 70 —
Obama announced that Assad had crossed a “red line” and the U.S. would soon
start retaliating with air strikes in Syria.
But we didn’t.
We didn’t because instead Obama cut a deal with Syria’s principal protector,
Russian President Vladimir Putin, that if the U.S. agreed not to attack Syria, Syria would destroy all its
stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons — and Russia would guarantee that
they would do so. Until last week, there was no evidence that Assad still had
chemical weapons, though Russia had so extensively intervened in the Syrian
civil war that the Assad government had essentially won by 2017. Among the
things the Russians had done for Assad was send planes into Syria to bomb rebel
positions, ostensibly to fight ISIS but actually to help Assad’s forces against
all the armed enemies of his
regime. Since the U.S. and Russia were supposedly working together in Syria to
fight ISIS, the two countries’ air forces had worked out what was given the
rather awkward name “deconfliction” — meaning that they talked to each other
about whose planes would be bombing where so they didn’t risk crashing their
planes into each other or shooting each other down.
Indeed, by 2017
Bashar al-Assad’s government had so decisively won the Syrian civil war — it had
retaken all the major cities the rebels had once held and reduced the
opposition to a handful of isolated fighters in the countryside — that in late
March U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (the former CEO of Exxon/Mobil and
the recipient from Vladimir Putin personally of the highest decoration the
Russian government ever gives to non-Russians) announced that the future of
Assad was “a matter for the Syrian people to decide.” He got ragged over this
by Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell at MS-NBC, but I suspect the message
Tillerson was sending to Assad was, “You won your war already. Now you can stop
killing your own people.” Instead what Assad seems to have heard was, “Oh,
goody! I won my war already. Now I can kill even more of my own people.”
One of the open
questions in the U.S. attack on Syria was why Bashar al-Assad decided to launch
the chemical weapons attack against Syrians in the first place. That’s a more
interesting question than where the chemical weapons came from — whether he
colluded with Russia to keep some stockpiles intact, he deceived the Russians
and kept some back from destruction, or all the Syrian chemical weapons that
existed in 2013 were destroyed but
Assad’s people later made more. (Sarin, the gas allegedly used in the attack,
is not that difficult a chemical to make. In 1995 a Japanese terrorist group
called Aum Shinrikyo produced some and used it to attack the Tokyo subway
system. The actual attackers were caught relatively quickly, but the chemists
who made the sarin for them weren’t arrested until 2012.)
Why on earth
would Assad stage a gas attack now? What
did he have to gain? He’s an Alawite Shi’ite Muslim leading a country with a
Sunni Muslim majority — which is why the world’s largest Shi’ite Muslim
country, Iran, is his biggest ally next to Russia. If he’d left well enough
alone, he could probably have won at least the sullen, reluctant support of
Syrian Sunnis who would have concluded that, whatever the problems with him,
Assad definitely counted as the lesser of two evils over ISIS. Now he’s got the
lasting enmity of a lot of Sunni Syrians and risks re-emboldening the rebels.
Assad has also
got the United States, whose officials were seemingly resigned to him staying
in power indefinitely, denouncing him as the most uniquely evil person in the
world. Indeed, on April 11 Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer, said on April
11 that even Adolf Hitler hadn’t stooped to using chemical weapons on the
battlefield — which is historically
accurate (Hitler had been the victim of a gas attack in World War I and was in
a hospital recovering when that war ended, and the experience gave him a
distaste for the use of gas in actual battles), but of course ignored the
enormity of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ use of poison gas for the mass
extermination of Jews and the Holocaust’s other, largely forgotten targets:
Queers, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and people with disabilities.
Given what’s happened to other petty tyrants, including Manuel Noriega and
Saddam Hussein, once American officials started denouncing them as the most
evil people in the world, if I were Assad I’d be awfully worried about my
future and maybe I’d wonder if it was time to get out of the country and spend
the rest of my life in Switzerland hiding amongst my secret bank accounts.
And it’s also an
open question what Assad’s chemical attack has to offer his principal ally,
Russian President Vladimir Putin. The attack happened at an odd juncture in
U.S.-Russian relations. Whether Putin and his good buddies in Russian
intelligence (which he used to run) had advance knowledge either of Assad’s
actions or the U.S. response (and the latter, at least, seems likely because of
the ongoing “deconfliction” program through which the U.S. and Russia routinely
notified each other whenever either was going to strike ISIS positions inside
Syria), certainly the blowup and Trump’s decision to attack a major Russian
ally is going to make it that much harder to build better relations with
Russia. At a time when the FBI and both houses of Congress are investigating
the 2016 election to try to determine whether Russia’s attempts to influence
the outcome were done with the knowledge — or, worse, the collusion — of Trump
campaign officials, armed conflict between the U.S. and a Russian ally isn’t
going to make it easier for Putin to build whatever ties he was hoping for with
Trump and his administration.
What’s In It for Trump?
Still, for the
man who ordered the air strike against Syria, Donald Trump, the attack has been
an unalloyed positive. First of all, it’s arrested the bizarre slide in his
public approval rating, which before the attack had dropped in just five months
from the 46 percent of the popular vote he won on November 8, 2016 to a mere 35
percent — the lowest numbers any new
President this early in his term had racked up since modern polling started.
Now the polls are reporting that 51 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s
attack on Syria, versus just 40 percent opposed.
Second, it’s
likely laid to rest once and for all the accusation that Donald Trump is
President only because Vladimir Putin wanted him to be and manipulated the
American electoral process to achieve that result. The attack on that score has
been led by, of all people, Trump’s son Eric, who’s publicly stated that the
attack proves that Trump is not in
Russia’s pocket. Since the FBI and Congressional investigations began in
earnest, Trump has been desperately trying to change the subject, first sending
the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee to lobby the media
not to publish stories about the alleged Trump/Russia connection, then accusing
President Obama of wiretapping him during the campaign, then claiming that
Obama’s foreign policy adviser Susan Rice had committed some unspecified crime
and should be locked up (presumably in the cell next door to Hillary Clinton
before he reneged on his promise to lock her up).
But where all
the media lobbying and targeting of Obama and his people failed to knock the
Trump-Russia investigation out of the media spotlight, the attack on Syria has
brilliantly worked to change the conversation and made the American people see
Trump as a bold, decisive leader who’s willing to risk war with a nuclear
superpower to protect “babies, beautiful babies” and other victims of Syrian
gas attacks. Indeed, a third appeal of the airstrike for Trump was that he
could legitimately claim that he had the
guts to do something Obama didn’t when Obama backed away from launching a U.S.
strike against Syria in 2013. Never mind that back in 2013 Trump was using his
favorite communications channel, Twitter, to tell Obama repeatedly that the
U.S. had no business attacking Syria:
June 15, 2013: We should stay the hell out of Syria, the “rebels” are just as bad
as the current regime. WHAT WILL WE GET FOR OUR LIVES AND $BILLIONS? ZERO.
August 29, 2013: What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a
possible long-term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval.
September 3, 2013: What I am saying is stay out of Syria.
September 5, 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!
September
9, 2013: Don’t attack Syria —
an attack that will bring nothing but trouble for the U.S. Focus on making our
country strong and great again!
For Trump, a
master practitioner of what George Orwell in 1984 called doublethink —
“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind, and accepting
both of them” — it doesn’t matter in the slightest that in 2013 he was telling
Obama that Obama would be making a big mistake if he launched an airstrike
against Syria, and now he’s giving himself points for having the balls to do
something wimpy little Obama, with his exaggerated concern for the feelings of
foreign leaders and unwillingness to put “America First,” didn’t have the guts
to do. It also reassures the world that the U.S. is still willing to be the
world’s policeman, and that Trump’s oft-repeated “America First”
mantra doesn’t, in his mind — at least his
mind as it’s thinking this week — have the isolationist and tacitly pro-fascist
connotations “America First” had in the late 1930’s, when it was the slogan of
the movement to keep the U.S. out of World War II.
It also helps
Trump, ironically, that the actual attack was so ineffectual — just a few holes
shot in one runway of a two-runway airfield and 20 planes taken out of
commission — because it’s yet another way in which his propagandists can sell
the media and the rest of America on the idea that Trump is now being
“Presidential.” The talk in the first few days after the strike was that it had
been a “measured, proportionate response” to the Syrian gas attack — that it
hadn’t been a full-fledged commitment of the U.S. military to change the regime
in Syria, the way George W. Bush had done in Iraq and Barack Obama had in Libya
(with disastrous results). Apparently the bar to accepting Donald John Trump as
fully “Presidential” has been set so low that anything that doesn’t make him
look stark, staring mad — like his capable delivery of his fully prepared,
scripted and Telepromptered speech to both houses of Congress, or his
“measured, proportionate” firing of a few Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian
airfield — makes him look good.
Which brings us
to the final lesson of the Syrian attack: never underestimate Donald Trump. He has an extraordinary ability, verging on genius,
to present at least the appearance and aura of invincibility. Through his
shrewd ability to manipulate public perceptions, he’s been able to convinced a
good chunk of America — enough to elect him President — that he is a sagacious
business leader and the acme of competence. I’m convinced many people who voted
for him were sure that Trump was a superb businessperson who had never lost on a deal — even though his actual business
record was considerably more checkered than that, with some spectacular losses
(like Atlantic City) next to some solid wins — because they’d seen him play
the ultimate all-wise businessman on his TV
show The Apprentice.
Throughout the
campaign his rivals in both the Republican and Democratic parties were sure the
latest revelation, the newest negative story, the most recent public meltdown
would be the one that would bring down
Donald Trump. They were all wrong. Nobody in the media or the commentariat
thought Trump would ever be elected President … until he was. And the people
who were wrong about him then are still making the same predictions that
there’s something out there that
will bring Trump down. So far, though, Trump’s record as a politician, like his
record as a businessman, has been marked by an unerring ability to snatch
victory from the jaws of defeat. Maybe the steady drip-drip-drip of accusations
of scandal, corruption, self-dealing, foreign influence or just plain insanity
will undermine and ultimately erode the strong, almost cult-like support Trump
still enjoys among his base voters — or maybe Trump will continue to ride out
all the storms and maintain control of the U.S. for the next quarter-century,
since he’s obviously grooming Jared Kushner to succeed him and Ivanka Trump to
succeed him when age and the 22nd
Amendment catch up with him in 2024.
