President Trump’s pronouncement that he would be pulling troops out of Syria “very soon” has laid bare a major source of tension between the president and his generals.
Trump has made winning on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan a central tenet of his foreign policy and tough-guy identity. But Trump and the military hold frequently opposing ideas about exactly what winning means.
Those differences have played out in heated Situation Room debates over virtually every spot on the globe where U.S. troops are engaged in combat, said senior administration officials. And they contributed to the dismissal last month of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who as national security adviser had pressed the president against his instincts to support an open-ended commitment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan.
Trump’s words, both in public and private, describe a view that wars should be brutal and swift, waged with overwhelming firepower and, in some cases, with little regard for civilian casualties. Victory over America’s enemies for the president is often a matter of bombing “the s--- out of them,” as he said on the campaign trail.
Of course under President Obama the policy was to spare innocent civilians, and family members, and instead use precise targeting to take out the terrorist objective.
As we know that did not always work, and many innocent civilians were also killed.
However Trump does not seem at all bothered by that sort of collateral damage.
Trump came to office promising to give the Pentagon a free hand to unleash the full force of U.S. firepower. His impatience was evident on his first full day in office when he visited the CIA and was ushered up to the agency’s drone operations floor.
There agency officials showed him a feed from Syria, where Obama-era rules limited the agency to surveillance flights — part of a broader push by the previous administration to return the CIA to its core espionage mission and shift the job of killing terrorists to the military.
Trump urged the CIA to start arming its drones in Syria. “If you can do it in 10 days, get it done,” he said, according to two former officials familiar with the meeting.
Later, when the agency’s head of drone operations explained that the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed unimpressed. Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled.
To be clear killing innocent people overseas is how you create more terrorists, not defeat terrorism.
Trump's inability to understand that, or to respect human life, will only ensure that not only does terrorism outlast his term, but that it increases exponentially.
Having said that I am going to tack on the report about those Russian sanctions right here, because I do not think they deserve a post of their own.
Some in the media are trying to give Trump credit for finally cracking down with some aggressive sanctions that will actually hurt the Russian oligarchs who support Putin, but they are fools.
Trump is NOT behind these sanctions. In fact he was clearly dragged kicking and screaming into supporting them, because he had NO choice.
If this were really something that Trump was behind, he would have tweeted the shit out of it, but there is not a peep about this on his account.
To sum up Donald Trump does not value human life, but he absolutely values his relationship with Vladimir Putin.
