OPINION:
President Trump accomplished some surprising things while entertaining communist China’s president at Mar-a-Lago Thursday evening.
The U.S. president pulled off a military action quickly enough to snap the heads of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Syrian President Bashar Assad and a few billion other people around the world.
Some news accounts reported 60 U.S. Tomahawk missiles fired at a Syrian airfield. That number would cost U.S. taxpayers $90 million, by a quick inexpert calculation.
The speed of the U.S. military action against Mr. Assad’s military airfield reflects Mr. Trump’s decisiveness, alacrity and seriousness about the value of the surprise factor — all oh so un-Obama-like.
The Syrian government’s use of lethal gas on its own civilian population is always shocking.
Whether the point of the U.S. Tomahawk strike was worth making only — you guessed it — time will tell. In no time at all, it surely made me feel good, along with a couple hundred million other Americans at least.
The Syrian president has been held responsible for killing far more of his own citizens in gas attacks and bombings throughout the course of the Syrian civil war than he killed in the latest nerve gas attack.
It’s doubtful that the Tomahawk attack will diminish the Damascus regime’s war against the combined Islamist-ISIS-democratic forces, who are determined to kill and replace Mr. Assad, who is defending himself against them.
The various factions and interests fighting the Assad regime would kill each other if they weren’t preoccupied with killing Mr. Assad and his military.
Mr. Assad and his father ruthlessly kept Islamic sects and factions and fractions from ruthlessly killing each other and slaughtering Christians in Syria.
Whoever takes over if Mr. Assad is knocked off will — what? Plead with the sects, factions, fractions and ISIS-types to play nice with each other or face arrest and possible imprisonment?
Mr. Trump was well aware that thousands of the former KGB chief’s own military types and intelligence agents whose Russian is a lot better than their Arabic were hanging around Syrian airbases, sea bases and around Mr. Assad himself on this fateful Thursday evening.
So the huge question is: What will this surprise attack do to Mr. Trump’s supposed political bromance with Russian President Putin. And to the Trump-bashing press’ preoccupation with that Russo-U.S. romance.
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