What in God's name is going on in Syria?

I think the Islamic State is part of this. It was a very limited strike, only one target, and may be expanded later. It accomplished many things. It got the attention of China and North Korea and Iran, for whom military strength was a joke under Obama, and didn’t make it a factor or fear it until now.

It also put to rest criticism that Trump is allied with Putin. Obama was being led by the nose, Russians told him the chemical weapons were taken care of and Obama just said “ok,” and clearly wasn’t. If Obama had been spying on Assad, rather than Trump, he wouldn’t look like such a fool now. Most of the legitimate nations in the Mideast, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, approve of this and very relieved that the USA is back again.

That’s the only worrying thing about the whole issue.

I’m sure that the Saudis are waiting to import their brand of Sunni Islam to Syria. Assad doesn’t particularly strike me as a religious guy.

Assad is probably the most secular of all leaders in the middle east. Syria is one of the few countries in that area where Christians and Muslim live next to each other with no major issues. The so called “moderate rebels” and ISIS are trying to get rid of Assad for that exact reason, they want to go full retard and turn the country back 500 years (while backed from foreign countries who have economical interests).

Also, there’s not much in common betwen the current Assad and his father. He clearly did some things that in Western societis would be considered intollerable (like the jailing of protestors and journalists), but compared to all the cr@p that goes on in his neighboring countries he’s far from the worst you could have as a leader in that region.

I disagree that it “got the attention of…North Korea.” I think it showed our hand, namely, that we are only about limited strikes and boots on the ground are out of the question. Trump should have waited and gone in much, much, much stronger after congressional approval.

3 minutes to Seoul in a Russian mig fighter. About the same for ballistic missiles. Seoul has a population of 10 million. The US has 28,500 troops in Korea, many at the army base in the middle of Seoul (8th army? Can’t remember). Any such provocation against North Korea would get real messy.

I believe this has only emboldened Kim Jong-Un. We can debate but the proof will be in the pudding as we witness a deafening silence with respect to any type of real military option against North Korea. Moving warships in the vicinity? So what.

Strategically, Trump really screwed up.

Vietnam War: North Vietnam “attacks USS Maddox in Gulf of Tonkin”

1st Gulf War: Iraq “tosses baby incubators out of hospital windows”

2nd Gulf War: Iraq “building massive weapons of mass destruction arsenal”

WW III: Syria “uses chemical weapons on civilians”

It’s like a broken record.

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They don’t want ISIS either. They kept wondering what was going on with Obama and America and why were weren’t doing anything. He kept warning everyone that ISIS was coming after the West.

North Korea can’t have nuclear weapons. Obama has let things slide so bad, that there is probably no other option than to take out North Korea. I think that demonstration showed the Chinese that we are going to solve North Korea if they can’t.

Yes, we have the 8th army in Seoul, but also Osan Air Force base further south, and Camp Humphreys army base further south, and more in Pusan I believe.

Time will tell. All I will say is, watch and see as Trump does nothing more regarding military action against North Korea and as Kim Jong-Un continues to flip the world off. And I’m not sure how you can put North Korea’s slow march to nuclearization on Obama’s shoulders. Sheesh, that’s a bit of a stretch. Thanks for googling the US military situation in Korea. I really had forgotten. Finally, in the grand scheme of things, sending warships does nothing.

At first, I thought Trump might not do what was necessary, but the more I see what he does, the more confident I am that he’s not stupid, he knows what he’s doing, and he has a strategy, and nothing is done in vain.

For instance, he did the strike while meeting with Chinese leader, all smiling, I don’t think that was an accident. And yes, it can rest on Obama’s shoulders because he didn’t fully exhaust all the options open to us when they were still options, the best he did was jam the North Korean missiles when they were being designed and tested, but it only slowed their march, as you said, but wouldn’t ultimately stop them. He should have continued the 6-way talks that Bush presided over, and which Trump is trying again, but North Koreans only wanted to deal with us because all those nations have grievances against them and are just more trouble, so Obama let them cause it’s easier that way, even if it doesn’t help solve problems.

Trump can still keep jamming, but as for other options, he could station nuclear in South Korea, which may not be effective. It’s gotten too late in the game, the threat of taking out North Korea has to be felt and on the table in order to exhaust all over options.

I didn’t have to google about Korea. I was there, stationed at Camp Humphreys as a Korean linguist in military intelligence. I’ve been all those bases.

Well, hat’s off to you and your work there, even though your views may be as misguided as the North’s missiles! Sorry for that little dig (about googling). Then you know what a nightmare any military option would be. My older brother is in Seoul. I hope to God that you’re right about Trump knowing what he’s doing. Personally, I think such faith in him is misplaced.

But…I think history is on my side when I say that all we’ll hear is a deafening silence when it comes to military options against North Korea.

Oh, I wouldn’t worry about North Korean capabilities. They built up a large military but mostly old, run-down equipment, and don’t have the manpower like China does.

We’ve beat them before, all the way up to the Yalu River. We lost the War because Chinese came down and we fought them for 2 years and slaughtering them, but they kept sending masses down. North Korea is more bark than bite, that is, without nuclear weapons. We wouldn’t want to fight them when they’ve finally arrived to the nuclear club, that might be more messy than now.

Trump’s got a few options left, including assassinating Kim, but the threat of war has always got to be palpable to render other options more viable.

I have reached the conclusion that the real warmongers behind the US trying to start WWIII eitehr in Asia or the Middle East -same diffference- are the Evangelicals. They are trying to ignite the Second Coming, any place is OK, as long as we have a nuclear devatation of such impact that it moves the Heavens to open up and finally interneve in this mess we call Earth.

Question: if the world cannot handle 5 million refugees from the Syrian conflict, how are we going to manage as a whole when the already starving and fanatic masses of 25 million North Koreans amble outside of their walled existence without leadership nor purpose in life except kill the Great Satan who got them in that mess? They are not expecting them to embrace blue jeans and HBO, right?

I’m not sure if discussion of the Korean War will make me in any way confident that things will go well for the US if war should break out again. A quick search shows over 50,000 US deaths in the Korean War, which has been revised down to a bit under 40,000. And how many total lives on both (or all four) sides? It would depress me to look that up. And China getting involved to result in a stalemate at the 38th parallel? War is unpredictable and frightening is what this proves more than anything (real war, that is, and not a missile strike against a second-rate military force like the one Syria has).

In any event, I think most agree that war with North Korea would be catastrophic for both sides. The US would win, no doubt, but the number of lives lost in the beginning stages of war is a scary thought, for sure.

I’ve mentioned this a number of times now, but look for a deafening silence from Trump and his administration in the weeks to come.

We had the wrong leader then, a Democrat, and they don’t listen to their generals, Obama was the same, had to get his fingers in the pie and micromanage everything instead of just trusting the generals.

Republican general McArthur was excellent. He warned Truman and made it quite public that we needed to go into China and bomb their factories and war making capabilities, since it turned into the China War from the Korean War. But Truman fired him for embarrassing him, didn’t want to go there. That’s why there were so many casualties. A quick American victory under McArthur’s leadership would have kept casualties low and ended much sooner with American victory.

Same with Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson. We won all the battles but lost the war because Johnson was trying to respect the enemy instead of trying to defeat them. Nixon was began to lead the war right, but by then people were tired of the war, understandably, so he had no choice but to shut it down in dishonor. Had Nixon been there from the beginning, the Vietnam War would be much different, shorter, with American victory.

We have a good leader now, and our military disparity between the Norks and us are even greater than then. Once we blow all their stuff away, they don’t have an economy to maintain a war.

Actually, I think Obama wanted to create Syrian refugees so we could take them in the USA. He profited from creating chaos there.

North Korea could easily be incorporated into South Korea, which they would love to do and planned for a long time, just as East Germany was into West Germany. It helps when the nation was divided and then united again.

It’s called proportionate response. It shows he’s not reckless. Showing he’s not a wimp comes later.

Now he has the option of nuking people down the road and no one can get away with calling him a dangerous lunatic for doing so.

You could call it a balancing act, but that would miss the point. He’s calling out the extreme warmongers and the extreme pacifists, reminding the impressionable middle that you can’t have it both ways. This puts him in a position to define ‘moderate’ and put the Overton window where he wants it.

Oh, and the Russia conspiracy theory is dying a painful death.

Because the vast majority of people running to Europe are not war refugees. They’re people from Syria’s neighjboring countries, Somalia, Afghanistan etc, as well as Syrians who support Al Nusra (Al Quaeda), as well as Syrians who support ISIS. They’re not looking for shelter from a war, they’re looking for free $$$. Many imams in the middle east teach their people that the money the European union is giving them is the jizya, or the money that infedels are supposed to pay to muslim governments in muslim countries. This is the reason why many of those migrants (who are not refugees in the slightest) commit abundant crimes and expect governments to give them free stuff: they’ve been brainwashed into thinking that’s what they should expect. And the migrants who go to Europe for the free $$$ are not the smartest and brightest. Don’t expect doctors and scientists to travel thousands of miles from non-war zones to Europe just for some petty cash.

In before:“NOT ALL”. Of course, but if all people who from the middle east went to Europe were REALLY Syrians, especially the secular ones, they’d have little to no issues integrating into a western society. When you add in the mix millions of people who couldn’t care less about integration, you get problems.

In before:“More refugees! More integration! Fewer problems!” → countries who don’t give out free $$$ to migrants are those with fewer migrant related crimes, and have seen little to no terrorist attack. Countries that offer plenty of cash, housing etc, have been hit by constant terrorist attacks, and Sweden is going to sh1t. If 10 years ago I heard that Sweden, a holiday paradise with some of the lowest crime rates in Europe, was bound to become the rape capital of the world, I would have bursted out laughing. Feelsbadman.

Regarding North Korea, all the stories I read about common people escaping NK’s regime and fleeting to SK or China or whatever, those people integrated quite well in the new reality.

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I don’t believe I’ve read any analysis that predicts different outcomes, depending on party affiliation of the US president. All analyses predict the US and South Korea winning. All analyses predict devastating losses in Korea and for US forces in Korea, and for these losses to occur in very early stages of war.

So, rather than having the effect of “getting the attention of North Korea,” Kim Jong-Un and company have been emboldened by the recent limited action against a very weak Syrian military. And the proof for this is very simple: Watch as things slowly turn back to normal as Trump and his administration become very quiet in the weeks and months to come regarding concrete military action against North Korea. It won’t happen. And North Korea knows this.

Strategically, this was a very bad way to proceed.

Russia has its interests, namely ports and oil.

The US has its interests; namely, doing whatever Israel and the Saudis tell us to do. The latter gives the US oil, the former is the homeland of the globalist elite.