We woke up another day and we found ourselves at war

Wars are preceded by orchestrated incidents. It took the USS Maine to be sunk to allow the United States to enter a war against Spain; then RMS Lusitania had to be sunk to prod the United States to participate in World War One; World War Two required the sinking of a number of US warships at Pearl Harbor; the Gulf of Tonkin incident allowed Americans to intensify their presence in Vietnam; President Bush needed the twin towers of the World Trade Center to tumble down to have the right pretext for the war against Afghanistan; President Bush senior used the hearsay that Baghdad stored weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq; President Clinton needed mass graves and concentration camps to give the poor Serbs a sound thrashing; President Barrack Hussein Obama almost began escalating war in Syria after reports on poison gas use against civilians; based on similar reports, President Donald Trump did not shy away from giving the order to launch missiles against President Assad’s troops. So it goes.

When you need to win support of the people for a war, you have to shock them into action. Hence reports of insidious attacks, heinous atrocities and use of prohibited weapons that the enemy has allegedly resorted to. The most potent of them all is the suffering-children card; it was used during World War One: German soldiers allegedly thrust their bayonets through Belgian children’s bodies’; it was used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq: Iraqi soldiers allegedly disconnected incubators with new-born babies in Kuwait, thus bringing about their instant death; it was used to make Europeans accept the flood of the Third World masses: the visual media bombarded them with the picture of a drowned boy. Now the same trump card has been used by Trump, the president: he pours his heart out to the sorry plight of – how on earth otherwise – children.

Never mind the prospective detente with Russia; never mind the election promises of pulling America out of policing the world; never mind the gratuitousness of a poison gas attack: someone in Washington saw it fit to take action and action was taken. Qui prodest?

President Bashar al-Assad is Iran’s friend, supporter of Hezbollah and Russia’s ally. Israel sees in Hezbollah a terrorist organisation, in Iran its bitterest enemy (Iranian President held a conference on the holocaust inviting historical revisionists from Europe) and in Russia (by the way a country with the world’s only Jewish Autonomous Region (capital city: Birobidzhan), a legacy after the Soviet era) a nation from where Jews kept fleeing towards the end of the tsar and the Soviet era. Neocons are the eminece grises in Washington D.C. and Israel’s bosom friends.

A man who has just taken the office of President of the United States either asserts himself right from the start or lets himself be dictated to: if he chooses the former, he is likely to rule like a sovereign to the end of his term; if he chooses the latter, he is done as President.

A man who is emerging from a war victorious, like President Assad of Syria, a man who has won back much of his country’s territory is not likely to resort to anything that might warrant his sworn enemies’ attack against him. Whatever for? With powerful Russia and strong Iran on his side, with the ISIS contained to a few pockets of resistance, with a support from the majority of his own populations, Bashar al-Assad would have to be a fool to hand the Americans a pretext for intervention on a silver platter.

Have the hawks in the White House got the upper hand of Donald Trump eventually? Or was he their right-hand man in the first place?

Does President Trump realise what he has done? The masses of traditionally-minded, conservative Americans who voted him into office precisely because he promised to drain the Washington swamp, because he promised to withdraw American engagement from the many conflicts, because he promised to work towards peace and good relations with all, are now greatly – and that’s putting it mildly – disappointed.¹⁾Paul Joseph Watson: I guess Trump wasn’t “Putin’s puppet” after all, he was just another deep state/Neo-Con puppet. Ann Coulter: Trump campaigned on not getting involved in Mideast. Said it always helps our enemies & creates more refugees. Then he saw a picture on TV. [in:] Syria strike disappoints Trump backers in media, The Hill 2017-04-07.He is not very much into his presidency yet and he has started to saw off the branch he is sitting on: his voters. They all are looking in dismay, their mouths agape, with bated breath. What’s next in store?

It seems a sparring rather than a summit with President Putin is most likely to occur next. And we may pray to God the sparring is diplomatic rather than military.