Wow, okay, Donald Trump has attacked Syria. He has dropped dozens of tomahawk missiles on an airbase in Syria. We finally have proof that Donald Trump is going to put his fingers on any scary red button that he wants to. That’s right. Donald Trump is President, he has launch codes, and he’s not afraid to use them. Yikes.
Now, some say the bombing was stupid. In fact, a lot of people are saying it was at least a reckless miscalculation. Some people believe that this is proof of Trump’s lack of ability to serve the Office of the Presidency. I mean, Trump didn’t even knock out the important parts. First of all, he didn’t destroy the runways on the airbase. That means the planes that he didn’t attack can still take off. In other words, he killed people that can be replaced, replacements that can fly the same planes Trump didn’t attack off the runways Trump didn’t attack. So, his attack, whether you call it defense or offense, was frankly ineffective and stupid.
On the other hand, you have the people that say it’s about time. I wouldn’t go about blaming Obama for failed policies on Syria, but I would say that our enemies have pushed us into a situation in which we have the play their game or lose. Psychologically, it does make sense. I mean, some people need everyone to behave the same way they do. Whether Syria, North Korea, Iran, or others, there are violent and illegitimate despots out there that are trying to get America to commit the same atrocities they commit. It makes them look better. It makes our enemies look mainstream, like they’re not so bad after all. If we start gassing people, well, then can’t Syria do that, too? Well, we’re not going to start doing that, but randomly dropping bombs to cause fear? Now that’s a precedent Trump has sent. Now our enemies can do that whenever they want and claim hypocrisy if American is allowed to do it and they aren’t. That opens the door for permissible chaos.
After six years of Bashar al-Assad’s attacks on his own people, even supported by Russia and other likeminded regimes and opportunities allies, it was time. In fact, our response was long overdue. It was stupid, ineffective, reckless, sets the abovementioned precedents, and probably made things worse, but it had to be done. So, I believe our enemies have already backed us into that corner, as I alluded they were trying to do. The fact is, everything has gotten so bad in these countries that we’re going to have to start playing dirty. That’s not a criticism of other policies. That’s an admission that we’ve fallen behind, that we’ve got to start falling on our swords ethically and picking up more malicious methods if we’re going to get out of this mess.
The reality is you can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. No matter how true it is that Nixon said that and that nothing else he did was any better than disgusting, it is true that you can’t get to Point B if you don’t know whether you’re currently standing on Point A or Point Q. The reality is, in our minds, we’re so far ahead of the rest of the world (most of it, anyway) that we can’t see what our enemies are capable of. If we don’t start assuming that our enemies are smart, we run the risk of thinking they are easily defeated. Further, if we believe that they don’t even want to act this way but are doing so as a last resort, then it’s okay for us to do the same, making it okay to treat our enemies the way they treat us. I believe that is the first step to beating them at their own game.
In other words, it’s about time we attacked Syria. We should’ve done it a long time ago, despite how many ways it destroyed our psyches and is against everything we stand for. That’s because the enemy knows what we stand for. They know how to commit atrocities while somehow still following international law, and they know how to get us so bogged down in paperwork and analysis so they can commit their second act while we’re trying to prove the illegality of their first act, despite the fact that we could never undo the deaths of the first and the fact the deaths of the second aren’t far behind. They know how to infiltrate and cheat and steal and neutralize us, all while being sure to do so in a way that prevents our protocols from stopping them. That’s why we need to change our protocols. If someone punches you in the face and you turn around to go get your lawyer and that same someone punches you in the back of the head, eventually, you’re gonna learn to stop turning around to look for your lawyer and either start handling the situation yourself or end up with a concussion or worse. We need to start losing the ethical battle in order to win the existential war. It’s sad, but if they can spend billions of man hours on propaganda, we can repair the world’s opinions of our actions, too, but we can only do that if we’re still alive to do it.
So, how do we do it?
Well, in Syria, as I’ve said a few times, there’s basically a giant sign that says Donald Trump is an absolute imbecile. So, that’s not how we do it, and I admit I might not have all the answers, but now that the Russians are sheltering the Syrian military within Syrian territory, it’s clear that we’re stuck. Boots on the ground would be lovely for the Syrian military. Sitting ducks. I’m sure we’ll do some of that, but what about resources? Well, I’m sure their military would love that, too. See, they love to destroy their own people so they’d really love to destroy the people of the countries they hate even more than their own. So, they’d love it if Trump were to gut domestic policy to afford yet another war. They’d get to kill boots on the ground in Syria–that’s their bread and butter–and go home for some light reading on all the Americans who no longer have healthcare and how the school system is failing and how Americans are working two to three jobs just to make ends meet.
So none of that really works. It seems they’d win no matter what. What about sanctions? What about no longer sanctioning individuals and the people that do business with them? What about sanctioning an entire country and tying our allies to those sanctions? Now that would be a violation of human rights of the innocent people in those countries. However, that would be what the enemy wants. They enemy wants us to hurt their own people so that they can say we’re just as bad as them, and all we can say is that those people’s governments brought it on themselves. In response, the enemy can claim they’ll start attacking American citizens in retaliation. However, they’re already doing this. They’re already attacking us. Moreover, if some of our sanctions hurt innocent people in their countries, well, those governments are already hurting innocent people in those countries. So, no loss of liberty, I’d say.
In short, I think what we’re going to do is far different from what we should do. Just look at what Trump did next. He bombed Afghanistan. He dropped the MOAB near Kabul. What was the point of that? To show our enemies we’re not afraid to do it? Oh c’mon. Our enemies aren’t afraid of anything. They either interpret their religion to mean death in war is the greatest night of their lives or that they’ll never be killed, no matter what, because their government told them that, depending on what techniques are used by which leaders to control their peoples. So, dropping MOAB was nothing but a waste of resources. Moreover, whoever it killed wasn’t enough. More will spring up and probably already have.
Frankly, I think we need to start at home. There are various actors in this country that know that citizenship grants them all kinds of liberties and that, therefore, have gone through the motions to get citizenship so that they can carry out their acts of terror. So, how do we stop these people without hurting many, many innocent civilians who aren’t agents of their foreign governments or terrorist groups posing as loyal U.S. citizens? Well, remember. They would love it if we started abusing our own people to find the needle in the haystack. The difference here is that we’d be hurting our own people physically instead of through domestic policy and that we’d be hurting our own people and not innocent citizens of other countries. So, what could we do? Perhaps we could start by looking at what all foreigners have in common in order to identify a U.S. citizen as someone not born here. Perhaps your driver’s license can have a chip in it. This chip could be used to track your whereabouts when you travel via air or train. It could be used to minimize invasiveness during a raid. Since police routinely request ID’s during a raid, they could start scanning them in cases where probable cause was given to raid a location to look for someone originating from a foreign country. This would minimize harm to the citizens.
This gets into procedure and protocol and operations techniques, which opens the door to many variations, and I’m no expert in that. However, there are ways to ensure that the enemy is at least kept out of our country, whether Syrian, North Korean, Chinese, Iranian, ISIS, or others.
Simply dropping a bomb isn’t going to do anything.
Given the fact that information collection, whether it’s best or worse in war, is what our largest enemy does on a regular basis and does incredibly well even in their sleep, I think we ought to stop thinking about whether it’s smart or dumb and whether it’ll work or not work and start doing what they’re doing. I mean, what they’re doing is working for them. The Chinese are stealing everything. They’ve stolen fighter jet designs, for godsakes. They wouldn’t use their brains for a second to come up with a creative idea if they could spend years building a computer program to steal the idea instead. Stupid? Sure sounds like it, but after all those years of delays, now they have an amazing system that does work in seconds. So, no need for creativity.
I’m not suggesting we stop being creative. I’m suggesting we do what they do. I’m suggesting that their governments will become aware of everything we do because they’ll hack to find out. So let’s given them some information they don’t wanna read. Let’s start tracking everything their people are doing here. Let’s start creating fake evidence of theft of their information so their governments think we’re doing that. Let’s insert mistakes sometimes so it looks like we’re not good at it so they don’t respond. Let’s make them think we’ve stooped to their level.
So what can you do?
You can start supporting more technical and more sophisticated background checks, more pinpointed evaluations of individuals, and more critical analysis of someone’s movements. You can start by supporting proactive movements by law enforcements rather than thinking being proactive equals offense. You can start by realizing that a preemptive response to someone planning an attack by raiding their apartment or by not giving them access to a computer is not offense but a defense to someone we know they were about to do. You can start by accepting the unacceptable, that there are threats, that there are, in fact, some bad actors in this country. It’s true. Sad but true. You can get over it by reminding yourself that you’re strong, that you can handle it, that, if faced with this situation head on, you’d know how to thrive in it. You can stop being so worried that someone bad is around the corner and start approaching that corner with confidence because you’ll know you can handle it. Then, you can start admitting the dangers and that they need to be solved.
Yes, I’m a Democrat. Yes, war sucks. However, there are problems here and abroad. No, we’re not solving them. We’re trying but failing, and Trump is going to make things a whole lot worse. I’m the last person to want to limit freedom or liberty or increase scrutiny of people’s actions. Just let me be me and leave me the heck alone. However, when something bad happens, you wonder why it did, you wonder why it wasn’t prevented, you wonder where your defender was, and I say we ought to start being able to walk down the street shoulder to shoulder with the enemy and say “How are you? What are you up to today? Oh, I’m just heading to work, and you? Oh, you’re a terrorist? Well, I heard that’s getting harder these days. It pays well though, if you believe in that. No no, you can believe in whatever you want. Freedom of religion, of course. Well, good luck. And thanks…until now, I thought my job was the worst in the world. Have a good day!” and then just keep on walking like you would if he or she was anyone else. If we’re that confident, then it won’t affect us. Moreover, you can always snap a photo of them or use that conversation as time to memorize his or her face, clothes, etc, or even ensure that you walk past a camera or too and that you can remember the address where the camera was. Then, just report the address to police and voila! They can take it from there.
I’m sorry this post has very little to do with Trump, but the reality is this has nothing to do with a President or a law or anything like that. It has to do with all of us. Assad wants to kill his own people. Former leader of Iran Ahmadinejad described his joy of thinking about dead Americans. North Korea creating videos of how exactly we’d die. So, it’s about us. And it’s always been about it. Their militaries can beat our military. So they fight innocent civilians, instead. They do it in their own countries, and they do it here. So, we’ve got to start taking matters into our own hands. That has nothing to do with violence and everything to do with studying what these people are trying to do to us so that we’re informed. Our government is quickly becoming unable to train us in how to stop it because, well, in the case of China, if we so much as tell our citizens that China is anything less than perfect, the CCP threatens us and our allies or commits more hacks. So, we’re going to have to train ourselves. It’s their militaries against ourselves and our neighbors. Our military and our government have nothing to do with it.