theunitofcaring:

And now we’ve fired on Syrian government forces. It’s hard to get a really good feel for things from newspaper headlines, but I think this is genuinely a significant escalation of U.S. involvement in Syria, and accordingly probably a horrible disaster. Violent involvement in the Middle East with no long term plan beyond bombing the people we’re mad at usually works out so well, after all.

I will observe in very lukewarm defense of our new president that I think lots of the candidates for President would have been tempted to do this. It’s stupid and evil and absolutely on Trump’s hands, but it’s stupid and evil in precisely the fashion that American foreign policy usually is, not in a new or unpredictable way. 

The motive is to retaliate for the use of chemical weapons. The use of chemical weapons is a horrible evil and I understand the impulse to retaliate against that kind of thing, but at some point we as a society have to notice that violent involvement in the Middle East, with no long term plan beyond bombing the people we’re mad at, makes everything worse even when we’ve picked a humanitarian justification.