While We Obsess Over Comey, What About Syria?

Hey Trump:

I hold you the opposite of dear and I did everything I could to help you lose the presidency, so my salutation above is as generous as you’ll get from me.

Right now, all of our media outlets are devoted to Comey coverage and trying to gauge your ties to Russia. However, does anyone remember that you sent 400 more troops to Syria? Exactly what are those troops being ordered to do right now? Do you even know?

I ask because I care about how you engage my country in war. Also, I ask because I feel like the American people have forgotten how dangerous you really are. As serious as political collusion is, we need to know if you are still killing people in Syria.

This spring, people called you brave and tough for bombing Syria. I didn’t join McCain and Graham in singing your praises. Instead, I want to make it perfectly clear that you are actually a weak coward. No one has ever created peace by adding bombs to bombs.

You and your followers wrongfully equate dropping bombs on foreign soil with virility and strength. In truth, ordering the bombing of Syria cements your impotence. Virility implies that you have the ability to create; whereas your actions only destroy. Moreover, you make military commands from the far-away safety of your favorite ninth hole.

Bombing Syria in no way protects that country’s innocents. Stop pretending that you actually care for Syrian children. You helped drown Syria’s toddlers when they tried to swim through closed borders. You allied yourself with Putin who sourced Assad with the very chemical weapons you feign disgust against.

You can try to break up with Putin now, but I will not forget your sins.

You yourself acknowledged the oxymoron of bombing to condemn acts of war when you read: “And we hope that as long as America stands for justice, that peace and harmony will in the end prevail”. Your speech writer hopes for miraculous concord while you intentionally kill Syrians. Violence has never once sired harmony; for peace is simply not a part of destruction’s DNA.

However, your bombs will improve enrollment in ISIS and ensure the deaths of even more Syrian civilians. Do the likely consequences of your actions give you even a moment’s pause?

Your hubris revolts me. It had been little more than eleven weeks since you exited Trump Tower and you thought you’d amassed the military intelligence to bomb another country? What’s more, you’ve chosen advisers who do little more than spin while their noses grow from a steady diet of alternative facts.

Although your artillery is terrifyingly real, you are merely playing a political blame game fueled by the false premise that violence means strength. You exploited your blame-the-past-administration card when you stated that Assad’s atrocious chemical attack is “a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution." Dragging President Obama’s decisions into your present-day policies is a cheap distraction.

And you’ll beam with pride to know that it worked. Around the water cooler, any “snowflake” who displays contempt at your bombings is shot down by your disciples’ spoon-fed obsession with President Obama’s comparatively irrelevant record in Syria. The American people are foolishly playing by your blame-game rules. It’s embarrassing.

If you really want to have an honest discussion about President Obama’s Syrian policy, perhaps you’ll mention that he helped broker a diplomatic deal that destroyed 67,098 metric tons of chemical agents. Or, you’ll recall that, like you, he wanted to strike Syria in direct response to Assad’s 2013 chemical weapons attack. Unlike you, he decided the follow the Constitution and ask for Congress’ approval before initiating an act of war. But he was roadblocked by a Congress which specialized in little more than opposing President Obama. What’s more, President Obama is nowhere near the dove you paint him to be, for he too eventually ordered multiple airstrikes in Syria against Islamic State group targets.

But this is about more than you or your predecessor. As repugnant as your policies are, Americans have long hero-worshiped at the church of bombing in the name of peace.

I am repulsed and ashamed by the American people’s love affair with military action during times of human crisis. Rather than toil toward humanitarian relief, we relish launching 59 missiles from the comfort of our living rooms. You, Trump, lead us in this embrace of violence because we let you.

Why are the only two options on the table to do nothing or to instigate US military action? Even if we discount diplomacy with Syria (for a conversation is not possible with the genocidal psychopath named Bashar al-Assad); have you so much as considered diplomatically crippling Syria’s Russian and Iranian sponsors?

Syria’s civil war has persisted for seven painful years. Have you ever once tried to fathom the many complex layers of the conflict? I doubt that you have, considering you’re befuddled enough to believe that you became president two weeks before your own inauguration.

Most importantly, how can you deny refuge to those who suffer most? You literally create refugees while simultaneously refusing to help them. I’m shocked you’ve not yet choked on your own hypocrisy. Although you’ve kept mum about what our troops are doing in Syria, you’ve remained constant in your push for a Muslim Ban policy, tweeting:

The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

So, answer me. What is our nation’s military doing in Syria right now?

When my sisters and I joined in the Women’s March this January, I had no idea what you would do to Syria. Tragically, the sign I held that day has become an even more urgent plea.