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April 10, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:46
Ep. 283 - There's A New Sheriff In Syria
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Last night, as news emerged of President Trump's missile strike against a Syrian airfield, Twitter quickly began examining Trump's old tweets from 2013, many of which opposed the possibility of action in Syria by Barack Obama.
He tweeted, What will we get for bombing Syria?
Besides more debt and a possible long-term conflict, Obama needs congressional approval.
He also tweeted, The president must get congressional approval before attacking Syria.
Big mistake if he does not.
And then there was the re-examination of Senator Ted Cruz's position on American involvement in the Syrian conflict.
In 2013, Cruz said that Assad's chemical weapons use was, quote, not a direct threat to U.S.
national security, and added that such behavior was, quote, well outside the traditional scope of U.S.
military action.
Now, Cruz is silent on Trump's airstrikes, adding, quote, I look forward to our commander-in-chief making the case to Congress and the American people.
In 2013, I was one of the people who opposed Obama's pre-stated pinprick strike.
I tweeted at Hugh Hewitt, Lobbing missiles into Syria without decapitating the regime strengthens both Assad and the mullahs.
I also wrote in a column around that time that Obama's strategy was destined to fail because he had no credibility to uphold.
He was negotiating a deal with the Syrian sponsor state Iran.
He was undermining American allies all over the region.
He was making the only standard for intervention use of chemical weapons while ignoring all of Assad's other war atrocities.
So, What's changed between 2013 and now?
Three things.
First, Trump can re-establish American credibility.
Obama had already blown American credibility out of the water for four years by the time Assad gassed his own people.
It was obvious to everybody, Democrats and Republicans, that not only did Obama lack a plan in Syria, he was looking to launch a few missiles to silence criticisms of his pathetic foreign policy.
As I tweeted then, hitting a few donkeys in the rear in Syria wouldn't do anything but make Assad look stronger and the United States weaker.
The same is not true of Trump.
He's a brand new president, a man of mystery on foreign policy.
A coherent plan of action following a strong immediate response to a chemical attack can help reshape the map in different ways than Obama could in 2013.
Second, The Russian-Iranian axis is now operative in Syria.
After Obama handed over control of Syria to Russia in 2013, I wrote this, quote, Thanks to President Obama's statements in August 2012 regarding a Syrian red line on chemical weapons use in Syria, the United States was faced with three choices in Syria.
Depose Assad, do nothing in order to prevent al-Qaeda from taking over the country, or...
Or, as John Kerry advocated, push for an unbelievably small action in order to reinforce America's credibility.
The third option was probably the worst.
But in a truly awe-inspiring display of his foreign policy genius, Obama has found a fourth option.
Appeasement, complete with international weapons inspections it rejected just a week ago.
In 2013, our geopolitical interests in Syria were significantly less important than they are now, thanks to Russia's aggressively reshaping of the Middle East.
Obama handed over power to Russia in Syria, thereby helping complete an Iranian-Russian axis that now spans from Iran to Lebanon, and then backed Iran through his idiotic and evil nuclear deal that made Iran a regional power again.
All of that is creating a safe haven and base of strength for Iranian-backed terrorists, strengthening Putin's hand as an expansionist dictator, and even creating an incentive for countries who oppose Iran and Russia to covertly support ISIS.
Blunting Russia's ambitions in Syria without drawing us into a war with them is a worthwhile goal.
Third, the map does not look like it did in 2013.
Here's a graphic of control of Syria in 2013.
You can see those blue dots up in the top, those are the Kurds, then you see the red dots, that's the opposition, and the black dots are the government.
Now, here's a map from March 2017.
Okay, you can see the black there is ISIS, the red is the Syrian government, and the yellow is the Kurds.
Note the geographic divides.
Note also the new clarity about the identities of some of Assad's rivals.
In that first map, you didn't know who his rivals were.
Here, you know a lot of them are ISIS.
This means that America's strategic goals have changed.
Now it's no longer about deposing Assad, per se, which was always a questionable goal given his terrorist rivals.
America has no interest in intervening in the middle of the Syrian civil war.
We do have interests regarding Assad's dominance and fighting ISIS.
Russia and Assad are not interested in fighting ISIS.
That was always a fantasy of pro-Russian isolationists.
Our best policy at this point is to contain the region without serious intervention, kill as many ISIS members as possible along with friendly countries, and to deter major human rights violations, if possible, while emboldening the Kurds in that yellow northern region.
That's why Trump's first strike matters.
But it won't matter unless he has some sort of strategy to back it up.
If he doesn't, it will be precisely the same as Obama's proposed pinprick strike, and will have been a counterproductive rather than a first blow toward restoring American interests on the world stage.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty.
So, obviously, a ton of news to get to.
Neil Gorsuch has now been confirmed.
He is now going to be on the Supreme Court.
Good for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
I didn't think he was actually going to do it.
He did invoke the nuclear option, did what he was supposed to do.
Good for him.
We'll also get to a full analysis of what is happening in Syria.
Is it good?
Is it bad?
Or are we undecided?
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You get $50 off your first set of sheets, $50 Okay, so, big news last night.
The Gorsuch thing, we can wait till later to discuss, but it's not huge news because we knew all week that they were going to confirm Justice Gorsuch.
Big win for President Trump.
He fulfills a campaign promise.
Big win for Mitch McConnell, who fulfills a quasi-campaign promise.
It is a big thing.
I don't think it's as huge a thing as some people make it out to be, because I don't think the Supreme Court is as huge a thing as some people make it out to be.
I've said that in the past, I will continue to say that, but it is big that Scalia's seat is maintained for originalism, as opposed to being converted over to a leftism activist seat, as it would have under Hillary Clinton.
So, I got that one totally wrong during the election cycle.
I said I thought that Trump would appoint somebody who is not conservative, or at the very least, Mitch McConnell, would not ram Trump's pick through over the filibuster, and obviously I was wrong.
Good for Trump, good for Mitch McConnell, that's great stuff.
But the big news, obviously, is that we are now involved in a war in Syria.
How much are we involved?
Not particularly much.
Last night, about, it would have been about 6 o'clock Pacific time, we get the news that the United States has launched 50 plus, I think it was 59, Tomahawk missiles from the Mediterranean Sea to a Syrian base, an air base that was apparently the source of the gas attacks that happened earlier this week on Syrian civilians that Trump saw And that made him very, very upset.
Here's a little bit of the footage of the strike.
So you can see there's the ship launching a Tomahawk missile.
Pretty cool stuff.
And then the actual impact of these missiles was pretty marked.
They destroyed, I think, six planes on the ground.
They knocked out the usefulness of the airbase.
There are six Syrian airbases.
This did not cripple Syria's ability to actually go out and perform gas attacks or weapons mass destruction attacks.
But it was a sign that Trump is not going to sit there and do nothing.
And it was a marked contrast to President Obama, who after a Syrian gas attack in 2013, he basically sat around and did nothing, dithered, tried to blame Congress, and then finally handed over control of the whole situation to the Russians.
But it has raised a number of really important and interesting questions.
The first question, I think, is was the strike worthwhile?
Was it something that was worthwhile?
And again, I go back to what I just said a few minutes ago.
How worthwhile the strike was is going to depend on what comes next.
So, in 1998, Al-Qaeda targeted the U.S.
embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and killed hundreds of people.
And Bill Clinton's response was to shoot off a missile at a chemical weapons factory, supposedly in Sudan, and hit a camel in the ass.
And that was basically the end of it.
That obviously not only had no impact, it actually was counterproductive.
It convinced bin Laden that the United States was a paper tiger, we weren't going to actually do anything, and led to 9-11.
If you just do these sort of symbolic measures that aren't followed up on with any sort of real cohesive policy, then nothing actually matters here.
It doesn't matter.
David French, I think, gets this exactly right in National Review.
He says, if this is the only strike, unless it was extraordinarily and unusually effective, it has little chance of materially impacting the Assad regime or the course of the civil war itself.
Even if it persuades Assad to refrain from dropping gas bombs, he'll doubtless continue his campaign of mass murder with barrel bombs, cluster bombs, area bombing, and mass executions.
And as I just said, the idea that you can do a pinprick strike and that's it, whether this is effective or not, we just don't know the answer yet because we don't know what Trump is going to do yet.
Second question, did Trump tick off his base?
A certain part of his base, absolutely.
Ann Coulter is very upset this morning.
Paul Joseph Watson at Infowars has declared himself off the Trump train.
Milo Yiannopoulos says he's angry with daddy, predictably enough.
And folks like Mike Cernovich are very angry about this as well and claiming that anybody who backs Trump on this thing, anybody who thinks this isn't the worst idea in the world should join the U.S. military.
To which I say to people like Cernovich, well, you seem very concerned about Pizzagate.
Why don't you go join the D.C. police force?
You know, the idea that you are concerned about something happening in the world, and this is the rationale, you must join the military if you care about persecuting a war, or prosecuting a war, or you must join the police force or the border force if you want people to do their jobs, that's silly.
But, The reason that so many people are upset is because there are a lot of people who bought into the original concept of Trump as sort of a Ron Paul isolationist, and what Trump actually is, is an isolationist who, if he gets pissed off, fires missiles at things.
That's all the evidence we have so far.
We don't know that he's now an interventionist, we don't know he's somebody who plans, and this is the great debate.
What Trump did in Syria last night, was that something where Trump is actually now going to shift his entire policy on Syria and pursue something that's more coherent and cohesive?
Or is it going to be a situation where Donald Trump basically, earlier this week, said, everything is fine in Syria, don't care what Assad does, Assad gasses a bunch of people, he sees it on TV, he says, oh those poor babies, and then he goes and he shoots off a bunch of missiles, and then that's it.
If that's it, that's not going to be good, but we don't know the answer yet.
You know, that seems to me the most plausible solution here is that he doesn't have a coherent strategy.
The only reason I say that is because they're members of the Defense Department who are already saying this was a one-off, that this isn't going to be something that is repeated, and they've yet to roll out what their strategy actually is.
But there's a lot of confusion.
So let's start with what happened before all of this.
So in 2013, Donald Trump was very militant about not getting involved in Syria.
He had a series of tweets in which he specifically talked about this.
He tweeted, if we can get those up, he said the president must get congressional approval before attacking Syria.
Big mistake if he does not.
We'll talk about the constitutionality of this in a second.
And then he also tweeted that if the U.S.
attacks Syria, it'll be a terrible idea.
He says if the U.S.
attack Syria.
This was September 2nd, 2013, and hits the wrong targets, killing civilians.
There will be worldwide health base.
Stay away and fix broken U.S.
And yet now he's involving himself.
And then he also tweeted, President Obama, do not attack Syria.
There is no upside and tremendous downside.
Save your powder for another and more important day.
So a lot of his supporters took that seriously, and he can't blame them.
He said during the entire campaign that we never should be involved in Syria.
We should never be involved in Iran.
We should never be involved in Iraq.
We should basically bring everything home and focus on building roads in Iowa.
That was sort of his take.
And so if you look at a lot of his supporters, they have a reason to be upset with him today, because obviously that was not his position here.
He saw something on TV, he heard intelligence reports, and then he decided to act.
And we'll have to see how, you know, we'll have to see how much he ends up acting.
Bob Corker, Senator from Tennessee, he says that he was excited that this happened because he was worried Trump might just make a cheap deal over Russia.
...patron Putin and Russia.
I heard U.N.
Ambassador Nikki Haley criticize Russia.
I have not heard President Trump hold Is Putin or Russia responsible in any way?
He's been far more critical of Barack Obama on this issue than Vladimir Putin.
Why?
Yeah, I don't know.
I have seen, by the way, an evolution even in Russia.
I'd like to see more.
Look, I'm just being honest with you.
I was very concerned in the beginning that there may be an attempt to do some cheap deal with Russia relative to Ukraine and Crimea.
In Syria, and I don't think there's any chance of that now.
I think the president is, the longer he's in office, the more he has people coming in to see him from other countries.
I think that he's developing a body of knowledge and experience that will keep anything like that from occurring, and he'll have an opportunity to see firsthand right now.
So we'll find out.
We'll find out.
You know, Putin is getting very militant over Syria.
Is this a one-off where Trump backs down in the future?
That's possible too.
We just don't know what's going to happen.
But you can see the flip happen in real time.
So earlier this week, Tillerson said that Assad could stay in power.
Then he added, now he's saying after that gas attack, that Russia was complicit or incompetent in preventing the Syria gas attack.
There's information that Russian agents were on the ground as they were organizing the Syrian gas attack.
He also is now saying that there are steps underway to remove Assad altogether, which is precisely 180 degrees polar opposite of what he said earlier this week.
Assad's role in the future is uncertain, clearly, and with the acts that he has taken, it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.
And so what steps is the United States prepared to take in order to remove him from power?
The process by which Saad would leave is something that I think requires an international community effort, both to first defeat ISIS within Syria, So, we can stop it there.
I mean, but that obviously is a flip in position.
to avoid further civil war, and then to work collectively with our partners around the world through a political process that would lead to leaving.
So we can stop it there.
I mean, but that obviously is a flip in position.
I want to talk about all these various positions.
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Okay, so There are really a few different positions that are emerging on Trump.
All we know about Trump is that Trump was deeply affected in an emotional way by what happened in Syria.
So here is what Trump said after speaking last night after the missile attack.
My fellow Americans, on Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack On innocent civilians.
Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children.
It was a slow and brutal death for so many.
Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.
No child of God should ever suffer such horror.
Tonight I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched.
It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.
There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations Under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and ignored the urging of the UN Security Council.
Stop it right there.
There is some irony to this, if you're a Trump follower, and Trump spent his entire campaign ripping on George W. Bush, saying that George W. Bush was a warmonger.
If you recall, what was George W. Bush's excuse for going into Iraq?
It was use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein on his own people, the possibility of future use of weapons of mass destruction on Americans and others across the world, upholding UN sanctions against all of this.
And that's exactly the same template that Trump is using here.
So people have a right to be upset with Trump if they were against the Iraq war.
And now they say, well, what happened to the Trump that we knew and loved here?
The fact is that isolationism runs up against reality, not only because you see nasty pictures on TV, but because it turns out that there are nasty forces in the world from Iran to Russia who are interested in maximizing their own power at the expense of U.S.
power.
And that's really where America's interest lies here, not in the human rights violations, which are terrible but exist all over the world.
It really lies in the idea that a strengthened Russia that has an impact in broadening the sphere of influence for Iran And for places like Lebanon and Syria and Assad.
When you do all of this, you're heightening the chance of war against America's allies, war against citizens of the West, and terrorism against citizens of the West.
And Assad has been complicit in that.
All of that said, basically there are three solutions, three possible things that can be done here.
And we'll talk about all of them.
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