Hasta La Gadget!

It was only a few weeks ago that Samsung confirmed the ongoing rumors that it would release the ill-fated Galaxy Note 7 on the world once again as a refurbished device. It appears the Korean phone maker is wasting no time, as one of the first refurbished Note 7s has made its public debut, sporting some slightly modified hardware. The … Continue reading

U.S. President Donald Trump claims the objective of his cruise missile strike on Syria is to deter Syrian President Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons again. But six years into Syria’s brutal civil war, Trump does not have the luxury of defining his objective that narrowly. Whether he likes it or not, he will be judged by his intervention’s impact on the trajectory of this war. And there, his action has no path to success.

By now, it is clear that the missile strike has not impeded Assad from using his air force to strike rebel strongholds. In fact, Syrian warplanes reportedly carried out strikes yesterday against rebels near the city of Homs — taking off from the very air base hit by U.S. missiles. Trump even gave Assad advanced notice via Russian President Vladimir Putin, which enabled the Syrian dictator to move his troops and bunker his planes. Moreover, Trump left one of the airstrips at the targeted base untouched, which is why Assad could quickly use the base to launch further attacks.

Very soon, Trump will face the first reactions to his strike. Both Assad and Putin are likely to intensify their assault on the rebel strongholds and the civilians living in those areas. The end result will be a more intensified civil war with more civilian casualties and even greater difficulty for diplomatic efforts to bear fruit. This will create two opposite pressures ― pressure to de-escalate as a result of confusion over what the U.S. is trying to achieve and pressure to escalate in order to save face and achieve a defensible result before any de-escalation takes place.

The end result will be a more intensified civil war with more casualties and greater difficulty for diplomatic efforts.

The de-escalation option will reveal the significant limitations to Trump’s new-won sympathy for the plight of the Syrian people, as well as to his commitment to prolonged military operations. If he chooses escalation, on the other hand, he risks a wider regional war, including potential confrontation with Russia. The dynamics of this particularly complicated conflict will make Trump lose control of the course of events. Furthermore, the type of military operation that could potentially steer developments in Syria is so sizable that both Congress and the American public would vehemently oppose it, as they did in 2013.

Whichever path Trump chooses, success is unlikely.

But what if Trump had the political maneuverability to get away with the narrow objective of simply deterring Assad from gassing his own people? Couldn’t the cruise missile strike be successful?

Even in that hypothetical scenario, the odds are against Trump because it won’t entirely remove the use of chemical weapons from the Syrian theater. After all, the so-called Islamic State has reportedly used chemical weapons in Syria and Iraq more than 52 times. Nor will it stop Assad from killing thousands of his own people using conventional weapons. The pictures may be less alarming, but the carnage will continue, making Trump’s action difficult to defend.

Helping ensure that civilians aren’t trapped in Syria should be the first and most obvious thing the U.S. can do to help.

At that point, the very same people cheering Trump’s intervention will turn against him, feeling betrayed and let down. In their view, Trump will have left the job unfinished. The impulse that “something must be done” to put an end to the humanitarian disaster in Syria is correct. But when that “something” can only mean military measures, the U.S. makes itself part of the problem rather than the solution.

It is profoundly hypocritical of Trump to launch missile strikes to protect Syrian children when he himself has prevented those same children from finding refuge in America. During his election campaign, Trump callously stated that he could “look in [Syrian refugee children’s] faces and say ‘You can’t come.’ I’ll look them in the face.”

Helping ensure that children and civilians aren’t trapped in Syria should be the first and most obvious thing the U.S. can do to help. Second, a far more robust dedication toward finding a diplomatic solution is needed, although such a solution is now more difficult to achieve. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry should be commended for his efforts to broker a Syrian deal. I describe in my forthcoming book on the Iran deal negotiations that Kerry, together with former President Barack Obama, provided a key ingredient for the success of those talks: a near unprecedented degree of political will and commitment toward making the negotiations succeed.  

Trump launching strikes before trying diplomacy gives little hope that he has the political will to truly resolve the conflict.

Diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear program had been taking place on and off for more than a decade. But those negotiations were profoundly flawed. And even when they became more appropriately structured and realistic, they often faltered due to insufficient political will from one or both sides. The readiness to expend the necessary political capital and pay the domestic political price to achieve a deal was simply missing. Diplomacy had to succeed on the cheap.

But complex international disputes such as the stand-off over the Iranian nuclear program or the Syrian civil war cannot be resolved on the cheap. Trump launching strikes before trying diplomacy gives little hope that he has the political will to truly resolve the conflict.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In this week’s episode of Scheer Intelligence, Robert Scheer interviews attorney Bill Blum, a Truthdig columnist and a lecturer at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.

The two examine Blum’s recent column, “Bill Clinton Laid the Groundwork for Trump’s Ugly Immigration Policies,” in which Blum explains how Trump’s harsh policies “haven’t sprung from thin air” but rather “owe a specific debt to legislation enacted during the tenure of none other than President William Jefferson Clinton.”

Blum tells Scheer how he found “legal antecedents in the Clinton administration” that “created the machinery that Donald Trump and his team now want to use to expand the deportation of the undocumented population in the United States to new levels.”

Scheer commented that, although Blum’s column is “startling” to many readers, it reinforces an important narrative: Trump is not a new manifestation of evil, but rather an outcome of decades of inequality. Scheer adds that Blum’s analysis reminds readers of the overlooked failures of the Democratic Party.

“Scapegoating immigrants and linking immigrants to crime—particularly violent crime—didn’t begin with Donald Trump,” Blum continues. “It was greatly accelerated under Bill Clinton.”

Blum also addresses the expedited removal of undocumented immigrants. Blum explains:

“[Trump] is building on what was already given to him by the law. And I don’t think we can just say, ‘Oh, this is the process of unforeseen consequences at work. … When it comes to illegal immigration, I have to think people as smart as the Clintons understood those consequences as well. So what I would like to advocate is that as we struggle for a progressive approach to immigration, we don’t seek to return to the status quo before Donald Trump. Because that was unacceptable.”

The two also discuss the Mexican border and the war on drugs, as well as the economic impact of undocumented immigrants.

Scheer Intelligence is also available in iTunes. Click, share, subscribe.

—Adapted from Truthdig.com

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

What happens when a cat has the power to instantly teleport itself, and its owner, practically anywhere? Well, there’s near-death, followed by more near-death and more near-death… then food.

Read more…

WASHINGTON ― On Thursday night, President Donald Trump authorized the military to launch several dozen cruise missiles from the Mediterranean Sea at a Syrian airfield. The strike was meant to punish Syria’s President Bashar Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons to attack his own citizens.

It was a dramatic reversal, not only from Trump’s own pledges to limit U.S. involvement in Syria but from his predecessor, who for years resisted growing calls to intervene militarily against the Assad regime. President Barack Obama’s decision to refrain from engagement in 2013 was criticized as feckless at the time and is cited now as one of the reasons that Trump was forced to act. But a revisiting of the arguments and calculations that led Obama to make his decision ― from the fear that it would not be a deterrent to the concerns over how the U.S. would respond to future attacks on civilians ― provides an important blueprint for the major hurdles that Trump will now have to confront.

Even if the Assad regime stops using chemical weapons, it will continue to pummel civilians with barrel bombs, predicted Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department official during the Obama administration. “You’ll see many more pictures of ‘beautiful [Syrian] babies’ [dying] on TV ― specifically to humiliate the United States and show the fecklessness of military action,” he said.

“What will the United States do? Will it get drawn in the way it did in Libya where we started with a civilian protection operation and ended up with a regime change operation?” Goldenberg continued. “This is the biggest danger and I think this was Obama’s biggest concern.”

The Obama administration resisted getting pulled into the Syrian civil war, which began during the Arab Spring protests in 2011. But in August 2013, a sarin gas attack allegedly carried out by the Assad regime killed 1,400 Syrians. It was a humanitarian catastrophe and a clear challenge to Obama’s self-imposed “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, which he laid out the previous year. At first, Obama appeared poised to respond quickly with limited airstrikes ― a variation of what Trump did on Thursday. Three days after the 2013 chemical weapons attack, the U.S. sent armed warships into the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the military drew up attack plans.

But Obama never ordered the military to strike. In the days following the 2013 gas attack, the administration attempted to drum up international and domestic support for a retaliatory response. Obama had hoped for a coordinated response with an ally, but the British Parliament voted down the United Kingdom’s participation. Their vote raised the specter of whether Obama, as well, would allow his government’s legislative branch to have a say. After a 45-minute walk around the South Lawn of the White House with his chief-of-staff, he announced that he would ask for Congressional approval ― even as he maintained that he had the authority to order the strike without consulting lawmakers.

By that point, however, it was becoming clearer that the American public, still reeling from drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an ill-fated intervention in Libya, opposed the move. Lawmakers said they were inundated with calls from constituents urging them to vote against military action. After weeks of deliberation, it was unclear if Obama could get enough votes from Congress. By the time all the views within the administration had filtered up to Obama, he had heard passionate cases both for and against intervention, said Perry Cammack, a staffer for then-Secretary of State John Kerry, at the time. And then, in what appeared to be an-off-the-cuff rhetorical remark, Kerry told reporters the only way for Assad to avoid military action was to turn over his chemical weapons stockpile to the international community within a week. “But he isn’t about to do it and it can’t be done,” Kerry said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov jumped at the narrow opportunity. Five days later ― Washington and Moscow announced a deal in which Syria would do what Kerry had almost jokingly proposed. Obama called off the military strike.

In the years since, even some of Obama’s most strident supporters questioned whether this was the right call. Backing down, they said, damaged U.S. credibility and strengthened Assad’s sense of impunity. But even as the civilian death toll in Syria mounted, Obama maintained that he’d acted prudently. A limited strike would have no practical effect on the Assad regime ― and surviving an attack from the U.S. risked emboldening rather than deterring the dictator, his camp argued. Obama also worried about starting down the slippery slope to deeper involvement in another quagmire in the Middle East.  

Whereas Obama has been faulted for overthinking matters to the point of crippling inaction, critics of the current president say his weakness is his apparent lack of interest in planning.  “I have no confidence these guys have any plan whatsoever,” Goldenberg said.  

Moreover, all of the concerns that made the Obama administration second-guess military action in Syria are still relevant today. If anything, the situation there is messier now than in 2013. The Islamic State militant group controls parts of Syria and Iraq. The U.S. air war against the group depends, in large part on Syria staying out of the way. Meanwhile, Russia has entered the Syrian civil war as a staunch defender of the Assad regime, providing air support to the embattled dictator. The crowded airspace is managed by a fragile deconfliction pact between the U.S. and Russia.

Trump seemed to recognize these complications too ― both during the 2013 debate when he strongly advised the U.S. not to engage in Syria and the presidential campaign when he warned that involvement would precipitate World War III. But in a span of a news cycle, his tune changed this week.  During his daily intelligence briefing on the day of the attack, he asked for military options, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters. Two days later, he had settled on an option and ordered the military to move forward. His administration notified foreign allies and Congressional leadership after the missiles were launched, minutes before they hit their targets.  

The haste with which Trump acted stands in contrast to the weeks of deliberation culminating in a decision not to strike in 2013. Cammack, the former Kerry staffer, described it as “a reflection of the temperaments of the two presidents.”

But it also allowed Trump to avoid a pitfall that ensnared his predecessor. By moving swiftly, the president earned plaudits from lawmakers and pundits ― some of whom swooned over the images that the military had released of the damage to the Syrian airfield. Even those who have accused Trump of being unhinged in the past praised the strikes as a decisive and proportionate response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. That might be because the U.S. was already regularly dropping bombs in Syria against ISIS, making the public somewhat desensitized to further military action there. 

But it also could be because by skipping the deliberative process that the Obama administration so meticulously engaged in, the Trump administration didn’t give the public time to sour on the idea.   

I’m worried about whether they did enough of their homework given how quickly decisions were made.
Eric Pelofsky, former NSC official

And yet, the speed with which Trump flipped positions and ordered military action based on his newfound distaste for the Assad regime risks doing exactly what Obama feared in 2013: sparking a series of unforeseen consequences. It is unclear whether the strikes will have any meaningful impact on the Assad regime. Hours after the U.S. attack, Reuters reported that Syrian warplanes took off from the base hit by American cruise missiles. On Friday and Saturday, Khan Sheikhoun, the opposition-held site of the chemical weapons attack earlier in the week, was hit by more airstrikes.  

“I’m worried about whether they did enough of their homework given how quickly decisions were made,” said Eric Pelofsky, a former National Security Council official in the Obama administration. “ What happens if the Assad regime targets our aircraft as they are continuing to prosecute the war on ISIS inside Syrian airspace?  Are we prepared to take down their air defenses ― and for the consequences of doing that?” continued Pelofsky, who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Even some who criticized Obama’s inaction worried that Trump’s impulsive decision-making process could backfire. “Horrible as the Khan Sheikhoun attack was, the Assad government has used chemical weapons dozens and dozens of times, and has committed numerous other war crimes,” Kori Schake, a former Bush administration official, wrote Friday. “The indiscipline that has characterized the Trump’s actions may lead him to emotional reactions without corresponding strategy.”

S.V. Date contributed reporting.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.