President Trump Attacks Syria Again

In response to what he claimed were chemical weapon attacks against Syrian rebels, President Trump ordered missile attacks against targets in Syria. These bombings were done in concert with France and the UK on Friday night. The number of casualties and other damage is at this time unclear.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States, France and Britain launched military strikes in Syria to punish President Bashar Assad for an apparent chemical attack against civilians and to deter him from doing it again, President Donald Trump announced Friday. Pentagon officials said the attacks targeted the heart of Assad's programs to develop and produce chemical weapons.

Explosions lit up the skies over Damascus, the Syrian capital, as Trump spoke from the White House. Syrian television reported that Syria's air defenses, which are substantial, responded to the attack. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said there were no reports of U.S. losses in what he described as a heavy but carefully limited assault.

Trump said the U.S. is prepared to sustain economic, diplomatic and military pressure on Assad until he ends what the president called a criminal pattern of killing his own people with internationally banned chemical weapons. "The evil and the despicable attack left mothers and fathers, infants and children, thrashing in pain and gasping for air. These are not the actions of a man; they are crimes of a monster instead," Trump said. The Syrian government has repeatedly denied any use of banned weapons.

The decision to strike, after days of deliberations, marked Trump's second order to attack Syria. He authorized a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles to hit a single Syrian airfield in April 2017 in retaliation for Assad's use of sarin gas against civilians. The strikes that hit early Saturday in Syria came hours before inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were set to arrive to inspect the site of the apparent attack. LINK

CIA, Torture, Trump, Obama and Hypocrisy: Gina Haspel

Jeb Bush called Donald Trump a chaos candidate. Trump has been a chaos President with his public attacks on his hires and resulting constant personnel turnover. People like Trump thrive within organizational disorder.

Trump's recent firing of Secretary of Stae Rex Tillerson (did Tillerson think he'd get away with calling his boss a f***** moron) and possible reassignment of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to Secretary of State made some people point out Trump's crappy managerial style. Trump may nominate CIA deputy director Gina Haspel to replace Pompeo as CIA head. Haspel evidently oversaw and directed some torture. She destroyed the records of torture at CIA "black sites" during the George W. Bush administration. 

Gina Haspel is set to become the first female director in the 70-year history of the CIA. But smashing that glass ceiling will depend on offering the US Senate a convincing explanation about her dark past. More than a decade ago Haspel reportedly oversaw an infamous secret CIA prison in Thailand where a terrorism suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded, a process that simulates drowning. She is also said to have drafted orders to destroy video evidence of such torture, which prompted a lengthy justice department investigation that ended without charges

Some Trump opponents believe that Trump's endorsement of Haspel is horrible, wicked, evil and very bad. They claim that Trump's selection means that America now endorses torture. Bad Trump. There's at least one problem with this argument. When President Obama took office he could have turned Federal government machinery against the torturers. That move would have been moral if politically and perhaps even personally dangerous. President Obama and Attorney General Holder decided against that. As Adam Serwer points out:

Reaction to Chris Kyle's Murder

Chris Kyle, a former US Navy SEAL, was the most dangerous sniper in the history of the US military. He had over 150 confirmed kills and multiple Bronze and Silver Stars. Kyle was wounded in combat. He completed four tours of Iraq and once killed a rocket launcher bearing insurgent from a little over a mile away. In short he was the best at what he did. When he left the military to be with his family he wrote a best selling autobiography, American Sniper, detailing his story. He didn't take any of the royalties from this book but instead donated them to the families of SEALS killed in combat.  He also gave away the money he made from appearances or book signings. Kyle started a non-profit foundation, FITCO, to work with veterans suffering from disabilities, whether physical or emotional/mental like PTSD. Kyle did a lot of hands-on volunteer work with veterans. He was pretty dedicated towards raising awareness of the challenges that veterans face reintegrating into society and doing what he could to help veterans meet those challenges.

Kyle was supposed to help work security at the Super Bowl but evidently decided to decline that opportunity in order to volunteer with a veteran he didn't know, Eddie Ray Routh, who was suffering from PTSD. The men went to a shooting range. Apparently, at some time on Saturday, Eddie Ray Routh murdered both Chris Kyle as well as a friend of Kyle's, Chad Littlefield. So a man who survived four tours of Iraq and an Iraqi bounty being placed on his head was murdered in the US. Kyle leaves a wife and two small children behind.

Now this isn't the first time this has happened to a combat veteran. And it definitely won't be the last. The news is full of stories where someone survives the war zone abroad only to return home and get murdered. Usually when things like this happen, people murmur words of sympathy and curse the evil person who took the life. But see, Chris Kyle was also something of a conservative who was quite proud of having served his nation in the Armed Forces. He also was not a fan of current gun control proposals or the current Administration. I haven't read his book yet but it's probably a pretty fair bet that Kyle was probably close to if not 180 degrees different from my political beliefs.
So evidently that made it okay for some people to snark or joke about his untimely death.
Whether it was the Mother Jones editor  implying Kyle's death showed we needed more gun control because even SEALS aren't safe, random twitter users calling Kyle a hillbilly liar, saying his death was poetic justice or karma, alternet commenters calling Kyle a "mass murderer","psycho", "serial killer", or Ron Paul saying that "live by the sword die by the sword" there was an unseemly number of people that were eager to denigrate Kyle (and by extension all soldiers) after his death.

I am not a fan of an interventionist foreign policy. I did not and do not support the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But once we're there, we're there. Chris Kyle did not commit war crimes. He killed people in a war zone who were trying to kill him or other Americans. He wasn't sitting in Langley dropping bombs on children and or writing memos claiming the right to kill Americans. He put his life on the line overseas to save soldier's lives. And upon his return he continued to look out for soldiers. He died trying to save a soldier's life. There are American veterans today who are alive because Chris Kyle was watching their backs. You may or may not think that makes him a hero, but there's no way that makes him a bad guy as far as I can see. But even if you do think that Kyle was a bad person for his politics or his attitude, I don't see why someone should crack jokes or make light of his death. Is that where we've come to as a nation? Someone politically opposed to us is murdered and we hurl insults and unfunny jokes? That's disgusting. I have family members who served in Desert Storm. I am very glad they returned safely. Another younger relative is at West Point now. In the unthinkable event of their murder I wouldn't have much nice to say to anyone who implied that their death was somehow karma for their "bad" deeds or politics. Even if you think that our foreign policy is wrong and needs to be radically changed as soon as possible, (and I certainly do) I just don't think you do your argument or yourself any favors by making fun of dead soldiers. Something has gone very wrong in our political culture when someone's death just invites more vitriol. Given time and experience Chris Kyle may have become a modern day Smedley Butler. Or he may not have. He may have stayed most comfortable on the right. Either way he (nor most other human beings) did not deserve to be murdered and then mocked after death. Again, it's not about if you agreed with his politics or not. It's just basic human decency.

One of Kyle's last interviews from January 2013.

Women in Combat?

You might have missed it but recently two female Army reservists decided to sue to have combat operations opened to women. 

Command Sergeant Major Jane Baldwin and Colonel Ellen Haring, both Army reservists, said policies barring them from assignments "solely on the basis of sex" violated their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.  "This limitation on plaintiffs' careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits," the women said in the suit filed in U.S. District Court.

I thought this was interesting because it appears at first glance that the women are more interested in their personal career options and monetary gain than they are in a supposed class based grievance. Of course to be fair, their personal interests and the larger class based unfairness would be congruent in this case if you buy their argument, which I don't. However, I am fascinated by hypocrisy as you probably can tell by now and this entire issue is full of hypocrisy on all sides.

I think the differences between races are usually small and often caused by environmental factors.  "Race" itself is often something which is ill-defined and somewhat arbitrary and can change in meaning from time to time or society to society. What is "white" or "black" in Latin America or the Caribbean or the Middle East may not be so in the United States. The racial biological differences simply don't exist to the level some think. But the biological differences between men and women are real. They are also shaped by environmental factors of course as none of us grow up in a vacuum but there are some very obvious irreducible differences between men and women. In a wartime/combat situation this comes down to the fact that men are stronger and more aggressive while women are simply worth more to their society reproductively. There have not been, as far as I know, any successful societies that routinely sent women marching off to war while the men stayed home.  No one ever says "save the men and children first" or angrily points out an enemy's perfidy by claiming "they killed innocent men".  No parent ever asks a prospective daughter-in-law how she will provide for and protect their son.  Men are, by and large, the replaceable gender when it comes to such things. That's not a complaint. It's just a fact.

Now in the modern feminist world we are not supposed to notice such things and if we do notice them we are supposed to believe that they are only and always the product of invidious discrimination. Well maybe. Maybe we really can go against thousands of years of evolution and turn the gender with seven times less testosterone into soldiers and warriors that are just as fierce as their male counterparts. After all, war has changed as the women litigants point out. A roadside bomb doesn't care what gender you are. And considering some of the people we're fighting against or for that matter allying with these days a captured male soldier might be in just as much danger of rape as a female one.

The problem though is that at the very same time that some women are chafing at the bit to be formally assigned and not just attached to combat units, we are also told that violence against women is the worst thing that can happen and therefore we need the Violence Against Women Act, tons of spending on domestic violence and anti-rape programs, etc. In fact the military itself has a big problem with rape. So I have trouble understanding, how if violence against women is such a horrible event, why we would want to place more women into an arena of organized brutal violence. 

The other issue is of course one of standards. Women soldiers do not have to meet the same physical standards as men soldiers. Some of them could no doubt but most could not. Do we believe that the standards are specifically designed to give a soldier and his unit the best chance to survive in combat operations ? Or do we think the standards are created for other reasons. If I were in combat I would want to know that the person beside me could carry their own load and if need be pull, carry or lift me out of harm's way. If I had good reason to doubt that would the unit be as cohesive? 

These pics of Air Force reservists are somewhat NSFW.(nursing mother and partially visible chest) These are not combat troops. But the pics exemplify my worries about women in combat. These images are simply not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of US combat personnel in particular or soldiers/warriors in general. In fact they are virtually the antithesis of what I think soldiers are about. There were no new mothers landing on the beaches of Normandy or making the last stand at Thermopylae. There have been about 1.3 million US military personnel killed in all US wars since the Revolutionary War. From what I can tell somewhere between 1000-2000 of those people were women. Now you will often hear women talk about all the male presidents or CEO's or other people at the top of the heap while intimating that women need to have an equal number of those positions for the next millennium or so. But it's quite rare that you would see women clamoring to make up an equal number of those killed, wounded or maimed in war so perhaps I should applaud the women litigants. Equality and all that.

I believe in legal and actual equality between men and women. I supported the Lily Ledbetter Act and oppose discrimination in hiring or promotion.  I think that every man and woman has some characteristics within that are stereotypically associated with the opposite gender. And I think that by and large women and men are more alike than different. But equality does not mean that men and women are identical. Because we aren't. To quote Meg from Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle In Time, "Like and equal are not the same thing at all". Women do not currently play in the NFL because they are not capable of doing so. There's no shame in that. The vast majority of men are not capable of playing in the NFL (or dare I say of being a combat soldier). But in the NFL, as dangerous as it is, usually your life and the lives of those around you are not at risk. If women don't play in the NFL, which is after all a sport, why would we want women in the exponentially more demanding and dangerous combat arena. It doesn't make sense to me. The military is there to kill people and blow stuff up. It is not there to provide day care, career advancement, nursing stations or anything else along those lines. There are ways for women soldiers to serve their country proudly and with distinction without being in direct combat.

The obvious parallel of course is between the opening up of formal combat roles to black men and the desegregation of the US military. I don't think that's a good analogy. Even before Truman's order to desegregate black men had fought and died in every war America ever had. The battle to lift formal combat restrictions was based on the black male desire to prove themselves as men, get rid of segregation and discrimination in the larger society, including but not limited to voting rights. The lawsuit about women in combat seems to be as I wrote a more personal selfish desire for career advancement and perhaps a larger activist desire to blur or eliminate differences in gender roles.

Well to each his/her own but I actually like distinct gender roles and don't feel that they are automatically oppressive. But as you've probably figured out by now I am not a feminist. Not even close. I do believe in equality and if the women could meet the exact same standards as the men I would tell them to rock on with their bad selves and cheerfully send them off to combat. Yeah right. But I am no military expert and have no military experience. These are just my ramblings.

What's your take?

1) Should women have the right to serve in combat?
2) Should combat groups be gender segregated?
3) Should physical standards between male and female soldiers be made the same?