Off the rails

Stephen Cohen makes a lot of sense in terms of how close we are to war with Russia based on a foreign policy that has gone off the rails. This is potentially an existential event, IMHO.

By firing off five dozen Tomahawk missiles at a military airfield, our "America First" president may have plunged us into another Middle East war that his countrymen do not want to fight.

Thus far Bashar Assad seems unintimidated. Brushing off the strikes, he has defiantly gone back to bombing the rebels from the same Shayrat air base that the U.S. missiles hit.

Trump "will not stop here," warned U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday. "If he needs to do more, he will."

If Trump fails to back up Haley's threat, the hawks now cheering him on will begin deriding him as "Donald Obama."

But if he throbs to the war drums of John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and orders Syria's air force destroyed, we could be at war not only with ISIS and al-Qaida, but with Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. - Patrick Buchanan

JFK, we need you now.

Addendum:

I would note that those who say that the Russian air defense systems did not work don’t know what they are talking about.  Not only did Russia sign an agreement with the US not to interfere with US flight operations, the Russian air defenses in Syria are NOT tasked with the protection of the Syrian Air Space.  That is a task for the Syrian air defenses.  The Russians air defenses in Syria are only here to protect Russian personnel and equipment.  This is why the Russians never targeted Israeli warplanes.  And this is hardly surprising as the Russian task force in Syria never had the mission to shut down the Syrian air space or, even less so, to start a war with the USA or Israel.

However, this might be changing.  Now the Russians have withdrawn from their agreement with the USA and, even more importantly, have have declared that the Syrians urgently need more advanced air defense capabilities.  Currently the Syrians operate very few advanced Russian air defense systems, most of their gear is old.

It gets better

Most people think that crimes against humanity or genocide must be the ultimate crime under international law.  They are wrong.  The ultimate crime is aggression.  This is the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trial on this topic:


To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Any questions as to why this is a rather dangerous situation?