Strikes add to Syrian mess

The history of American military intervention in faraway lands has been pockmarked mostly by failures after World War II. Its latest adventure in raining 59 tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase suspected to have been the source of a chemical attack on a rebel-held province could be another geopolitical mess and a possible slide into another war that the Americans do not want. The missile strikes of Friday were intended to send a message from the new occupant of the White House who will not tolerate misadventures like a murderous sarin nerve gas attack, which killed in their beds sleeping children too. The question here is whether the evidence was irrefutable enough to fix the attack on Bashar-al-Assad’s air force, or is there any credence at all to the Russian claim that ISIS may have had access to the evil stockpile and may have delivered it with the newfound drone capabilities.

Assad may have been emboldened by recent American pronouncements that they can do nothing about his presence in the Syrian melting pot in which no one is really quite sure as to who is fighting who and why. The Assad regime itself may have killed half a million people in the last six years as Barack Obama vacillated, even though he was not as much of a pacifist as the Democrats would like to believe, as he continued to put American forces in the line of fire on foreign soil as much as his predecessors. The propensity of the global policeman to rain bombs or induce attacks on the Middle East at the slightest provocation has not changed. The world must be concerned at this, more so as the decision making was virtually by one man when he was at a Florida beach golf resort talking trade with the visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping. The major powers have built up a huge record of inciting regional conflicts or messing up existing ones.