Sober Up, part twelve: Mr. Trump Gets Trumped

Events in the insane world in which we live are happening so quickly that it is impossible, at least for me given my duties as a husband and father, to produce commentaries about those events with rapidity.

That is, I had intended to write about the continuing deep state coup against the clueless, groundless narcissist in the White House who has surrounded himself through his life with a gaggle of Talmudists to serve as his consigliares, enablers and fixers, that is being conducted with committed naturalists of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” who are equally narcissistic but, being grounded in a commitment to the eradication of opposition to the permanent administrative state, are relentless to overturn the results of another presidential election. Given the latest “allied” missile strike against Syria, however, the principal focus of this commentary is going to be on the cooptation of President Donald John Trump by members of the warfare party that he chose to serve in his administration.

This having been established, though, I do want to reiterate a few comments about the ongoing coup against the best friend that the Zionist State of Israel has ever had in the White House, Donald John Trump, who truly does not know his mind from moment to the next and who seems so disengaged from the legislative process that he permitted himself to sign a $1.3 trillion spending package that only empowers the swamp that he promised to drain and, most tragically of all, continues funding for Planned Barrenhood. So much for the shell game played by the carnival barkers in the careerist Republicans in the Congress of the United States of America who promised to reduce spending and to end funding for Planned Barrenhood if only they got control of the White House. Ladies and gentlemen, this is all farce.

Anyhow, let me reiterate how Donald John Trump is very much to blame for enabling the deep state plotters who first tried to thwart his election and have done everything imaginable—and mostly highly illegal—to sabotage his presidency thereafter.

First, Donald John Trump knew nothing about the Constitution of the United States of America before his election on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. He still knows nothing about the Constitution of the United States of America. While I am a critic of the false principles underlying the Constitution, it is nonetheless true that it is the governing charter of the Federal government. One who aspires to be the chief executive of the United States of America ought to have some familiarity with the provisions of the document that outlines the responsibilities and powers of the Federal government, including the limitations upon the exercise of those powers. (Spoiler alert: Military action not undertaken in response to an actual attack upon the territory of the United States of America needs to be authorized by an actual declaration of war passed by both Houses of the Congress of the United States of America.)

Mind you, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro and all other statists of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” had contempt for the Constitution of the United States of America because he believed it to be an “outdated” document that had to be deconstructed of its actual meaning to provide for the alleged “needs” of “the people” in a “changed” world.

In other words, the former president and commander-in-chief of the coup against the current president believed in the sort of “living constitution” (see the appendix below for the late Associate Justice William Brennan’s defense of this false concept) that can be manipulated by Federal judges and/or ignored by presidents and congresses who have the “needs” of “the people” in mind. This is nothing other than a secular version of the late Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II’s “living tradition,” which was relabeled as the “hermeneutic of continuity” by Antipope Emeritus Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, that is nothing other than condemned Modernist precept of “dogmatic evolutionism.” Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of course, is just an open dogmatic evolutionist without any pretext.

President Donald John Trump is not a reader. He fashions himself a doer. He simply hath not the attention span to engage in the realm of ideas. He reacts to the world by pure viscera, and he may never realize that his visceral instincts, while correct on some occasions, can never be substituted for a clear-sighted understanding of First and Last Things, ignorance of which consigns any man, including the president, to becoming his own worst enemy over the time and also to becoming easy prey for those who make it appear as though they know the world better (another spoiler alert: military generals and intelligence officials) even though they, the “experts,” are equally clueless about First and Last Things.

Second, Donald John Trump was also ignorant of the actual complexity of the existence, no less the structure, of the Executive Office of the President, which is a massive behemoth consisting of 1,869 full-time employees. It was as president-elect that Trump remarked to the two-faced man who had tried to sabotage his election and was conspiring even at that time to undermine and cripple his presidency, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, that he, Trump, did not know how many people worked in the White House. Such ignorance was inexcusable and is directly responsible for much of the chaos in his presidency as the man with the gigantic combover of dyed hair was simply unprepared to staff the Executive Office of the President, which is why he “outsourced” much of the personnel selection process of the nogoodniks in the Republican National Committee who cared only about giving their friends cushy jobs and to try to “limit the damage,” as they continue to see it, that could be done if Trump actually did carry through with his threat to “drain the swamp.”

Third, Donald John Trump, as has been noted on this site several times before, was equally unprepared to name individuals to fill sub-Cabinet positions in the fifteen Cabinet departments of the Federal government. This is how he got saddled with holdovers from the Obama/Soetoro administration, including the nefarious Sally Yates, who served as Acting Attorney General of the United States of America while a New Yorker who is tougher than Trump, Charles H. Schumer, the Minority Leader of the United States Senate, slow-walked the nomination of United States Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (R-Alabama) to serve as the Attorney General of the United States of America. Obviously, it should go without saying that Trump’s selection of Sessions was mistaken in the first place.

Fourth, Donald John Trump made a huge mistake by retaining the petty statist and vicious narcissist named James Brien Comey as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.).  Comey should have been fired. Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Andrew McCabe, should have been fired. Even without all of the evidence that has been revealed in the past fifteen months concerning the corruption within the highest reaches of the F.B.I., the United States Department of Justice (D.O.J.), the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), the National Security Agency (N.S.A.) and the United States Department of State, Comey and McCabe should never have been retained.

Fifth, Donald John Trump made a “yuge” mistake, as they say in New York, by thinking that he could schmooze the retained Comey, whose new book confirms that he had contempt for Trump before his election and distrusted him after his inauguration. Trump has far, far too much confidence in his ability to win people over to his side, and it was when he saw that he could not “play” Comey, who has always been every bit the self-seeker, he chose a most inopportune to fire Comey, which played into the latter’s hand perfectly.  Comey wanted a “special counsel” appointed to investigate the nonexistent “collusion” of the Trump campaign with Russia, and he got exactly the man he wanted, deep state’s own Robert Mueller (see an editorial in The Boston Herald on Mueller’s prosecutorial misconduct in his current role as leader of another American coup, Investigators Reveal Bias Against Trump) and Real Clear Politics’ Carl Cannon’s Special Prosecutorial Abuse, when another ill-chosen appointee, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein, chose his former boss at the United States Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division to conduct what has turned out to be an investigation whose scope is ever-widening.

These were completely unforced errors. However, Donald John Trump is the epitome of the “carnal man,” which is meant not only his notorious behavior as a serial adulterer in each of his three “marriages” but, much, much more importantly, his absolute obsession with himself and how he his viewed by others, to say nothing of how much he permits himself to be duped by military “experts” who are themselves the most carnal of men.

Perhaps the following explanation of the vainglorious pursuits of carnal men as found in Father Charles Arminjon’s The End of This World and the Mysteries of Future Life will help to shed some light on what I mean to convey:

This judgment is rightly called universal because it will be exercised over all members of the human race, because it will cover every crime, every misdemeanor, and because it will be definitive and irrevocable.

In the first place, the last judgment will be exercised over all the members of the human race.

The men of every nation, every tribe, and every tongue will appear at it. There will be no more distinction of wealth, birth, or rank among them. Those whose names were Alexander, Caesar, and Diocletian will be jumbled together with herdsmen who, at this moment, are grazing their flocks on unknown, deserted shores, where the ashes of these masters of the world lie scattered. Men will then be ruled by concerns other than those of curiosity and empty admiration. Far more serious spectacles will hold their gaze and attention; the figures of the world will have passed away, and the victories of great captains, the works conceived by genius, the enterprises and great discoveries will be deemed mere shams and child's play.

Just as in the theater, says St. John Chrysostom, when an actor goes off the stage, it is not because of the part he has played that people admire him; they praise neither the fact that he has imitated the personality of a king, nor the fact that the has acted a lackey or a beggar: rather, they praise his skill, and they applaud only the perfection with which he has played his part. So at the last judgment, a man will not be honored because he was a king, an eloquent orator, a minister, and a great statesman. All these honors and distinctions, which the world holds in such high esteem, will be deemed of no merit and of no value. Men will be praised solely for their virtues and good works: Opera enim millrun seguungtur illos.

Secondly, this judgment is called universal, because it will cover every crime and offense. Only then will human history begin. In the clarity of the light of God, all the crimes, public and secret, that have been committed in every latitude and in every age, will be seen clearly and in detail. The whole life of each human being will be laid bare. No circumstance will be omitted: no action, word, or desire will remain unknown. We shall be reminded of the different periods we have gone through; the lustful man will have his disorderly living and libertine speeches set out before him; the ambitious man, his devious, Machiavellian ways.

The judgment will unravel and bring out all the strands and the duplicity of those intrigues, so cleverly hatched; it will set out in their true light all those base repudiation of principles, those craven acts of complicity, that men invested with public authority have sought to justify, whether by invoking the specious reasons of state, or by covering them up with the mask of piety or disinterestedness. The Lord, says St. Bernard, will reveal all those abuses people concealed from themselves, all those unknown dissipations, those planned crimes where the only thing lacking was the actual commission; those pretended virtues and those forgotten, secret sins, blotted out from the memory, will appear suddenly, like enemies darting out form an ambush: Prodient ex improvisio et quasi ex insidiis.

Without doubt there are men so hardened in evil that the thought of this terrible manifestation has little effect upon them. Being familiar with crime, they treat it as a subject of amusement and boasting. They probably boast in assessing the judgment with the same insolence, to defy by their cynical and arrogant attitude the majesty of God and the conscience of [mankind]. Vain hope! sin will no longer be viewed from the opinion of carnal men, ready to excuse the most violent outbursts because they do not harm any neighbor, either in his goods or in his life. The foulness and disorder of sin will be revealed in the ineffable clarity of the light of God. Sin, says St. Thomas, will be judged as God Himself judges itTunc confusio, respicie aestimationem Dei quae secundum veritatem est de peccato.

Three main classes of men will draw attention to themselves. The first of these will be the sons of justice and light, whose merits and good works will be extolled, and given public praise and approval by the perspicacious and infallible Judge, whose testimony can admit of no error or contradiction.

In the second class will be the sons of Voltaire, the leaders of free-thought and revolution who, at the present time, are hatching dark and sacrilegious plots against Christ and His Church. They will be terror-stricken, and they will tremble with unspeakable horror, when they see appear in His glory and omnipotence Him whom they had wished to crush, whom they had stigmatized by calling Him the enemyfool, and the infamous one. They will utter a final scream of rage and malediction, crying out like Julian the Apostate: Thou hast conquered, Galilean!

Finally, the third category of men who will be given special attention at the judgment will be composed of the sons of Pilate, the worshipers of the golden calf and the chameleons of wealth and power. Clouds without water, as St. Jude calls them, drifting along with every opinion and doctrine, with no other religious or political compass than that of their ambition, always ready to ride rough-shod over their conscience and their principles; speculating on the blood of souls, for lack of gold, and delivering up Christ like the Roman money-lender, in order to purchase the honors and goodwill of the master of the moment.

This hideous, repellent type recurs continuously, with the same characteristics, at every period of crisis and social unrest. St. John, in his Gospel, has popularized this archetype of lying and cowardice in a figure of speech forever popular and living, in which all our Pilates in legislation and governmentwho sell the just man for the sake of procuring favors and lucrative honors, will be eternally recognized. Such men as these will learn at the judgment that it is not expedient to serve two masters. They will curse the straw Caesars to which they rendered that which they refused to render to God, and will exclaim: Ergo erravimus. We have erred then." (Father Charles Arminjon, The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, translated by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2008, pp. 101-104.)

This describes both Donald John Trump and each of the vast number of the conspirators who are trying to oust him from office. Neither Trump (nor his supporters in the ultimate world of carnal men known as “talk radio,” a veritable bastion of naturalist babbling and blathering) nor those who have done everything possible to throw him out of office—which may just happen in the hapless Republicans, who cave to the determined Democrats at almost every turn in order not to offend
“moderate” voters, lose control of the House and Senate after surrendering effective control of the national policy agenda Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi)—understand that the following words quoted just above applies to each and every one of them—and us—without exception:

The judgment will unravel and bring out all the strands and the duplicity of those intrigues, so cleverly hatched; it will set out in their true light all those base repudiation of principles, those craven acts of complicity, that men invested with public authority have sought to justify, whether by invoking the specious reasons of state, or by covering them up with the mask of piety or disinterestedness. (Father Charles Arminjon, The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, translated by Susan Conroy and Peter McEnerny. Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2008, pp. 101-104.)

Although I will have more to say in a week or two about the ongoing coup and its defense by the smarmy, self-serving James Brien Comey, who is small in moral stature even though he stands four inches shy of seven feet all (see, for instance, George Neumayr’s How Comey Lied About Spying on Trump Tower) and a very honest Comey's Last Stand for the Deep State by, of all people, Mark Penn, who was one of William Jefferson Blythe Clinton’s pollsters and served as Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton’s strategist in 2008, suffice it to say for the moment that Trump has helped to enable it by his ignorance and inexperience, which shows itself in so many ways, including his misplaced trust in the Republican Congressional leadership and the almost-blind, if not blind, trust he places in military generals and other war mongers such a his new National Security Adviser, John Bolton (who is not be mistaken for the late Officer Joe Bolton.)

If It’s April, American Missiles Must Be Falling on Syria

Anyone among the “vast” readership of should know from my “Sober Up” series that I carry no brief for President Donald John Trump and that I place zero trust and less than zero “hope” in naturalism of any kind to do anything but advance naturalism. Even well-intentioned efforts to curb the administrative state and to staff the Federal judiciary with appointees who will apply rather than make the law are reversible over the course of time. Presidents and their administrations come and go. The cadre of lobbyists and career civil servants in the Federal bureaucracy stay, at least for the most part. Everything a naturalist of the false opposite of the “right” seeks to do is written in the sand, which is why I do not get excited or agitated by this or that development as I am aware that even supposedly “good” developments are not what they appear to be, something that I have spent a whole lot of time exposing in great detail as the “fine print” of what, for example, seems like a “pro-life” initiative is actually very flawed.

One thing, though, that is eminently predictable about presidential administrations is that the Judeo-Masonic warfare party always wins the day. Even Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, who campaigned against President George Walker Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, found himself coopted by Washington’s war-making machine, although there were times that he ignored the advice of military advisers, most notably when he decided to use military force without Congressional authorization of any kind in an effort to remove Moammar Quadafi in Libya in 2011. Libyan remains a land of tribalism and is a center of Mohammedan training camp for terrorists as a result.

President Trump’s deference to the generals is such, though, that his ignorance of history, including the long history of presidents being manipulated into wars by the military and/or by the forces of the military-industrial complex that were the subject of President Dwight David Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961:

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small,there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. (Dwight D. Eisenhower -- Farewell Address.) 

Although Eisenhower did not understand that the authentic security of one's nation is premised upon its subordination to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by the Catholic Church, placing him in concert with today's conciliar officials in the counterfeit conciliar church, the late president and former five star General of the United States Army did have a keen insight into the dangers posed by the rise of what he termed so accurately as the military-industrial complex, which thrives on the constant warfare that former President George Walker Bush and his team of Trotskyite advisers envisioned as “necessary” to “secure” this country and “liberate” other peoples.

President Donald John Trump trusts military leaders implicitly. This trust is misplaced as both the historical and contemporary record demonstrates that both the civilian and military leaders of the United States of America have misled the American people throughout the course of this nation’s history about the “necessity” of every war that has been fought in the name of “national security” and/or in the name of spreading “democracy” and rectifying alleged wrongs throughout the world.

The belief in American exceptionalism—and the necessity of using the armed forces of the United States of America to advance the “American way” throughout the world—was critiqued by the late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn in his famous commencement address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978, almost forty years ago now:

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978.)

President Trump’s visceral deference to military leaders is coupled by a credulous grasp of world events, which are not always what they appear to be. That is, it is an entirely unsettled question who is responsible for the recent gas attack upon civilians in Syria or even if such an attack took place. Moreover, the president, who said less than two weeks ago that the armed forces of the United States of America would be leaving Syria, where, of course, they have never belonged in the first place, has shown deference to French President Emanuel Macron by deciding to keep American military troops in a sovereign country that is in the midst of a civil war:

PARIS, April 15 (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday said he had convinced U.S. President Donald Trump to keep troops in Syria for the long term and limit joint strikes to chemical weapons facilities.

Early on Saturday, the United States, France and Britain launched 105 missiles targeting what they said were three chemical weapons facilities in Syria in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack in Douma on April 7.

"Ten days ago, President Trump was saying 'the United States should withdraw from Syria'. We convinced him it was necessary to stay," Macron said in an interview broadcast by BFM TV, RMC radio and Mediapart online news.

"We convinced him it was necessary to stay for the long term."

The United States, Britain and France said they only hit Syria's chemical weapons capabilities and the strikes were not aimed at toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or intervening in the civil war.

Limiting the strikes to these specific targets was not necessarily Trump's initial plan, Macron said.

"We also persuaded him that we needed to limit the strikes to chemical weapons (sites), after things got a little carried away over tweets," he said.

While it is unusual for a French president to present himself as driving U.S. policy in military matters in the Middle East, Macron and Trump have developed a friendly relationship over the past year.

Macron invited Trump to assist to Bastille day celebrations last year and will travel to Washington on a state visit later this month.

Saturday's strikes on Syria were the first major military operation since Macron's election in May last year.

He reaffirmed that there was proof of chemical attacks, adding: "We had reached a point where these strikes were necessary to give back the (international) community some credibility."

Macron said that failing so far to get the red lines respected had led Russian authorities to think of Western powers that "these people from the international community - they are nice, they are weak".

"He (Russian President Vladimir Putin) has understood it's not the case anymore."

Macron added that Russia, which backs Assad politically and militarily, had made itself complicit in the Syrian government's actions.

"Of course they are complicit. They have not used chlorine themselves but they have methodically built the international community's inability to act through diplomatic channels to stop the use of chemical weapons," he said of Russia.

The French president nevertheless said he wanted to engage in dialogue with all parties involved, including Moscow, in order to find a political solution for Syria. There are no changes to his planned trip to Russia next month, he said.

Macron had warmer words for Turkey. "With those strikes we have separated the Russians and the Turks on this. The Turks condemned the chemical weapons."

Macron added that the strikes on Syria had been "perfectly carried out".

"All of our missiles reached their target," he said.

Macron, criticised by the far-left and far-right and part of the conservatives over the attacks, said France, Britain and the United States had "complete international legitimacy to act." (Macron Convinced Trump to Keep American Troops in Syria.)

So much propaganda, so little time.

Perhaps it is best to deal with all of this in summary fashion.

First, there is no compelling national security interest that requires the United States of America to involve itself in the midst of a sovereign nation’s civil war even if the president went to Congress and obtained a declaration of war passed by a majority of both houses. Military action is thus unjustified and, as will be noted below, imprudent. There exist no casus belli, no causes of war. (See Appendix B for United States Representative John James Duncan, Jr.'s, April 12, 2018, floor speech against war on Syria and Appendix C for United States Senator Rand Paul's questioning of Central Intellligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo)

Second, the leaders of the United States of America, the United Kingdom and the French Republic do not constitute any kind of just authority to undertake a military strike in a sovereign country whose military forces do not constitute a grave and imminent threat to the security of their own people. A duly constituted authority must decide to enter into a justified war, replete with the consequences that must follow from military action. The “allies” have arrogated unto themselves the “right” to act to “rectify” an attack that Russian Television (I know, consider the source) predicted on March 17, 2018, the Feast of Saint Patrick, might be launched as a “false flag” to justify Western intervention (Russian Television) as an action of the first resort, not as a regrettable last resort as is required in most instances by the precepts of the Just War Theory.

Third, the precepts of the Just War Theory demand that military force be used as a last resort in situations when there is a real and legitimate threat to a nation's security and/or in situations where justice has been so disturbed internationally that the only recourse to defend one's nation and/or to restore justice is military force. [This is not to forget, however, then-General Eisenhower's role in the forcible repatriation of Eastern Europeans, most of whom were Catholics, to behind the Iron Curtain after World War II to enforce the terms of the treasonous Yalta Accords. See the appendix below for a brief synopsis of “Operation Keelhaul” and an observation from Mr. Dennis Bilodeau, a one-time reader of this site.]

The judgment to use military force, which is supposed to be governed in the United States of America by a declaration of war passed by both Houses of the Congress of the United State, in such situations must take into account many factors, including whether the good end sought will be outweighed by the foreseen evil to be done in the prosecution of a justified and duly authorized military action after a full consideration of the facts and in light of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law.

Even the best efforts to protect noncombatants from injury and death will fail. Bombs go astray. Noncombatants might be misidentified accidentally as combatants. Soldiers make mistakes in the field of combat. War carries with it terrible consequences, which is why the Catholic Church has taught from time immemorial that every step be taken to assure, as far as is humanly possible in this fallen world, that noncombatants are indemnified and that the damage done to a country's infrastructure and food supply does not create worse conditions that are meant to be redressed by the use of military force.

It was only a year ago tomorrow, April 17, 2017, that President Trump lobbed over fifty missiles into Syria after another gas attack upon civilians that was ordered, so we were told at the time, by Bashar al-Assad, who, though a Mohammedan, has been as protective of Syrian Christians as wad the thuggish lout named Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Trump acted as he did a year ago after he had been lobbied by his Kabbalist daughter, Ivanka Trump Kushner, who was said to be concerned about the innocent children whose deaths she laid at the doorstep of Assad.

This is what I wrote at the time:

Yes, as I have been trying to explain to the readership on this site (and to those who have viewed my You Tube videos), President Donald John Trump is guided by no particular philosophy or ideology. Additionally, he has no grounding in any kind of understanding on matters of faith and morals. He is a man who responds mostly by gut instinct, not clear-headed thinking based upon facts and a reasoned-assessment of circumstances based on even a minimal foundation of logic and morality.

The current president is notorious for fits of rage, displayed usually on Twitter, as he does not know how to curb his emotions and his passions. Although his ready surrender to the “neoconservatives” who have now enlisted him in their never-ending crusade for to make the Middle East “safe” for “America’s only ally” in the region, the Zionist State of Israel, is not in the least bit surprising as he is surrounded by Talmudists, some of whom (the Kushers and Council of Economic Advisers Director Gary Cohn, a former employee of Goldman Sachs) are in the ascendancy within the White House power struggle, it does demonstrate the extent to which the president responds viscerally to fast-breaking evets without very little in the way of circumspect reflection. Mr. Cohn, who is a registered Democrat and a globalist with close ties to the nefarious George Soros, a Jewish atheist from Hungary, is apparently so much on the rise within the White House that he might supplant the beleaguered Stephen Bannon as a presidental counselor (see Globalists Eye Takeover As Bannon Takes Heat).

Ah, you doubt my word?

Consider the fact that, as I suspected was the case but had no documentation to cite three days ago (there is sometimes a benefit to being unable to complete articles as quickly as I used to), none other than the Kabbalist by the name of Ivanka Trump Kushner was one who convinced her Daddy, President Donald John Trump, to launch military airstrikes in retaliation for what the use of Sarin nerve gas on innocent civilians on Tuesday, April 4, 2017, upon the orders, it is alleged of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:

DONALD Trump’s decision to rain down 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian air base was sparked by his daughter Ivanka’s “heartbroken” response to Assad’s chemical attack, insiders have claimed.

Trump has long opposed military intervention in Syria – both as a private citizen when he criticised Obama’s intervention in the region, and as President.

But the Republican firebrand is believed to have made his dramatic U-turn after being convinced by his daughter Ivanka’s impassioned response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons on Tuesday.

A source close to the first family said: “Increasingly, Ivanka is having more and more influence over her father.

“She often counsels her father and was very clear that action needed to be taken against Assad in some form.”

“Ivanka was infuriated over the lack of a direct response in the immediate aftermath of the Syrian attack.”

Responding the morning after Assad’s attack, The President’s eldest daughter tweeted: “Heartbroken and outraged by the images coming out of Syria following the atrocious chemical attack today.

Following her comments, the President’s stance on a military response began to shift, quickly claiming the attack was an “affront to humanity” and blasting Assad’s “heinous” actions.

And the following day, hours before launching a flurry of 2,900lb missiles into the country, the President had shifted from isolation to intervention.

He said: “I think what Assad did is terrible.

“I think what happened in Syria is a disgrace to humanity and he’s there, and I guess he’s running things, so something should happen.”

After the missile strike, Ivanka wrote on Twitter: “The times we are living in call for difficult decisions. Proud of my father for refusing to accept these horrendous crimes against humanity.”

The insider added: “Ivanka has her own mind.

“While her dad is driven by his ego and political point-scoring, Ivanka could not be more opposite.

“She has genuine concerns for others and wants to do what is right.

“As she was feeding her kids on Wednesday morning, she thought enough was enough and tweeted her thoughts for everyone to see.

“The response was quite immediate and clearly helped changed her father’s views on the issue of Syria.” (Ivanka Trump Kushner Urged Missile Strike Against Syria.)

There are three things that come to mind at this point.

First, Ivanka Trump Kushner has no business advising her father on matters of public policy, whether foreign or domestic.

Second, Ivanka Trump Kushner has no business advising her father on matters of public policy, whether foreign or domestic.

Third, Ivana Trump Kushner has no business advising his father-in-law on matters of public policy, whether foreign or domestic no less undertaking diplomatic and trade missions in his behalf.

Here are three additional points that come to mind:

First, Jared Kushner has no business advising his father-in-law on matters of public policy, whether foreign or domestic, no less undertaking diplomatic and trade missions in his behalf.

Second, Jared Kushner has no business advising his father-in-law on matters of public policy, whether foreign or domestic, no less undertaking diplomatic and trade missions in his behalf.

Third, Jared Kushner has no business advising his father-in-law on matters of public policy, whether foreign or domestic, no less undertaking diplomatic and trade missions in his behalf, and it appears that the very young Mr. Kushner is exercising an outsized role at the National Security despite administration denials that this is the case (see New Front in White House Civil War As Kushner Asserts Authority at National Security Council and Ivanka and Jared Kusher Operate With Ruthlessness).

Are these points clear?

Good.

President Donald John Trump lives by viscera just as much as the Argentine Apostate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio despite their differences on various matters, and it is because Trump lives by viscera that he has never studied anything about authentic history and knows nothing of a Just War Theory that a statesman who is concerned about governing in a prudent manner must consider and attempt to apply to various events. As Saint Augustine taught us, however, one cannot give what one does not have, and Donald John Trump has nothing in the way of clear-headed rationality to offer that can withstand emotional appeals from his daughter or to restrain his own emotions after viewing images of the innocent victims of an unjust and immoral military assault.

This time, though, Trump was convinced by American military leaders and by the leaders of the United Kingdom and the French Republic, Theresa May and Emanuel Macron, to let the missiles fly. I want to dwell on this for a few moments as there is quite an irony in the fact that Theresa May and Emanuel Macron are militantly pro-abortion, and Theresa May, it should be noted, was fully in favor of the actions of the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) against innocent Charlie Gard last year, and it is in her United Kingdom that young Alfie Evans is being consigned to execution even though he is innocent of any wrongdoing. He is simply guilty of being considered “unfit” to live.

No country, no, not even the United States of America, has any moral “high ground” to speak about crimes against children when its laws permit, if not encourage, the daily slaughter of the innocent preborn and the daily execution of those after birth who are said to be “brain dead” or who are suffering from such illness, condition or even a loss of a “quality of life” that requires their deaths to be expedited by the sort of “comfort care” that former First Lady Barbara Bush is opting at this time to receive.

Let’s face facts.

Look, the removal of Syrian Bashar al-Assad has been a longstanding goal of the Zionist State of Israel, and Donald John Trump is even more deferential to desires of Israeli leaders than he is to his own military generals. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist, which I am not and never have been, to understand the simple truth that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his own military advisers both encouraged and aided the most recent American attack. Indeed, the evidence seems pretty clear in this regard:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the US led air strikes on Syrian targets, but warned that Iran’s presence in the country further endangered it.  

“Early this morning, under American leadership, the United States, France and the United Kingdom demonstrated that their commitment is not limited to proclamations of principle,” he said in a statement. 

He added that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must understand that “his provision of a forward base for Iran and its proxies endangers Syria”.

An Israeli official said Israel was notified of the strikes ahead of time, adding they believed it was around 12 to 24 hours in advance. 

Asked whether Israel had helped to choose targets, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added: “Not to my knowledge.”

A US embassy spokeswoman later confirmed to the Reuters news agency that Israel had been notified before the strikes, but provided no further details.

Iran’s involvement in Syria in support of Assad has alarmed Israel, which has said it will counter any threat. The armed Iranian-backed Shi’ite movement Hezbollah, which has an extensive missile arsenal, last fought a war with Israel in 2006.

Syria, Iran and Russia say Israel was behind an air strike on a Syrian air base earlier this week that killed seven Iranian military personnel, something Israel has neither confirmed nor denied.

Russian President Vladimir Putin subsequently spoke to Mr Netanyahu and urged him to do nothing to destabilise Syria, the Kremlin said in a statement. (Bibi Praises The Donald.)

Yes, whatever Bibi wants, Bibi gets from Donald John Trump.

Ah, we have seen, though, what a mess has been made of the Middle East in the past fifteen years as a result of American efforts to make the area “safe” for the Zionist State of Israel.

To wit, the chaos wrought by the unjust and immoral invasion of Iraq by the armed forces of the United States of America on March 19, 2003, took the lives of over 4,483 American service personnel needlessly and opened up Iraq's borders, which were controlled very tightly by the late dictator Saddam Hussein, to all kinds of Mohammedan terrorists bent on fomenting violence among Iraq's fractious Mohammedan sects and upon American military personnel and civilians based in that country. Violence in Iraq continues to this very day, and it has devastated Iraq's Catholic population. Devastated.

Indeed, one of the many contretemps in which I have been involved in the past four decades since the beginning of my professional life as an academic/pro-life political activist/Catholic writer and speaker took place in the run-up to the Iraq War in late-2002 and early-2003. Articles of mine that appeared in The Remnant and online at the Seattle Catholic website, which is now dormant and from which my articles have been expunged from view, were ripped to shreds by “super patriots” who called anyone who opposed the pending unjust, immoral and unconstitutional American invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by one wretched epithet after another. Dr. John C. Rao was excoriated in the letters page of the Seattle Catholic as one letter writer told him to “go to France where you belong.” It was pure and complete irrationality.

To this date, I have seen none of the “super patriots,” including some traditionally-minded Catholics, admit that they were wrong about Iraq, that the country has become an enclave of Shiite militants led by thoroughly corrupt officials who have care not one whit about the attacks upon our co-religionists in the country. 

Saddam Hussein had no remaining "weapons of mass destruction," and the ones that he used on the Kurds in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War had been supplied to him by the administration of President Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1983 during the Iran-Iraq War:

 

(Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983.  (National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/ There is an interesting, fact-based article, replete with links to national security documents, available at: Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein.)

Isn't it amazing how yesterday's useful ally can be called later a veritable reincarnation of Adolph Hitler?

Saddam Hussein had no links to the events of September 11, 2001, that killed 2,997 people in the City of New York, New York, at the Pentagon in Alexandria, Virginia, and onboard United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed n Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The propaganda machine of the government of the United States of America, starting with then-President George Walker Bush and then-Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney and including National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, told lie after lie after lie to whip up American and international support for the Iraq War, which had been the goal of the Trotskyite neoconservatives for at least five years prior to that time (see Letter to President Clinton on Iraq). By the way, one of those Trotskyites was none other than John Bolton, President Trump’s current National Security Adviser.

Was the United States of America to be made “safe” and Iraq to be “democratized” at the price of the shedding of the blood of Catholics and the destruction of their churches? What about Syria at the present time.

No good and justifiable purpose was served by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The country is a mess, and Syria will be partitioned, whether in a de facto or de jure sense, between Turkey in the north and Israel in the south as the Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to gain the upper hand in the new mess that the clueless Trump has created for himself.

The plight of Catholics and Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt has suffered tremendously as a result of the so-called "Arab Spring" seven years ago that was extolled by the former war mongering caesar and current capo of the effort to oust Trump, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro (see Different Chief, Same War Drums).

The fate that awaits Syria's very tiny population of Catholics is equally gruesome as the orthodox, believing Mohammedans who are rebelling against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—and to whose “rescue” Donald John Trump has now committed the military of the United States of America—have waged their own attacks upon our co-religionists. The fate of Syria’s Catholics, who have suffered much already, has never been and is not now any part of any American president’s decision-making.

George Walker Bush never uttered a blessed word about the fate of Catholics and Orthodox Christians in Iraq.

Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro never uttered a blessed word about the fate of Catholics and Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, refusing to let the word "Christian" pass from his lips as he condemned attacks on "churches" in but a brief statement in 2013 (see Francis and Barry's Religion of Peace).

Donald John Trump is simply ignorant of Syria’s rich Christian history, which includes its ancient capital city’s being the place where Saul of Tarsus had his sight restored on Straight Street by Barsabbas after he had been blinded by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ while he was en route to Damascus to persecute Catholics there after having presided over the stoning of Saint Stephen the Protomartyr. Antioch was where Saint Peter established his first episcopal see before moving to Rome, the center of the Roman Empire. The fate of Syrian Christians does not even enter into the president’s mind, which is filled with nonsense and so easily manipulated by others that it does not bother him in the slightest that he continues to undertake the sort of military actions as president that he denounced when running for the office he now holds.

Poor naturalist and carnal man that he is, Donald John Trump, who flies by the seat of his pants, does not realize that there can never be any peace without Christ the King and His Catholic Church:

Men today do not act as Christians, as brothers, but as strangers, and even enemies. The sense of man's personal dignity and of the value of human life has been lost in the brutal domination begotten of might and mere superiority in numbers. Many are intent on exploiting their neighbors solely for the purpose of enjoying more fully and on a larger scale the goods of this world. But they err grievously who have turned to the acquisition of material and temporal possessions and are forgetful of eternal and spiritual things, to the possession of which Jesus, Our Redeemer, by means of the Church, His living interpreter, calls mankind.

22. It is in the very nature of material objects that an inordinate desire for them becomes the root of every evil, of every discord, and in particular, of a lowering of the moral sense. On the one hand, things which are naturally base and vile can never give rise to noble aspirations in the human heart which was created by and for God alone and is restless until it finds repose in Him. On the other hand, material goods (and in this they differ greatly from those of the spirit which the more of them we possess the more remain to be acquired) the more they are divided among men the less each one has and, by consequence, what one man has another cannot possibly possess unless it be forcibly taken away from the first. Such being the case, worldly possessions can never satisfy all in equal manner nor give rise to a spirit of universal contentment, but must become perforce a source of division among men and of vexation of spirit, as even the Wise Man Solomon experienced: "Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit." (Ecclesiastes i, 2, 14)

23. The same effects which result from these evils among individuals may likewise be expected among nations. "From whence are wars and contentions among you?" asks the Apostle St. James. "Are they not hence from your concupiscences, which war in your members?" (James iv, 1, 2)

24. The inordinate desire for pleasure, concupiscence of the flesh, sows the fatal seeds of division not only among families but likewise among states; the inordinate desire for possessions, concupiscence of the eyes, inevitably turns into class warfare and into social egotism; the inordinate desire to rule or to domineer over others, pride of life, soon becomes mere party or factional rivalries, manifesting itself in constant displays of conflicting ambitions and ending in open rebellion, in the crime of lese majeste, and even in national parricide.

25. These unsuppressed desires, this inordinate love of the things of the world, are precisely the source of all international misunderstandings and rivalries, despite the fact that oftentimes men dare to maintain that acts prompted by such motives are excusable and even justifiable because, forsooth, they were performed for reasons of state or of the public good, or out of love for country. Patriotism -- the stimulus of so many virtues and of so many noble acts of heroism when kept within the bounds of the law of Christ -- becomes merely an occasion, an added incentive to grave injustice when true love of country is debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism, when we forget that all men are our brothers and members of the same great human family, that other nations have an equal right with us both to life and to prosperity, that it is never lawful nor even wise, to dissociate morality from the affairs of practical life, that, in the last analysis, it is "justice which exalteth a nation: but sin maketh nations miserable." (Proverbs xiv, 34)

26. Perhaps the advantages to one's family, city, or nation obtained in some such way as this may well appear to be a wonderful and great victory (this thought has been already expressed by St. Augustine), but in the end it turns out to be a very shallow thing, something rather to inspire us with the most fearful apprehensions of approaching ruin. "It is a happiness which appears beautiful but is brittle as glass. We must ever be on guard lest with horror we see it broken into a thousand pieces at the first touch." (St. Augustine de Civitate Dei, Book iv, Chap. 3)

27. There is over and above the absence of peace and the evils attendant on this absence, another deeper and more profound cause for present-day conditions. This cause was even beginning to show its head before the War and the terrible calamities consequent on that cataclysm should have proven a remedy for them if mankind had only taken the trouble to understand the real meaning of those terrible events. In the Holy Scriptures we read: "They that have forsaken the Lord, shall be consumed." (Isaias i, 28) No less well known are the words of the Divine Teacher, Jesus Christ, Who said: "Without me you can do nothing" (John xv, 5) and again, "He that gathereth not with me, scattereth." (Luke xi, 23)

28. These words of the Holy Bible have been fulfilled and are now at this very moment being fulfilled before our very eyes. Because men have forsaken God and Jesus Christ, they have sunk to the depths of evil. They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruinIt was a quite general desire that both our laws and our governments should exist without recognizing God or Jesus Christ, on the theory that all authority comes from men, not from God. Because of such an assumption, these theorists fell very short of being able to bestow upon law not only those sanctions which it must possess but also that secure basis for the supreme criterion of justice which even a pagan philosopher like Cicero saw clearly could not be derived except from the divine law. . . .

It is possible to sum up all We have said in one word, "the Kingdom of Christ." For Jesus Christ reigns over the minds of individuals by His teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one's life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example. Jesus reigns over the family when it, modeled after the holy ideals of the sacrament of matrimony instituted by Christ, maintains unspotted its true character of sanctuary. In such a sanctuary of love, parental authority is fashioned after the authority of God, the Father, from Whom, as a matter of fact, it originates and after which even it is named. (Ephesians iii, 15) The obedience of the children imitates that of the Divine Child of Nazareth, and the whole family life is inspired by the sacred ideals of the Holy Family. Finally, Jesus Christ reigns over society when men recognize and reverence the sovereignty of Christ, when they accept the divine origin and control over all social forces, a recognition which is the basis of the right to command for those in authority and of the duty to obey for those who are subjects, a duty which cannot but ennoble all who live up to its demands. Christ reigns where the position in society which He Himself has assigned to His Church is recognized, for He bestowed on the Church the status and the constitution of a society which, by reason of the perfect ends which it is called upon to attain, must be held to be supreme in its own sphere; He also made her the depository and interpreter of His divine teachings, and, by consequence, the teacher and guide of every other society whatsoever, not of course in the sense that she should abstract in the least from their authority, each in its own sphere supreme, but that she should really perfect their authority, just as divine grace perfects human nature, and should give to them the assistance necessary for men to attain their true final end, eternal happiness, and by that very fact make them the more deserving and certain promoters of their happiness here below.

 

It is, therefore, a fact which cannot be questioned that the true peace of Christ can only exist in the Kingdom of Christ -- "the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." It is no less unquestionable that, in doing all we can to bring about the re-establishment of Christ's kingdom, we will be working most effectively toward a lasting world peace. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

Paragraph number twenty-eight above says it it all:

They waste their energies and consume their time and efforts in vain sterile attempts to find a remedy for these ills, but without even being successful in saving what little remains from the existing ruin. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)

These are facts that that world leaders deny. We had better not deny them.

Indeed, we must recognize and accept these facts as we entrust all to Christ the King through the Immaculate Heart of Mary in these perilous times that require of us true apostolic courage and a great zeal for Catholic truth, not the fantasies of the Judeo-Masonry upon which conciliarism is founded. 

Our Lady told us that we must pray her Most Holy Rosary to console the good God, to make reparation for our sins, to pray for the conversion of poor sinners and to pray for peace. It is Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary and her Fatima Message, including our own personal devotion to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, are both part of Heaven’s peace plan, not the schemes of the naturalists of the false opposites of the naturalist “right” and “left.”

May it be our privilege in these difficult times to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state in life permits so that the master of lies who seeks our soul will not immerse us in the muck and mire of the bread and circuses of this world as we seek lift up our hearts and souls to Heaven by meditating upon the sacred mysteries of the Holy Faith, which alone is the only means of personal sanctity and true social order.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now ?

Viva Cristo ReyVivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, pray for us.

Appendix A

Comment Offered Seven Years Ago by Mr. Dennis Bilodeau on General Dwight Eisenhower's Operation Keelhaul

"You may not be aware of it, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was responsible for implementing the very evil repatriation of millions of Eastern European refugees (many of whom were Catholic) who had fled from the communist take over. This evil was code named Operation Keelhaul. Many people actually committed suicide rather than to be forced back to their homeland under Satanic communist rule. The entire Yalta Conference was also part of this whole diabolical plot to further the Judeo-Masonic destruction of Christianity and bring about the reign of antichrist."

Appendix B

United States Representative John James Duncan, Jr.'s Speech Against Syrian Missile Attack

Delivered on the Floor of the United States House of Representatives on April 12, 2018

In the days leading up to the Congressional vote on whether to go to war in Iraq years ago, Fortune Magazine had an article headlined “We Win – What Then?”

The article said a prolonged war in Iraq would make American soldiers “sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists.”

Another national magazine at that time, U.S. News and World Report, had an article headlined, “Why the Rush to War?”

Now that war has been frequently referred to as possibly the greatest foreign policy mistake in U.S. History.

The night before the Iraq war vote, a television station in Knoxville had a poll showing 74% in favor of the war, 9% against, and 17% undecided. I was one of six Republicans who voted against going to war, and for three or four years, that certainly was the most unpopular vote I ever cast. But slowly, slowly, slowly, it became my most popular vote.

We were basically conned into that war by a group called Neo-Cons, so called neo-conservatives, who George Will once described as being “magnificently misnamed” because they were really the “most radical people in this City,” meaning Washington.

In addition to our disaster in Iraq, we have now been at war in Afghanistan for 17 years, seemingly permanent, forever wars that have cost us trillions of dollars and caused many thousands of Americans to be killed or maimed.

What a waste.

President Reagan once said we should never go to war unless there were no other reasonable alternatives and then only as a very last resort.

We have had too many leaders who never went to war themselves, such as the new National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who seem far too eager for others to go to war so these chicken-hawks can feel more important or think of themselves as modern day Winston Churchills.

Now we seem to be rushing into another war in Syria. I am thankful that conservatives like Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan are questioning this new rush to war.

At some point, with a $21 trillion national debt, we have to realize there are limits to American power.

Speech given by Congressman John J. Duncan, Jr. on House Floor 4/12/18

Civil wars and really terrible things are happening all over the world – in Africa – in the Middle East – and other places all the time.

As President Kennedy said in one of his most famous speeches at the University of Washington, with only four percent of the world’s population, “we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity – and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

Most of the time, a military solution is the worst solution. There are many other ways we can help people who have been harmed through humanitarian, religious, or charitable organizations, or through the United Nations.

As Pat Buchanan wrote, President Trump is being “goaded into war,” and that Congress should “debate our objectives in this new war and how many new casualties and years will be required to defeat the coalition of Syria, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran, and the allied Shiite militias from the Near East.”

Tucker Carlson said we need to ask some skeptical questions now at least in part because Secretary Mattis said in February that we have absolutely no proof that Assad used the chemical weapons he was accused of using last year.

He added there is no real proof Assad did the chemical attacks this time because such an attack would really help only the rebels fighting Assad, and they also have chemical weapons, rebels who have been described as Islamic terrorists but who we are supporting. Mr. Carlson pointed out that Assad had no reason or incentive to use chemical weapons in a civil war his government had basically already won.

President Trump was elected in large part because he promised to get us out of these unnecessary wars in the Middle East.

Almost everything we have done in the Middle East over the last many years has been wrong.

There has been fighting going on there for several thousand years.

Throughout history, other wars have been started over incidents or information that turned out to be false or greatly exaggerated.

We do not need nor can we afford to get into another trillion dollar war in the Middle East without first making sure it is absolutely in America’s interest to do so and that it will not make the Middle East even more messed up and chaotic than it already is. (As found at: Against War on Syria.)

Appendix C

United States Senator Rand Paul's Questioning of CIA Director Mike Pompeo During Confirmation Hearings to be Secertary of State

PAUL: Thanks for your testimony and thanks for going through this grueling enterprise and your willingness to serve the country. You discussed with Senator Kaine a little bit about whether or not the President has the authority to bomb Assad's forces or installations in Syria and you mention historically, well we have done it in the past. 
 
I don't think that's a complete enough answer. I mean my question would be do you think it's constitutional? Does the President have the constitutional authority to bomb Assad's forces? Does he have the authority absent congressional action to bomb Assad's forces or instillations?
 
POMPEO: Senator, as I -- I think I said this to Senator Kaine, I'm happy to repeat my view on this. Those decisions are weighted. Every place we can, we should work alongside Congress to get that but yes I believe the President has the domestic authority to do that. I don't think -- I don't think that has been disputed by republicans or democrats throughout an extended period of time.
 
PAUL: Actually it was disputed mostly by our founding fathers who believed they gave that authority to Congress and actually they're uniformly opposed to the executive branch having that power. In fact, Madison wrote very specifically, he said, "The executive branch is the branch most prone to war. Therefore, we have with studied care vested that authority into the legislature". 
 
So the fact that we have in the past done this doesn't make it constitutional and I would say that I take objection to the idea that the president can go to war when he wants, where he wants. With regard to Afghanistan, some have argued that it's time to get out of Afghanistan. What do you think?
 
POMPEO: Senator, I think the course of action that President Trump has taken there is the right one. It's -- it is humble in its mission. It understands that we've been there an awfully long time. It has an objective of leaving, but is not prepared to leave until such time as we can put America in a position where we can greatly diminish the threat to our homeland from terrorism that may emanate from there.
 
And with an effort alongside that which will be required to achieve that first objective to create, I want to be humble, more stability in Afghanistan.
 
PAUL: Actually, the the president has been very specific at times on this and he said, "It is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are building roads and bridges and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interest". That's a direct quote. So, the president said it was time to get out. It sounds like you say it's time to stay. Is that a difference in opinion? 
 
Some here are worried that you're going to be too much in agreement with the president in action (ph) or are you going to be in too much in disagreement with the president. One of the things I have liked about the president is he says it is time to come home. Let's declare a victory and come home, but it sounds to me like you were saying we need to stay.
 
POMPEO: Senator, it sounds like I have a Goldilocks problem, too close, too far, different porridge for each. Senator, the president also said in the summer at Fort Meyer that he was committed to the mission that I outlined there. That's consistent with what secretary of state has been trying to do diplomatically. 
 
It's consistent with what Secretary Mattis has been trying to do by supporting Afghan forces in the country. I believe and I share the president's view that we have a continued role there. And while I want to get out in the same way you do, I have friends who are serving there. I've had friends, as I know you would, who have been injured. We're not a place yet where it's appropriate to do so.
 
PAUL: Here's the problem, is are we ever going to be at that place? I mean, so you've got people, the administration yourself now saying in your written questions back to me that there's not a military solution. So, we're sending our G.I.'s out there to risk life and limb when there is not military solution hoping that we - sounds a little bit like Vietnam.
 
Hoping that we get to a little position, let's bomb the crap out of them to get them to negotiate and we'll get to a little better negotiation. In the end it was no better in Vietnam. It was still a disaster in the very end. And a lot of people wasted their lives in the end for that. 
 
I think that there is no military mission and when you admit there's no military mission it is hard for me to square with your desire still to stay. And, we say oh we want to leave but when, we've been there 18 years. I think we should declare victory and come home. I think we won the battle. We did. We literally did win.
 
There's nobody left alive who plotted to attack us on 9/11. I've asked people repeatedly, tell me the names of those left alive in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, anywhere in the world. We're now sending people to war who weren't even born when 9/11 was. And, every administration comes, not just republican, democrat.
 
They come and say oh well it's, you know, it's just fine. We're going to keep fighting these wars and it's like it has something to do with 9/11. No, it has nothing to do with 9/11. everybody around the world is - that is a radical Islamist we now are at war with because we said we got the permission to go at 9/11.
 
But when you were in Congress you had a little bit different position, you know. Your position with Libya was that we should get authorization. Your position in 2013 was also - you wrote an Op Ed with Tom Cotton saying well we should give the president the authority he needs to go into Syria not because you were like me that we shouldn't get involved in another war because you were eager to get involved and you wanted to give the president permission saying please, President Trump, let's go to war in Syria.
 
But I think we need to think these things through and we need to not be so carte blanche that the Constitution does give just carte blanche permission for the president to do whatever he wants. Do you think the Iraq war was a mistake? 
 
POMPEO: Senator, I was running a machine shop in Kansas at the time so I don't have a contemporaneous view that I expressed.
 
PAUL: No opinions back then? How about opinions now?
 
POMPEO: I may well have had an opinion. 
 
PAUL: Now, was there ...
 
POMPEO: But, no, my opinion now is, look, we clearly had - we had bad intelligence. I've been one of the few CIA directors who's been willing to say we get it wrong. In spite of all the enormous resources ...
 
PAUL: But it's not just bad intelligence.
 
POMPEO: But we did have - we did have bad intelligence.
 
PAUL: We did geopolitically the wrong thing. We got rid of the enemy of Iraq. We emboldened Iran. We made it worse, we brought chaos to the Middle East. We are still suffering the ramifications and repercussion of the Iraq war but your president said it very clearly.
 
He says the Iraq war was the single worst decision ever made. So, once again, I'm concerned that you won't be supporting the president. That you will be influencing him in a way that I think his inclinations are actually better than many of his advisors. That the Iraq war was a mistake that we need to come home from Afghanistan. 
 
He was against being involved in Syria at many times in his career. So think he does have good instincts and my main concern is that will you be one who will listen to what the president actually wants instead of being someone who advocates for us staying forever in Afghanistan. 
 
Another Iraq war, bombing Syria without permission. So, these are the advice you will give and I guess that's my biggest concern with your nomination is that I don't think it reflects the millions of people who voted for President Trump who actually voted for him because they thought it'd be different. 
 
That it wouldn't be the traditional bipartisan consensus to bomb everywhere and be everywhere around the world. So, that's my main concern and I just want to make sure that that's loud and clear to everyone that is my concern. (As found at Your Nomination Does Not Reflect the Foreign Policy That Trump Ran On.)
 
Appendix D
From 2017: Applying the Principles of the Just War Theory to the 2017 Syrian Missile Strike
 

Here is a review of how a commander-in-chief of his nation’s armed forces should have looked at the deadly Sarin gas attack in Syria on Tuesday, April 4, 2012:

First, armed force, which must be authorized and deployed by a duly constituted authority, is always a regrettable last resort after the exhausting of all other avenues to achieve a peaceful resolution of a conflict and/or to remedy a wound to justice. Trump undertook a “surgical” military airstrike as the first resort, not the last.  

Second, one must seek to ascertain and to determine the facts of a given situation. In this instance, of course, there was simply a reaction to horrible images of children who had been gassed to death. The American intelligence community, whose leaders gave repeated assurances in 2002 and early-2003 that Iraqi President and dictator Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and from whose offices grave violations of law have been committed to leak information to the mainslime media, assigned responsibility for the dastardly attack upon Bashar al-Assad even though the Syrian strongman may not have been responsible.

Although the gassing of innocent civilians in Syria is a horrific crime no matter who is responsbile for ordering its commission, the fact remains that nearly three thousand five hundred innocent human babies, each of whom is beautiful in the sight of God in that they have immortal souls made in His very image and likeness, are slaughered with legal impunity every single day in the United States of America alone. (See the chilling statistics found at Number of Abortions.) Yet it is that anyone displaying the graphic images of butchered babies is said to be engaged in a form of "terrorism" or, at the very least, of indecent behavior by same of the very same people who were rightly horrified by the images of gassed children in Syria. Significantly, Ivanka Trump Kushner, who has not stated her position on baby-kiling, has sought to find "common ground" with the leader of Planned Barrenhood, Cecile Richards, heedless of the fact that this organization has been evil from its very inceptions, which is the largest single butcher of the preborn in the United States of America and the world.

What Ivanka Trump Kushner and her father do not realize that is if we lived in a Catholic world, which we do not, a coalition of Catholic kings and princes would have as much grounds to stop the carnage of the chemical and surgical assassination of the innocent preborn, to say nothing of the direct, intentional killing of the sick and eldlerly in hospices and hospitals, in this country as Trump asserted for dispatching Tomahwak Cruise missiles to destroy that Syrian airfield and fully twenty percent of Syria's military aircraft.

Not every injustice in the world can be rectified by military means. It is nothing short of completely hypocritical for Trump to respond viscerally to the gas attacks in Syria while standing next to the leader of Red China, Xi Jinping, where violations of human rights continue under a Communist regime that suppresses dissent of any kind and which persecutes underground Catholics, who are, of course, being sold out to the Chicom rump church, the so-called Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, by another of the world's current figures of Antichrist, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Trump and Xi, whose country is responsible for the deaths of close of over sixty million human beings after their births (without even citing the numbers killed by abortions, forced or "elective") in order to keep China under Communist captivity. 

Significantly, the man who saw horrible images in Syria did not want to discuss the Chicoms violations of human rights, including its coercive abortion policies and its persecution of underground Catholics, with Xi Jinping:

(CNSNews.com) - The Communist government of the People’s Republic of China continues to impose a “coercive birth-limitation policy” that is enforced by “measures such as mandatory pregnancy examinations and coercive abortions and sterilizations,” according to the Country Report on Human Rights in China released by President Donald Trump’s State Department.

President Trump had dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday evening.

China changed its coercive family planning policy last year by lifting the limit on children from one per couple to two per couple.

To make sure women do not have more children than the Communist government believes they should, the government engages in both forced birth control and forced abortion.

“The government considers intrauterine devices (IUDs) and sterilization to be the most reliable form of birth control and compelled women to accept the insertion of IUDs by officials,” said the State Department report.

“As in prior years,” said the State Department, “population control policy continued to rely on social pressure, education, propaganda, and economic penalties as well as on measures such as mandatory pregnancy examinations and coercive abortions and sterilizations.”

The State Department reported, for example, that provincial regulations in Hunan state: “Pregnancies that do not conform to the conditions established by the law should promptly be terminated. For those who have not promptly terminated the pregnancy, the township people’s government or subdistrict office shall order that the pregnancy be terminated by a deadline.”

“Other provinces, such as Guizhou, Jiangxi, Qinghai, and Yunnan,” said the State Department, “maintained provisions that require 'remedial measures,' an official euphemism for abortion, to deal with pregnancies that violate the policy.”

China still sees more male than female babies born, which the State Department attributed to both cultural factors and the child-limitation policy.

“According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China,” said the report, “the sex ratio at birth was 113 males to 100 females in 2016, a decline from 2013, when the ratio was 116 males for every 100 females. Sex identification and sex-selective abortion are prohibited, but the practices continued because of traditional preference for male children and the birth-limitation policy.’

Baby girls who are not killed in a gender-based abortion could then face hazards including infanticide and abandonment, the State Department reported.

“Female infanticide, gender-biased abortions, and the abandonment and neglect of baby girls were declining but continued to be a problem in some circumstances due to the traditional preference for sons and the birth-limitation policy,” said the report.

The law in the People’s Republic of China, according to the State Department, prohibits people with “certain mental disabilities” from marrying and unborn babies discovered to have a disability in utero could be subjected to a government-mandated abortion.

“The law forbids the marriage of persons with certain mental disabilities, such as schizophrenia,” says the State Department report. “If doctors found that a couple was at risk of transmitting congenital disabilities to their children, the couple could marry only if they agree to use birth control or undergo sterilization. In some instances officials continued to require couples to abort pregnancies when doctors discovered possible disabilities during prenatal examinations. The law stipulates that local governments must employ such practices to raise the percentage of births of children without disabilities.’

In a background briefing at the White House on Tuesday, senior administration officials suggested that human rights would not be a central element of Trump’s discussions with the Chinese leader when he visited Mar-a-Lago.

A report asked if “religious persecution in China” was something that the U.S. would bring up in the meeting.

A senior administration official responded that he thought it was more likely the Chinese leader would bring it up than Trump would.

I think to the degree that issue is brought up, it would be brought up, I would expect, by the Chinese as opposed to the United States,” said the official. “We’re obviously aware of the issues and prepared to address it, but it’s not something that that I would anticipate we’re going to be raising.” (China's Population Policy Still Enforces Coercive Abortions.)

Trump the Businessman has made many deals with the Red Chinese. He couldn't let such trifles as forced abortions and the persecution of underground Catholics get in the way of a nice chat with an atheist thug. 

Assad had no "deals" to offer, and thus could be punished even if the Russians might be angered as a result. This proves yet again that emotional reactions to terrible events are no way to conduct any kind of foreign policy and that the supposedly "pro-life" Donald John Trump has not thought too deeply about the slaughter of babies and religious persecution in Red China.

It was only after Xi Jinping, whose country executes more "criminals" each year than every other country tin the world combined, left the United States of America that President Trump began to talk tough to the Chicoms about North Korea, whose leader, the Pillsbury Dough Boy (Kim Jung-un), has delusions of sending intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear weapons across the Pacific Ocean to the United States of America. (See Trump Tells Chicoms to Solve North Korea or He Will.)    

All of this talk of war during Holy Week is nothing other than a continued Judeo-Masonic mocking of Christ the King, Who was crowned with thorns by Roman soldiers on Good Friday to expressed contempt for what they saw as His "pretended" Kingship.       .

A naturalist by the name of Eric Margolis saw further hypocrisy in the fact that thousands upon thousands of children have been burned alive by the American bombing of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan in the past fifteen and one-half years:

It seems that every new US president has to prove his machismo…or make his bones, as wiseguys say…by bombing the usual Arabs.  By now, it’s almost a rite of passage.  The American public loves it.

So we just saw the US launch 59 or 60 $1.5million apiece cruise missiles at a western Syrian airfield to express President Trump’s outrage caused by seeing injured children allegedly caused by a Syrian government toxic gas attack.

But what, Mr. President, about all those Iraqi, Syrian and Afghan babies killed by US B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers?  Or the destruction of the defiant Iraqi city of Fallujah where the US used forbidden white phosphorus that burns right to the bone?

Washington claimed its radar had conclusively identified Syrian warplanes dropping chemical weapons.  This sounds to me to be unlikely.  Where was the US radar? Hundreds of miles away aboard ships? Was the info from Israel or Turkey, both with axes to grind?  Is US radar so sharp that it can tell the difference between a chemical and high explosive bomb at great distance?  Sounds highly fishy to me. (Bomb the Usual Arabs. A caveat: As is the case with many other libertarians, Mr. Margolis appears to be quite sanguine about Communism and the legitimacy of the Red Chinese oligarchs, something that can be see in the rest of this commentary.)

Third, even if the intelligence community’s assessment of responsibility for the Sarin nerve gas attack is correct, what happened in Syria, as horrible as it is, posed no imminent threat to the national security of the United States of America that required armed American intervention (see a very good commentary on this point that was written by Judge Andrew Napoitano: The Missiles of Holy Week). One nation has no right to attack another sovereign nation even if, as Trump administration is not, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on the American Broadcasting Company television network's This Week program yesterday, Palm Sunday, that there is no intention to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Then again, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said yesterday that Assad had to go:

Trump's United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, said the United States had "multiple priorities" in Syria and that stability there was impossible with Assad as president.

"In no way do we see peace in that area with Assad as the head of the Syrian government," Haley told NBC's "Meet the Press."

"And we have to make sure that we're pushing that process. The political solution has to come together for the good of the people of Syria," she said.

Her comments appeared at odds with those of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who said the U.S. missile strike was aimed solely at deterring the use of chemical weapons by Assad.

"There is no change to our military posture" in Syria, Tillerson said on ABC's 'This Week' program.

Tillerson said the U.S. priority in Syria was defeating Islamic State, the militant group also known as ISIS. Once ISIS is defeated, the United States could turn its attention to trying to help bring about a "political process" that could bring about stability in Syria, he said.

"It is through that political process that we believe the Syrian people will ... be able to decide the fate of Bashar al-Assad," Tillerson said. (Officials Differ on the Fate of Assad.)  

Policy coherence?

Nikki Haley says one thing, Rex Tillerson says another. 

Hey, wait a minute. 

Rex Tillerson's got the memorandum from Nikki Haley. "Regime change" is still a possibility. Tillerson is now onboard the Wafare Party's Syrian Regime Change Express:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Tuesday that “the reign of the Assad family is coming to an end,” taking a firmer stance on Syria and aligning himself with statements from U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley – after the two top diplomats seemed to take a different view toward the Syrian regime’s future. 

He made the fresh comments shortly before arriving in Moscow, for the first trip to Russia by a Trump Cabinet official. He is in for a tense visit, as the U.S. prods Russia to split with Bashar al-Assad, and Russia blasts the U.S. over last week's Syria missile strikes.

In the wake of those strikes on an airbase controlled by Assad, who allegedly carried out a deadly chemical weapons attack, Tillerson had said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “we are hopeful” about navigating a “political outcome in which the Syrian people, in fact, will determine Bashar al-Assad's fate and his legitimacy.”

Yet Haley, on CNN, more bluntly said they expect regime change and “there's not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime.” 

As Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and others noted an apparent disconnect in such statements, Tillerson seemed Tuesday to align himself more closely with Haley, as he spoke to reporters in Italy before boarding the plane to Moscow. While the secretary did not speak directly of regime change, as Haley had, he telegraphed to the Kremlin that that is his view as well.

“It is our policy for a unified Syria that is governed by the people of Syria. … It's clear to all of us that the reign of the Assad family is coming to an end. But the question of how that ends, and the transition itself, could be very important, in our view, to the durability, the stability inside of a unified Syria,” Tillerson said. “… But I think it is clear that we see no further role for the Assad regime longer term, given that they have effectively given up their legitimacy with these type[s] of attacks.” (Tillerson in Moscow Getting in Line With Haly on Tough Syria Talk.)

"Regime change" still might be the outcome that American policy-makers decide is "necessary." Indeed, "regime change" is a probability now. Can war with Russia be far behind? 

Truly head-spinning.

Well, perhaps it should be recalled that Candidate Donald John Trump seemed to understand the failure of American interventionism when he gave a major foreign policy address at the Center for the National Interest, which was founded by former President Richard Milhous Nixon  before his death on April 22, 1994, on April 27, 2016, in Washington, District of Columbia:

Unfortunately, after the Cold War our foreign policy veered badly off course. We failed to develop a new vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which led to one foreign policy disaster after another.

They just kept coming and coming. We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper. Very bad. It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a western democracy.

We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans and just killed be lives, lives, lives wasted. Horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill that void much to their really unjust enrichment.

They have benefited so much, so sadly, for us. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision. No purpose. No direction. No strategy. Today I want to identify five main weaknesses in our foreign policy.  (Transcript of Trump Foreign Policy Speech.)

Well, it must be remembered that Donald John Trump was reading a speech nearly a year ago. The real Donald John Trump reacts to events without circumspection, and the neoconservative war hawks who are now advising him were more than happy to ignite to encourage him in his resolve to act “decisively” to send a “message” to Bashar al-Assad even though the latter’s forces did not attack the sovereign territory of the United States of America and that there is no constitutional justification for an American president to use armed force as a first resort when the national security of the country is threatened by an imminent attack. 

Donald John Trump's lack of convictions was noted in an commentary by a naturalist by the name of Robert Merry in The American Conservative:

Getting back to the Trump constituency, this isn’t what these people came to expect from him based on his campaign rhetoric and his attacks on the country’s foreign-policy aggressiveness of the past two decades. Those are the people who put him in the White House, and he owes them at least a recognition of that. He owes them a measure of political gratitude.

And this is where his weakness comes in. His campaign convictions seem to be devoid of the courage required to uphold them. In the campaign he talked big. He had the swagger down nicely. He conveyed the image of a man who wouldn’t be swayed by conventional vogues of thought or the opprobrium of elites. He would go his own way because that’s the only way he could drain the Washington swamp, craft new political dialectics, create a new governing coalition, reduce the level of American foreign-policy adventurism.  

But that takes real guts. It’s psychologically difficult to venture into entirely new political territory, where no one has gone before. Talking about it is easy; actually doing it requires a fortitude beyond the capacity of any political weakling.

We are now reading that the conventional thinkers and the establishment denizens of the Trump administration are decimating the administration people who were with him during his campaign, when he devastated the conventional thinkers and establishment denizens who now are taking over his administration. In domestic policy, perhaps the stakes aren’t so high; the biggest loser is likely to be Trump himself. But in foreign policy the stakes are immense, and the loser could be the entire country.

How does one account for these signs that Trump’s governance is going to be significantly at variance with his campaign advocacy? It’s difficult to resist the suspicion that some of it has to do with a lack of conviction. He’s winging it—and has been since he descended that famous Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. And yet he talked as if he were a man of ironclad conviction, someone whose words presage his actions. In politics, when words and actions don’t mesh, we call that phoniness.

The Syrian drama has yet to play out completely, and so perhaps this episode won’t be quite the window on the Donald that it seems at these musings. But the signs don’t look favorable on this particular matter, as they also don’t on many others. (This Isn't the Foreign Policy Trump Campaigned On. Another such commentary can be found at The War on Syria.)

What Mr. Merry does not realize is that Donald John Trump's one and only conviction has always been and continues to be to do what pleases Donald John Trump. One does have to descend to the sordid details of his personal life to demonstrate that a man consumed with money and pleasure his little time for logic and any kind of intellectual substance, whether natural or, more importantly, of course, supernatural. This is why I urge the very few readers of this website to see all the events of their own lives and those that take place in the world through the eyes of the true Faith.                       .

Fourth, the end to be undertaken must be clearly defined and have a reasonable chance of being achieved. As will be seen below, no recent president defined how a particular mission's "success" could be judged. To wit, Iraq is still a mess fourteen years after the injust, immoral and unconstitutional Amerian invasion and occupation. Afghanistan is still a mess fifteen and one-half years after Amerian bombs started falling from the sky on Sunday, October 7, 2011, and Libya will never be the same country again following "regime change" there effected by Obama/Soetoro and his then Secretary of State, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.

What is the measure of "success" in  Syria?

Preventing further use of a chemical agents that might have been employed six days ago without the knowledge, consent or approval of Bashar al-Assad? If Assad is not responsible for the Sarin gas attack, then is it not possible the agents provacateur who approved the attack might try again to goad President Trump into taking action that might result in the overthrow of Assad and the inevitable rise of the brutal killers of the shadowy organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria? If he is responsible, which is possible, the Russians are moving to punish any further American attempts to intervene militarily in Syria. Where does this stop? It doesn't. 

There is nothing by which to measure "success" in Syria, and no one has appointed the government of the United States of America as the arbiter as to what happens there.

Fifth, any situation requiring the use of force—something that the deadly attack in Syria did not require—must be undertaken only after a thorough effort is made to determine whether the possible evil consequences (the unintentional wounding and killing of innocent civilians, destruction of property and infrastructure, escalating a conflict beyond a localized area) that usually occur when armed force is deployed outweighs the good end to be sought in remedying a wound to justice. This is called the moral principle of Proportionality, which teaches us that an otherwise good end would be illegitimate to pursue if a reasoned determination is made than more harm than good would be done if a legitimate course of action was undertaken.

(The principle of Proportionality must not be confused with the late Father Richard McCormick, S.J.’s heretical principle of Proptionalism, which asserts that a preponderance of “good motives” and extenuating circumstances can make an objectively evil action licit to pursue. Even the conciliar Vatican condemned Proportionality in 1975, although it is precisely what a lay Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes and that serve as the basis of Amoris Laetitia, March 19, 2016.)