BUT THE SAME GUIDED MISSILES WILL GET YOU IN THE END

As a relatively new member of the obscure “Long Facebook Screed” branch of punditry, I have some limited sympathy for my more prominent brethren who get paid for their work and are thus expected to have something worthwhile to say on every topic du jour. I’m getting tired, though, of pundits who fall back on the cliché about “this is the day that Donald Trump became President.”

For the record, Donald Trump became President on January 20, 2017. He did not become president on the day he managed to give a speech to Congress without deviating substantially from the script on the teleprompter. He certainly did not become president when he gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at an airbase in Syria that had advance warning of the attack.

Although he didn’t bother to notify Congress, Trump did call Vladimir Putin to give him a heads up about the impending airstrike, and of course Putin passed the information on to his pal, Bashar al-Assad, who ordered the Syrian Air Force to move its planes to safety. The base resumed operations within 24 hours.

So what was the point of the exercise? TV news got some footage of explosions that they could re-run endlessly, and the Neo-Con interventionist wing of Pundit-American community got the jolt of adrenalin that they’ve been longing for. What they really want is war with Iran, but this was a good first step. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria provided the icing on the cake when he proclaimed that the missile strike meant that Trump had finally become President.

And that, in truth, was the real point of the exercise – a low risk, mostly inconsequential military strike that would impress the gullible media. Video of missile strikes is the journalistic equivalent of “Ooh, look, squirrel!” The more the press falls for it, the more Trump will use it, because it solves two of his biggest problems.

First, it diverts press attention from unpleasant realities at home, like investigations into the Russian election hack and the infighting among his advisors. Perhaps equally importantly, Trump lives for praise from cable news. Now he’s found a way to get it. Give them some tough talk and a few explosions, and much of the chattering class turns into a cheering section.

That sort of attitude is going to get people killed. Lots of them. Trump’s enablers in the press will be complicit in those deaths.

Instead of admiring the fireworks show, they should be asking hard questions. How did this make America safer? For that matter, how did it help Syrians? Why did we spend $60 million to temporarily disable one Syrian airbase? How will that stop Bashar al-Assad from gassing more people? What do you intend to do when new pictures of dead children show up on CNN? Do you have a plan to stop the mass murders? What happened to your secret plan to destroy ISIS that’s fifty days overdue?

Of course, there’s no plan, secret or otherwise. In military affairs as in everything else, Trump operates by impulse rather than strategy. That, too, will get people killed.