I don’t mean to concern you but those supposed purveyors of “fake news”, CNN, are reporting that President Donald Trump is actively considering sending conventional ground troops into Syria to speed up the fight against ISIS. Trump hates CNN and refuses to allow its reporters to ask him questions, but are they onto something? I think they may well be.
The most worrying thing about Trump is not that he is breaking his promises: it is that he is keeping them. Banning people from certain muslim countries (though not the ones in which he has business interests), dismantling affordable health care, planning the ludicrous wall with Mexico, threatening to undo the nuclear deal with Iran and now a ground conflict in Syria. Just look at his comments from just a few weeks ago: “Our focus must be on defeating terrorism and destroying ISIS, and we will.” We didn’t know then how he proposed to destroy ISIS because nothing else has worked, but perhaps CNN has found the answer.
And if it happens, will this be Theresa May’s Iraq? Already, our desperate and fawning prime minister has dashed across the Atlantic to promise our everlasting love to Donald Trump and given our imminent parting of the ways with Europe and indeed the weakness of our country’s negotiating hand leaves us vulnerable to involvement in yet another disastrous overseas conflict. We know that May is begging Trump for a trade deal with the USA, even though we already have a pretty good one, and it does not require rocket science levels of intelligence to conclude what Trump’s price might well be.
Just a few weeks into the most unstable, bizarre and potentially cataclysmic presidential term of office, probably ever, and already we face conflict on numerous fronts, but Syria could well be the first one.
One thing will happen for sure if Trump sends his troops, and potentially ours, into battle: soldiers will come home in body bags, others will come home horribly wounded and once again we will just make things even worse.
I hope we have learned from the catastrophes of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and everywhere else we get involved in, with simplistic aims and no exit strategy, but I fear the worst. An unstable dictator in the White House, a hopelessly out of her depth and desperate prime minister trying to strike a deal on the back of the mythical “special relationship” and another faraway war we can never win.
We have been here before.
