Tonight, Joe Biden launched another salvo in the forever war. This time, we hit Iranian units in Syria, ostensibly as retaliation for recent rocket strikes on U.S. facilities. Why we are even still in Syria is a mystery the world’s greatest minds will never solve, but I digress.
Some of you may be old enough to remember the consternation produced when Donald Trump launched a similar attack in 2017. We were assured that the orange man was going to start a world war.
In fact, a certain current White House Press Secretary once chimed in on the supposed illegality of Trump’s previous strike.
Also what is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.
— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) April 7, 2017
That tweet is summed up in the following gif.
I guess Syria is no longer a sovereign country? Amazing what electing a senile old man as president will change about world affairs, I guess. You can bet Fox News’ Peter Doocy is already salivating over asking Psaki about this at her next press conference.
It wasn’t just Psaki, though. Biden himself mouthed off with a similar response after Trump took out Qasem Soleimani in 2019.
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) February 26, 2021
The hypocrisy is just stunning, and comical if one has learned to stop taking politics as anything other than the joke it mostly is.
Just like with the detention of migrant children, the Biden administration is doing the very same things they demonized the Trump administration for. The only difference is that Trump had the media destroying him over ever move he made while they’ll laud Biden for the same actions.
Of course, there’s a more serious question here, which is whether Psaki was actually right back in 2017. Let’s put aside the fact that Trump and Biden have both launched strikes. Should they have? I think as retaliatory strikes, the single operations are defensible. At the same time, our broader encroachment into Syria, which Trump tried his hardest to shut down but Biden has rejuvenated, is simply not.
As I’ve said in my recent critiques of Liz Cheney, it’s long past time for the uniparty that is our foreign policy complex to answer for many of the mistakes that have been made the last two decades. Rand Paul is correct when he says it’s time to force new authorization for any new military actions in the Middle East. This thing where every new president just does whatever they want is no how things are supposed to work, never mind the moral issues at play.
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