{"id":23511,"date":"2017-04-09T09:07:29","date_gmt":"2017-04-09T14:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23511"},"modified":"2017-04-09T09:07:29","modified_gmt":"2017-04-09T14:07:29","slug":"trumps-wag-the-dog-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23511","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s \u2018Wag the Dog\u2019 Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trump\u2019s \u2018Wag the Dog\u2019 Moment<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Exclusive:<\/strong> President Trump earned neocon applause for his hasty decision to attack Syria and kill about a dozen Syrians, but his rash act has all the earmarks of a \u201cwag the dog\u201d moment, reports Robert Parry.<\/p>\n

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Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime\u2019s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.<\/p>\n

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The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter conducts strike operations while in the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. (Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ford Williams)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.<\/p>\n

There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a \u201chigh degree of confidence\u201d that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib province.<\/p>\n

But a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an\u00a0intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.<\/p>\n

One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek \u201cregime change\u201d in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump\u2019s \u2018Wag the Dog\u2019 Moment Exclusive: President Trump earned neocon applause for his hasty decision to attack Syria and kill about a dozen Syrians, but his rash act has all the earmarks of a \u201cwag the dog\u201d moment, reports Robert Parry. Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3218,6963,7844,7203,776,827,15096],"class_list":["post-23511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-bashar-al-assad","tag-consortium-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-robert-parry","tag-syria","tag-united-states","tag-wag-the-dog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23512,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23511\/revisions\/23512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}