Was there no political bias among the corrupt FBI officials, as some say the inspector general’s report indicates?

Mark Steyn points out that there certainly was:

President Trump addresses the international press after his meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

He starts at 22.30 minutes.

We enjoy this triumphalist article by James Delingpole at Breitbart – and post it even though the certainty of triumph may be premature:

President Trump just became the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s worst nightmare.

As he didn’t neglect to remind us in his hilarious post North Korea summit press conference, President Trump just saved maybe 30 million people from nuclear annihilation. He did what his predecessors considered impossible and what the liberal media and all the “experts” continue to assure us can never be done: he brought peace to the region which up till now was considered the likeliest ground zero for World War III.

In other words, pretty much, President Trump just saved the world.

Beat that Barack Obama! Suck on this, all you liberal MSM and NeverTrumpers! Who’s the boss now, President Xi Ping of China? Remind me what your name was again, Prime Minister – Bieber, is it? – of Canada. How are you going to wriggle out of this one, all you buttoned up bien-pensants at the Nobel Prize academy?

These were just of the few things President Trump didn’t actually say at his hugely entertaining post-summit press conference in Singapore. But then he didn’t need to. Anyone watching could read the subtext for themselves.

“I’ll do whatever it take to make the world a better place,” said President Trump in the special, soften humble-brag voice he uses to wind up reporters from Time.

What he meant was: “You still think I’m not the greatest president you’re ever likely to see in your life time? Hold my beer…”

Looking bright and alert on virtually no sleep, Trump worked the event like an Olympic sprinter doing a victory lap of the track after smashing the world record. This was his moment – one to cherish with his friends and supporters; one to rub in the noses of his enemies – and he was in no mood to rush his time in the sun. To show us just how much he was enjoying it, he casual-ostentatiously asked his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if she’d allow him an extension …

Goodness, it must have been annoying for his critics. If this had been Obama, the BBC and CNN would have been running replays 24/7 for months to come: this was a master at the very top of his game, winning new friends, confounding his enemies, reminding the world that he is by some margin its greatest, most charismatic leader.

This was a masterclass on how to be Leader of the Free World in the era of social media, reality TV and a global populist revolt against the staid, dishonest, sclerotic political class.

You bypass the media – treating them with a mix of jocular affection and amused contempt – and speak directly to the people in language they can understand.

There were so many choice moments that it sometimes felt more like a comedy set by an experienced stand up than the President of the USA. Trump has the same skill set: quick-witted, funny, thinks on his feet, even better on the ad libs than he is on the pre-prepared material.

I loved his line when asked about North Korea’s possible political and economic future. After explaining that it was really Kim Jong Un’s decision, not his, he couldn’t resist adding a helpful suggestion.

“They have great beaches. (You see that when they’re firing off their cannon). Think of that from a real estate perspective.”

See what he did there?

I’ll explain because I don’t want to sound like some David L Brooks character from the Obama era, hailing every presidential fart like it was the heavenly ambrosia which precedes the Second Coming.

No, Trump is not just impressive, but demonstrably brilliant at what he does.

So in those sentences I just quoted, he manages in the space of less than 30 seconds to move from economic policy outline to humorous mockery to self-aggrandising self-reference to his skills as a big swinging dick real estate player. Apart from being varied, interesting – keeping his listeners on their toes because they just never know what he’s going to say next – it also very clearly delineates US foreign policy objectives for North Korea. “Sure, you could go back to being a comedy, no-hope war-zone hell hole waiting to explode, like you were before,” Trump is telling Kim Jong-Un. “But don’t you think it would make so much sense, for all of us, if you became the hot new tourist resort for the enormous South Korean and Chinese markets instead?”

People who don’t get this – which of course still means the entirety of the liberal MSM and the Davos-going global elite  – don’t get it because they don’t want to get it.

They’ll continue to pontificate that President Trump is a vulgar, stupid, undignified, egotistical, hamfisted, troublemaking, divisive, dangerous braggart because that’s the only way they’re ever going to be able to deal with fact that he is so obviously #winning. Sure he might get the odd thing right, probably by accident – or, in the case of North Korea, because of all the amazing groundwork done by the genius Obama and by the arch deal-maker Dennis Rodman – but it’s all OK because in their heads they just know that Trump is the bad guy while they are all vastly his superior.

Meanwhile, every day, Trump is going to keep on reminding us that he is the greatest US president since Reagan, maybe even of our lifetimes. His second term is assured. As is his place in the pantheon.

Nice job, the Donald!

… of the G7 summit and his meeting with the dictator of North Korea:

https://youtu.be/bcXgLqFZ47c

… and how they are getting away with their crimes, helped by traitorous House Democrats led by the unconscionable Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and ignored by the Department of Justice.

On April 3, 2018, we posted the story: House Democrats put complete trust in a gang of Pakistani crooks.

We ended with this  –

To sum up: These Pakistani crooks were engaged by Democratic members of Congress, without any enquiry into their background, to “look after” their computers which contained highly confidential information concerned with the protection of Americans. The Democrats never apparently considered the possibility that their data was being stolen and sent to Pakistani authorities. When their hardware was stolen by the crooks – and they knew it was the Awan gang who had stolen it – they did not go to the police. When the FBI did finally arrest Imran Awan on charges of fraud in a car-dealership – and denied that the gang “had any connection with a foreign government” – Imran Awan continued to be on the payroll of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Democrats were putty in the hands of the foreign criminal gang. Helpless as babies. They feared to offend them by reporting them to the police or firing them.

Yet these people, for whom large numbers of Americans voted to represent them in the federal government, want, yearn, ache to rule the country. To conduct US relations with foreign powers. To be in charge of the world’s mightiest military force …

Now (June 7, 2018) Creeping Sharia deplores the inaction of the DOJ:

What the Democrats did here was treason. …

The DOJ under Jeff Sessions is covering up a scandal. … It is in[Attorney General] Jeff Sessions’s power to … charge the Pakistanis with hacking Congress and exposing Democrats’ hypocrisy and negligence. He has a list of witnesses and his FBI is refusing to interview them… They have all the goods. It’s in the server logs. This case is open-and-shut. And Jeff Sessions is refusing to bring the charges.

The question is, why?

Whatever his reasons, Jeff Sessions is failing President Trump and the nation.

… through an Australian living and working in the United States, Professor Philip Alston.

The UN – aka Evil HQ – despises and condemns this free republic.

Dan Calabrese writes (to the citizens of the United States) at Canada Free Press:

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. The United Nations says so.

Six months ago, the UN sent a “human rights investigator” to find out if the poor are worse off under Donald Trump, which of course he and the UN had already decided was the case before he ever got here. He spent a little time here, visited a few run-down areas, and referenced some obsolete census data. Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, called on U.S. authorities to provide solid social protection and address underlying problems, rather than “punishing and imprisoning the poor”.

While welfare benefits and access to health insurance are being slashed, President Donald Trump’s tax reform has awarded “financial windfalls” to the mega-rich and large companies, further increasing inequality, he said in a report.

Which was, of course, totally untrue. Everyone except the super-rich benefit from the tax cuts.

U.S. policies since President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s have been “neglectful at best”, he said.

“But the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship,” Alston said.

Almost 41 million people live in poverty, 18.5 million of them in extreme poverty, and children account for one in three poor, he said. The United States has the highest youth poverty rate among industrialized countries, he added.

“Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent and it has the world’s highest incarceration rate … and the highest obesity levels in the developed world,” Alston said.

Oh, happy is the country whose problem is that its people are too fat!

However, the data from the U.S. Census Bureau he cited covers only the period through 2016, and he gave no comparative figures on the extent of poverty before and after Trump came into office in January 2017.

The Australian, a veteran U.N. rights expert and New York University law professor, will present his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council later this month.

It is based on his mission in December to several U.S. states, including rural Alabama, a slum in downtown Los Angeles, California, and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

Actually bothering to rebut this point-by-point would be an exercise in absurdity, but the defining fact here is that this fool wants to blame Trump for all this while citing December 2016 census data to support all his points.

As for his view of the problems and the cause/effect, let’s just say Americans have been debating for centuries the best economic and societal policies to employ, and the debate continues, but apparently that’s all over now that a “UN human rights investigator” has pronounced from on high how things are.

Remember, this is the same UN that has allowed the likes of Syria, Iran and Cuba to serve as members of its Human Rights Commission, and that blames Israel for every bit of violence that occurs in the Middle East. The UN is a complete joke. Can someone tell me again why we bother to pay for the privilege of membership in this schlock organization?

A very bad joke. A very bad institution.

The UN must be destroyed!

The Obama administration was against increasing US oil production; against drilling in new fields; against fracking. Obama would rather Americans bought oil from other countries, in particular Muslim countries of the Middle East.

President Trump – intent on making America great again – has a different policy. It is enormously successful.

The New York Post reports:

In February, oil output hit 10.2 million barrels per day and gas production hit 87.6 billion cubic feet per day. The fact that US oil and gas companies are producing such prodigious quantities of energy — and by doing so, are saving consumers billions of dollars per year — should be headline news. …

The shale revolution has turned the US into an energy superpower. The combination of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other technologies … has resulted in “the fastest and biggest addition to world energy supply that has ever occurred in history”.

How big is that addition? Over the past decade, merely the increase — I repeat, just the increase — in US oil and gas production is equal to seven times the total energy production of every wind turbine and solar project in the United States.

Climate-change activists like to claim that renewable energy can power the entire economy and that we should “do the math”. I couldn’t agree more — on the math part. In 2008, US oil production was about 5.2 million barrels per day. Today, it’s about 10.2 million barrels per day. In 2008, domestic gas production averaged about 55.1 billion cubic feet per day. Today, it’s about 87.6 billion cubic feet per day.

That’s an increase of about 32.5 billion cubic feet per day, which is equivalent to about 5.5 million barrels of oil per day. Thus, over the past decade, US oil and gas output has jumped by about 10.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Let’s compare that to domestic solar and wind production which, since 2008, has increased by 4,800 percent and 450 percent, respectively. While those percentage increases are impressive, the total energy produced from those sources remains small when compared to oil and gas.

In 2017, according to the Energy Information Administration, US solar production totaled about 77 terawatt-hours and wind production totaled about 254 terawatt-hours, for a combined total of 331 terawatt-hours. That’s the equivalent of about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day.

Simple division (10.5 divided by 1.5) shows that since 2008, the increase in energy production from oil and gas is equal to seven times the energy output of all domestic solar and wind.

This surge in hydrocarbon production has resulted in huge benefits to the US economy. Over the past half-decade, foreign and domestic companies have invested about $160 billion in new chemical-manufacturing facilities in the United States. A 2016 study by IHS found that lower natural-gas prices have created about 1.4 million jobs and increased disposable income by about $156 billion.

Why?

The answer according to the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, is in order (at least partly) to ensure the recipients’ supporting votes in that assembly.

But how’s that working out?

From Breitbart:

The U.S. State Department has released a report on the voting behavior of other countries at the United Nations — and has identified the top ten best and worst countries in terms of voting for or against the U.S., respectively.

The April 26 report, Voting Practices in the United Nations 2017, was prepared after the Trump administration made clear it would consider cutting aid to countries that voted against the U.S. in UN institutions. That warning came after the UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 (with 35 abstentions) last December to oppose President Donald Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the capital city of Jerusalem.

“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care,” the president said.

His warning was reiterated by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who said after the vote: “We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations and we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”

The report on UN votes is prepared annually, but has additional significance this year due to those warnings.

In 2017, the best U.S. ally at the UN was Israel, and the worst U.S. enemy at the UN was Zimbabwe.

The report also notes the best ten: “The 10 countries with the highest voting coincidence with the United States were, in descending order: Israel, Micronesia, Canada, Marshall Islands, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Palau, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic.”

It also notes the worst ten: The 10 countries with the lowest voting coincidence with the United States were, in ascending order: Zimbabwe, Burundi, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Bolivia, and South Africa.”

According to the USAID website, the latter countries received the following amounts of U.S. aid, across all agencies, in fiscal year 2016 (the last year for which full records are available, rounded to the nearest million):

• Zimbabwe: $261 million
• Burundi: $75 million
• Iran: $3 million
• Syria: $916 million
• Venezuela: $9 million
• North Korea: $0
• Turkmenistan: $3 million
• Cuba: $16 million
• Bolivia: $1 million
• South Africa: $597 million

The total was close to $2 billion.

Haley said last week, upon release of the report: “This is not an acceptable return on our investment. When we arrived at the UN last year, we said we would be taking names, and this list of voting records speaks for itself. President Trump wants to ensure that our foreign assistance dollars – the most generous in the world – always serve American interests, and we look forward to helping him see that the American people are no longer taken for granted.”

Of the ten countries voting least often with the U.S., South Africa may already be feeling the consequences.

On Monday, South Africa learned that the U.S. would not be exempting it from new steel tariffs. The South African government released a statement in protest against the U.S. decision: “South Africa is concerned by the unfairness of the measures and that it is one of the countries that are singled out as a contributor to US national security concerns when its exports of aluminium and steel products are not that significant.”

The there’s the $320 million a year that goes to Mexico, where it is funding “human right abuses”.

USAID, an “independent agency” of the US government, is the spigot.

From Wiki:

USAID’s programs are authorized by Congress in the Foreign Assistance Act which Congress supplements through directions in annual funding appropriation acts and other legislation. As an official component of U.S. foreign policy, USAID operates subject to the guidance of the President, Secretary of State, and the National Security Council.

But who are the actual decision makers? Almost certainly denizens of the Swamp: Obama appointees, Hillary Clinton voters, Muslim Brotherhood fans, Iran “deal” supporters, President Trump haters (crocodile-green with envy) …

It seems to us that the (unlikely but actual) president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has a crush (decidedly not reciprocated) on President Trump. We do not think that is stupid, just more emotional than is necessary.

Macron came to Washington, D.C., made some speeches, either completely empty – just loose strings of grandiose phrases – or plain nonsensical, and got away unharmed.

Bruce Bawer writes what needs to be said about Macron’s stupidities at Front Page:

Last week, Emmanuel Micron, I mean Macron, visited Washington, had dinner at the White House, and gave a speech on Capitol Hill in which he referred to Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast as a novel, identified the French architect of Washington, D.C., whom Americans know as Pierre L’Enfant, by his middle name, Charles, and attributed a famous line by Ronald Reagan to Teddy Roosevelt. The line in question was the one about how freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.

There was, in fact, a good deal of rhetoric in his speech about freedom – and the threats thereto. Given what’s going on in France these days, that would only make sense. But his approach to his country’s – and the West’s – current travails was, to say the least, curious. On 9/11, asserted Macron, “many Americans had an unexpected rendezvous with death.” How poetic! How French! And how inappropriate a way to refer to thousands of people being evaporated one fine Tuesday morning. He made it sound as if death by jihad had been their divinely ordained destiny – as if the hijackers of those planes had been instruments of some cosmic will.

Macron went on to mention the “terrible terrorist attacks” that have struck his own country in recent years. “It is a horrific price,” he pronounced, “to pay for freedom, for democracy.” Meaning what? In what sense are such attacks the “price” we “pay for freedom”? Did Macron mean something like what London mayor Sadiq Khan meant when he said that living with terrorism is “part and parcel of living in a big city”? I’d say the people who died on 9/11 were paying for American leaders’ blithe indifference to the existential danger of Islam – and that those who’ve died in more recent terror attacks in Europe were paying for their own leaders’ cowardly irresolution (or outright defeatism) on the subject.

Macron might have said something gutsy about his fellow politicians’ culpability in the violent deaths of terrorist victims. But no. Like every other European-establishment political hack, he posed as a hero of freedom. Some hero: he didn’t dare breathe the word Islam or Muslim or even jihad. But what else to expect from a man who … has called for Arabic to be taught in every French high school, for “cathedral mosques” to be built in every major French city, and for enhanced measures to be taken against critics of Islam?

In any event, Macron’s grandiose Gallic gush about freedom – and about the cherished centuries-long friendship between the American and French people (yeah, tell that to the cab drivers in Paris) – was really just throat-clearing before he got around to the Paris climate-change accords, the Iran deal, and trade.

Yes, there was this, somewhat later in his oration: “Both in the United States and in Europe, we are living in a time of anger and fear because of these current global threats, but these feelings do not build anything….Closing the door to the world will not stop the evolution of the world. It will not douse but inflame the fears of our citizens.” Qu’est-ce que c’est? The French claim to love logic. But where’s the logic here? By “current global threats”, Macron presumably meant jihadist violence and Islamization. But what was Macron telling us to do about them? Nothing. Fear is bad. Anger is wrong. And stronger border controls? They won’t work, because they won’t stop the world’s “evolution”. Is evolution his euphemism for Islamization?

Macron proceeded to denounce “extreme nationalism”. Clearly, he wasn’t talking about actual far-right fascists. No, he meant “America first”. He meant Brexit. “Personally, if you ask me,” he said, “I do not share the fascination for new, strong powers, the abandonment of freedom, and the illusion of nationalism.” In short, he was equating “freedom” with rule by the EU and UN (for which he worked in a plug) and indicting ordinary folks who actually think their countries belong to them. During his rant about climate change, Macron proclaimed that we need to save the Earth because, as he put it, “there is no planet B!” Well, I couldn’t help thinking, there’s no France B, either. And the fact is that his own country is going down the tubes – and fast. But if you believed his speech, the only threat to liberté, égalité, et fraternité in the West isn’t Islam but “fake news”. 

Yes, he actually used those words. Unlike Trump, however, he wasn’t referencing the left-wing distortions of CNN, the New York Times, and their European equivalents. Here’s what he said: “To protect our democracies, we have to fight against the ever-growing virus of fake news, which exposes our people to irrational fear and imaginary risks.” Irrational fear? Imaginary risks? Plainly, here was yet another craven European pol who, even as Rome is burning, insists that the problem isn’t the arsonists or the fire but the firefighters. How many of the House and Senate members applauding him on Capitol Hill knew that Macron recently called for a law in France that would summarily close down online sources of “fake news” – by which (he’s made clear) he means news sources critical of Islam?

Macron’s Washington speech, as it happened, came only days after the release of the most comprehensive study yet of Islam in France. Co-sponsored by the Sorbonne, it concluded that the country’s second- and third-generation Muslims, who make up seven or eight percent of its population, are increasingly Islamized. Most have no respect for French law and culture; most approve of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Researcher Olivier Galland said his results were, “to put it mildly, harrowing” – reflective of community values in stark contrast with those of la belle Republique.

France’s mainstream news media reacted to the study with outrage. Galland and his team, charged Le Monde, were “stigmatizing Muslims”. But for those not interested in whitewashing Islam, the study only affirmed a grim reality that has been reported worldwide for years in what Macron would call “fake news” media – a reality of no-go zones, mass car burnings, large-scale gang riots, police who are scared to arrest Muslims, firefighters who hesitate to enter Muslim neighborhoods, anti-Semitic attacks that are driving Jews from France, historians who feel compelled to write “Islamically correct” textbooks, and high-school teachers who (as Millière puts it) “go to work with a Qur’an in their hands, to make sure that what they say in class does not contradict the sacred book of Islam.” Oh, and a tiny cohort of brave fools who are put on trial for daring to speak the truth about all this.

Another recent document is of interest here. On March 19, Le Figaro published a statement signed by about one hundred French intellectuals, among them Alain Besançon, Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard Kouchner, Robert Redeker, Pierre-André Taguieff, and Ibn Warraq. “Islamist totalitarianism,” they warned, is gaining ground in France by, among other things, representing itself “as a victim of intolerance.” It has demanded – and received – “a special place” in French society, resulting in an “apartheid” that “seeks to appear benign but is in reality a weapon of political and cultural conquest”. The signatories declared their opposition to this silent subjugation and their wish “to live in a world where women are not deemed to be naturally inferior….a world where people can live side by side without fearing each other … a world where no religion lays down the law.”

On the one hand, it was a powerful manifesto – nothing less than a j’accuse for the twenty-first century – whose power lay in its courageous candor about the real threat facing the Republic of France. On the other hand, my response upon reading it was: Well, good luck with that. Some of these intellectuals have been saying these things for a long time; others have joined the chorus more recently. All praise to every last one of them. But nothing will change in France until public proclamations by intellectuals give way to meaningful nationwide action by ordinary citizens – who, alas, in the second and deciding round of last year’s presidential election, gave Macron, this would-be Marshal Pétain, twice as many votes as the woman who, whatever her imperfections and her unfortunate parentage, is the closest their poor broken country has to a potential Saint Joan.

We are not fans of Saint Joan. But we do think Marine Le Pen would have been the better choice for the presidency of France in this late hour when the Islamic jihad needs urgently to be engaged and defeated and the EU disbanded – as she advocates.

Rhetorical questions: What moves James Comey? What makes him tick?

Why did he emerge from the mists of mystery which rightly enfold the FBI, to make statements about Hillary Clinton’s unlikely innocence and then again her likely guilt? Was doing that part of his job description? Seems improbable.

He is such a tall man that when he stands among other people, he has no choice but to look down on most of them. He is surrounded by the tops of people’s heads. So prominent in bodily presence is he, and yet, until the last couple of years, unnoticed. Did he crave more attention? Then why did he (as he says he did) hide among the White House curtains in the hope (disappointed) of escaping the attention of President Trump?

An enigma.

Did he crave fame? He has attained notoriety at least, which may in time be infamy, if it is not forgotten.

He pinched the title of his apologia, A Higher Loyalty, from one of our posts about him: The higher loyalty of James Comey, September 11, 2016. (So we will maintain in the teeth of all doubt and derision). Of course we meant it ironically, since in our account his “higher loyalty” was given to Hillary Clinton, to whose level even a midget would need to stoop. But we don’t grudge it. It’s probably the best-worded phrase printed anywhere in or on his book. (Which we have not read and have no intention of reading. We go by what is said about it, and by the banality of what we’ve heard him say on TV. And we freely confess to our unshakable prejudice against him.)

To what “higher loyalty” does he himself lay claim? Any hint in his subtitle, “Truth, Lies, and Leadership”? What “truth”? Whose “leadership”? His own? If not, the answers to those questions will remain forever in the vast hot-air Closet of Incoherent Explanations to which politicians’ and bureaucrats’ memoirs and apologias are consigned by the laws of nature.

As to “lies” – is he loyal to some or any of them? Not to all, anyway. His self-contradictions are common knowledge.

What we hear and read about him is that, in addition to lying, he revealed some parts of what he knew – directly to the president-elect, deviously to the press through a friend – while concealing other parts, highly significant facts, among the curtains of his mind. (Along such lines as: “We have a dossier about you Mr. Trump, in which it is alleged that you colluded with a p(r)osse of Russian whores to let you watch them micturate on a hotel bed in Moscow. We also know who paid to have the dossier compiled, but we won’t tell you who it was.” And not a hint did he drop. Even though she who paid for the scurrilous lies was his recently defeated rival for the presidency.)

Many Democrats – whose side he seems, at least intermittently, to favor – want his guts for garters. They, including Hillary Clinton herself, blame him for her loss and Donald Trump’s triumphant gain of the presidency in 2016. She blames lots of people. How much blame – or from our point of view credit – for her loss and his victory belongs to James Comey, who can say?

Millions of Republicans and conservatives long for his utter undoing: indictment, trial, imprisonment, humiliation. Why? That is a question we can answer. There may be many reasons, but we reckon that the big one, the one that towers above all others, is that he could have brought crooked Hillary Clinton to indictment, trial, imprisonment and humiliation – and didn’t do it. 

“What did the missile strikes on Syria’s chemical weapons sites do for America?”

“Why should Americans expend blood and treasure for Syrians victimized by their own government?”

“America is not the world’s policeman.”

Such are the questions and protests that are coming from angry commentators, including many conservatives.

So was President Trump’s decision to act as he did right or wrong?

Claudia Rosett, for long a trusty reporter on the horror show called the United Nations, writes at PJ Media:

With air strikes on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities, carried out jointly with Britain and France, America has done the right thing.

Leading from in front, President Trump is finally redrawing the red line that President Obama erased in 2013. Whatever the threats and criticisms that will surely follow, the world will be safer for it. The vital message is that America is no longer the hamstrung giant of the Obama era. Tyrants such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and his patrons in Moscow and Tehran, have been served notice that it would be unwise to continue to assume that America will waffle, appease or simply retreat while they take upon themselves the shaping – to monstrous effect – of the 21st-century world order. This message is also likely to resonate in Beijing (which has reportedly been planning live-fire naval exercises next week in the Taiwan Strait) and Pyongyang (with its nuclear missile projects).

The immediate aim of the US-led air strikes was to end the chemical weapons attacks that Syria’s Assad regime has continued to inflict on its own people – despite Assad’s promises in 2013 to surrender his chemical weapons, and Russia’s promise to ensure Assad did so. On Friday, speaking at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Ambassador Nikki Haley charged that by U.S. estimates, “Assad has used chemical weapons in the Syrian war at least 50 times” – some of these attacks within the past year, including the gas attack that killed dozens … in the Syrian city of Douma.

There’s room for debate about whether it is America’s responsibility, on humanitarian grounds, to stop such atrocities. But whatever your views on protecting children in a far-off land from the hideous effects of chemical weapons, there is a larger, strategic reason for trying to stop Assad. Syria, with its liberal use of chemical weapons, has been setting a horrific precedent – repeatedly violating the Chemical Weapons Convention to which Damascus acceded in 2013, and eroding the longstanding international taboo against chemical warfare. This is dangerous way beyond Syria. As Haley told the UN Security Council: “All nations and all people will be harmed if we allow Assad to normalize the use of chemical weapons.”

In theory, the United Nations was supposed to prevent this, ensuring in tandem with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that Assad would give up all his chemical weapons – with the specific oversight and guarantees of Russia, under a deal cut in 2013 by Obama and Putin. As I explained in an article earlier this week for The Hill, the UN has failed utterly, thanks to Putin’s cynical exploitation of the entire setup. Russia used the chemical weapons disarmament deal as a portal for its own military entry into Syria in support of Assad, and has since been using its veto on the UN Security Council, along with a torrent of Kremlin propaganda, to run diplomatic cover for Assad.

As many conservative commentators pointed out at the time, it was stupid (if not collusional) of Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry to hand over the responsibility for overseeing Syria’s WMD abandonment to Russia.

The upshot has been that if the US does not stop Assad’s use of chemical weapons, then nobody will.

Neither Britain nor France would have done it without the US.

The US could have done it on its own. British and French participation in the missile attack was useful for President Trump, though not necessary for the success of the operation. The huge majority of the missiles were American – 88 of the 105. Nine were French and 8 were British.

Prime Minister May allowed British forces to strike Syria along with US forces because she “owed” President Trump for his supporting her, when she hit back at Russia for the poisoning of two Russian expats in Britain by expelling Putin’s diplomats and closing a consulate. She asked President Trump to do the same, and he did. She was able to give the order for the strike on Syria by the RAF without consulting parliament because the MPs were still absent on their Easter break. She seized the moment, and now there’s an outcry in the Commons – as well as the country – about it.

As for President Macron, he seems to be fascinated by President Trump, wanting to follow him and yet also to direct him. Macron claimed that he had “convinced” Trump that he should keep the US military engaged in Syria – and then he retracted the claim.

Last April, after Assad used sarin gas in an attack that killed almost 100 people, Trump ordered a strike of 59 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian airbase. Evidently, that was not enough to stop Assad’s chemical weapons spree.

At a Pentagon press briefing Friday evening held shortly after Trump’s public announcement of the strikes on Syria, Gen. Joseph Dunford listed three targets “struck and destroyed,” which he said were “specifically associated with the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons program.” The last two on his list were chemical weapons storage facilities, one of which included “an important command post”. On these, I don’t know anything beyond the generic descriptions Dunford gave at the briefing.

But the first target on Dunford’s list had a very familiar ring. He described it as “a scientific research center located in the greater Damascus area”. He added: “This military facility was a Syrian center for the research, development, production and testing of chemical and biological warfare technology.”

That sure sounds like the notorious Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, also known as the SSRC. In which case there can be no doubt that these air strikes were aimed at an incredibly high-value target, an outfit central to some of the worst depravities of Assad’s weapons programs, and – as it happens – a longtime client of North Korea and Iran. On the 99 percent probability that this was the research center to which Dunford referred, here’s some background:

For starters, I’d credit Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis with telling it exactly as it is, when he said at the same Pentagon press briefing Friday night, “We were very precise and proportionate. But at the same time, it was a heavy strike.”

The SSRC has been on the U.S. sanctions list for 13 years, first designated under the Bush administration in 2005, with periodic, horrifying updates under the Obama and Trump administrations, targeting its various fronts, procurement arms, officials and connections.

This is not just any old research center. According to the U.S. Treasury, it is “the Syrian government agency responsible for developing and producing non-conventional weapons and the missiles to deliver them”. …

On April 24, 2017, following Assad’s sarin gas attack on the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun, the Trump administration blacklisted 271 employees of the SSRC, stating that these individuals “have expertise in chemistry and related disciplines and/or have worked in support of SSRC’s chemical weapons since at least 2012”.  In other words, during the same time frame in which Russia (and former secretary of State John Kerry) were assuring us that 100 percent of the chemical weapons were gone from Syria, the Syrian regime’s SSRC was prolifically busy plowing ahead with Assad’s chemical weapons program.

We also have it on good authority that during roughly that same interval, the SSRC was ordering up shipments from North Korea. According to the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea sanctions, in a report dated March 5, 2018, their investigations into weapons and dual-use shipments to Syria from North Korea turned up more than 40 shipments between 2012 and 2017 “by entities designated by Member States as front companies for the Scientific Studies Research Centre of the Syrian Arab Republic.” Among these shipments were items “with utility in ballistic missile and chemical weapons programs”.

If the SSRC was indeed struck and destroyed, the likely benefits are enormous. That would deprive Assad of one of the most diabolical laboratories of his evil regime, quite likely providing a big setback to his chemical weapons program, with the two-fer that it might also have zapped his bioweapons program.

It would also send a useful message to everyone from the SSRC’s suppliers, such as Iran and North Korea, to such predatory dictators as Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Destroying the SSRC with air strikes ought to drive home, in a way that no amount of UN debate and no quantity of sanctions designations ever could, that these days the U.S. and its allies are serious about their red lines. 

The SSRC was struck. According to the caption to this picture in The Independent, this rubble is what’s left of “part” of it.