Cynical stunt by Trump to boost ratings

WAVE after wave of Tomahawk cruise missiles raining on a remote Syrian military base. This was the swift and brutal revenge from an outraged President Donald Trump for a deadly chemical attack on innocents by president Bashar Al-Assad.

It’s a compelling narrative that’s being spun by the White House – but I’m not buying it.

To my mind, there is a much more credible – and far more disturbing – explanation for this terrifying turn of events.

Rather than a simple story about good versus evil, this missile attack is more likely to have been a grotesquely manipulated media spectacle, a clownish political stunt planned and shamelessly pulled off by Trump to boost his popularity at home.

What is beyond doubt is that there are many parts of the official story that, even at this early stage, do not appear to make any sense whatsoever.

Take, for instance, Trump’s extraordinary overnight transformation from isolationist and critic of foreign military intervention in Syria, in particular, to bellicose war-monger calling for Assad’s head.

This is a man who spent the entire election campaign castigating his opponent Hillary Clinton for fomenting war against the Syrian regime. Now, weeks into his presidency, he is on the verge of starting one himself.

One question is why attacking Syria suddenly took on such urgency two days ago.

There was no logical reason why Trump could not have waited until his intelligence services had irrefutable proof that it was indeed Assad who ordered the chemical attack.

This is especially baffling because, in the past, Trump himself had been deeply sceptical at reports that Assad had killed his own people in this way.

Could it be that this US strike was timed to have the strongest emotional impact on the American people, while the images of dying Syrian children were fresh in the mind?

TRUmP’S remarkable embrace of humanitarian interventionism, he said, occurred after he saw those pictures of the horrific chemical attack in Syria, which left dozens of civilians dead. It was a tragedy, for sure, but politicians do not change a lifetime’s conviction based on their reaction to a single, isolated incident.

Indeed, all the evidence suggests that, when it suits him he is more than happy to deal with monsters.

After all, just a week before this massacre in Syria occurred, Trump had hosted Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the White House. The latter came to power by massacring at least 1,000 innocent men, women and children taking part in a peaceful protest, and then overthrowing the democratic government they were supporting.

He has since ruthlessly stifled all dissent against his iron-fisted rule at home. His police force – among the most vicious in the world – routinely torture prisoners, and Egypt’s jails are jam packed with at least 30,000 political prisoners.

However, Trump dismissed out of hand calls to raise the issue of human rights during the meeting, instead heaping praise on his Egyptian counterpart. A few weeks earlier, he had embraced Prince mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of the tyrannical royal family in Saudi Arabia.

Leaving aside that country’s abysmal human rights record, as its defence minister he is personally responsible for having launched a war against Saudi’s impoverished neighbour, Yemen, in the process killing and maiming thousands of children and cruelly leaving more than half of those who are still alive slowly dying of starvation.

Again, not a peep from Trump about any of that – and I can assure you there will not be in the future, or about El-Sisi, however brutal his rule becomes.

Where there is no consistency there is only hypocrisy. That’s why I believe Trump’s singling out of Assad this week is, to my mind, pure political expediency.

There is, in other words, a cold and calculated method to his madness.

At home in America, with the exception of cutting the inflow of illegal immigration, he has been a dismal failure of a president thus far.

He has failed to repeal the previous administration’s national healthcare policy, Obamacare, having promised to do so. His flagship tax reforms seem similarly doomed.

Unsurprisingly, his polling figures are staggeringly low, especially for a president who has just taken office. Now, by attacking Syria, he has, it seems, cynically taken a leaf out Bill Clinton’s book.

The latter gained notoriety, we should recall, for conveniently firing off missiles at Iraq whenever his sordid affair with monica Lewinsky was in the headlines.

By launching a $5 billion firework show yesterday, Trump ensures that he will no longer be dogged by accusations that he is a puppet of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is of course the primary ally of president Assad.

Now he has flexed America’s muscles, watch how, in a frenzy of patriotism, the Congress and Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington suddenly warm to his domestic agenda; how his poll numbers will rise.

Already CNN, Trunp’s most vicious and relentless critic among the cable networks until now, is excitedly hailing the golden dawn of his ‘new presidency’.

We can only be grateful that Putin appears to have seen Thursday night’s charade for what is was.

HE knows this action was for domestic consumption, and Trump is already reassuring him this was a one-off event – after warning him well in advance that the missiles were on the way and that the Syrian airbase should be evacuated.

So what of those in America who voted for Trump on the strength of his promise to end reckless military adventurism abroad, and forge closer ties with Russia in order to fight Islamic State?

Those people have to live with the terrifying reality that the leader of the free world is just another charlatan and hypocrite.

He is, it seems, willing to sell out his principles and even risk starting World War III – all just to massage his ego and further his vaunting political ambitions.