JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Trump Against the War Party.
Clinton, for her part, told a Boston television station:
“I personally would be advocating now for a no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way to take stock of what’s happening, to try to stem the flow of refugees.”
This puts her in synch with the most irresponsible of the Republican candidates, such as Marco Rubio, who wants “a safe zone that includes a no-fly zone.” . . .
Against this chorus of voices calling for the US to step into the Syrian breach, Donald Trump dissents, telling appalled interviewers he supports the Russians “bombing the hell out of ISIS.” Oh, but they’re going after “our” rebels, his CNN interlocutor averred, to which Trump answered “that he tends to believe Russia’s goal is to go after ISIS and that the US shouldn’t strive to be the ‘policeman of the world’”:
“I hear they are hitting both. If Russia wants to go in and if Russia wants to fight – in particular ISIS, and they do and one of the reasons they do is because they don’t want ISIS coming into their country and that’s going to be the next step. So that’s why they’re there. I think they will be fighting ISIS.”
And while Assad is “a bad guy,” Trump said, the US-backed rebels who want to overthrow him are an unknown quantity:
“We always give weapons, we give billions of dollars in weapons and then they turn them against us. We have no control. So we don’t know the other people that we’re supposed to be backing. We don’t even know who we are backing.” . . .
That popularity is due not just to his manner, his brashness, and his “celebrity” status – all of which the chattering classes have attributed to his rise – but to the fact that he talks and thinks like an ordinary American. To wit, his comments on the Syrian imbroglio on ABC’s “This Week”:
“I think what I want to do is I want to sit back — and this does not sound like me very much — but I want to sit back, and I want to see what happens. You know, Russia got bogged down, when it was the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan. Now they’re going into Syria. There are so many traps. There are so many problems. When I heard they were going in to fight ISIS, I said, ‘Great.’”
This is precisely what most normal Americans were thinking and saying on hearing the news that Putin is cleaning up the Syrian mess – a mess we created — because what that means is that we don’t have to do it. When asked about Syria, Trump invariably refers to his opposition to the Iraq war, correctly pointing out that our invasion led directly to the rise of the Islamic State and its expansion into Syria. Watching him drop that bomb in the midst of the last Republican debate was certainly a fun moment: the look on Jeb Bush’s face as the frontrunner scored points off his brother was absolutely priceless.