Trump seems to rule out deeper US intervention in Syria

US president also says Kremlin’s backing for Assad ‘very bad for Russia,’ as Tillerson meets with Lavrov in Moscow

ed note–here’s what I (we here at TUT) don’t ‘get’.

At its core, the ‘muuvmint’ is made up of individuals who apply skepticism to outright rejection of everything coming out the JMSM, some even going to the ridiculous lengths of saying that since it appeared on the JMSM, that means it ‘didn’t happen at all’, i.e. various high-intensity events they claim were/are ‘hoaxes’ such as the mass shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Paris, etc.

HOW-FREAKING-EVER, when something pops up that seems to taste good to them in the sense that it feeds into already-pre-conceived notions, they swallow it whole hog. The same elements who claim Trump is a liar and a fraud and that nothing he says can be believed will–sometimes within the VERY SAME SENTENCE–take him 100% at his word when he says something nasty about Assad and about how much he ‘loves’ Netanyahu.

SO, which is it people? Is he to be rejected as a ‘liar’ and a ‘fraud’? If so, then disregard everything nasty he says about Assad or any other Islamic leader. You can’t have it both ways.

OR, we can try another approach here, which–granted, is a lot more involved, a lot more difficult and requires a lot more attention, flexibility, and skill, but which will prove more effective in trying to glean just what the hell is going on–

It’s called parsing for nuance. It means separating what is likely to be true from what is unlikely to be true. This is how politics works/has worked/always WILL work. There are frontal assaults and then there are tactical retreats, and then sometimes, there are tactical retreats that are feigned in order to draw an enemy into an ambush where he then faces a frontal assault.

Do we like the things he is saying about Assad and what these thing SEEM to indicate future actions on Trump’s part? No, any more than we ‘supported’ Trump’s so-called ‘strikes’ on the Syrian airfield.

But does this also mean that we take him at his word when he seems to be indicating an adversarial posture towards Assad, Putin, etc? No. This is something that he HAS to do, given the current political realities vis a vis the drive on the part of Judea, Inc to remove him from office under the pretenses that he is a ‘Russian Spy’ so that he can be replaced with a true warmonger more to Israel’s liking.

In short, there is checkers and there is chess, and despite the fact that both are played on the same board, they are entirely different games and only a fool would apply their understanding of the less-sophisticated/less complicated maneuvers of the one to the more sophisticated/complicated maneuvers of the other.

Times of Israel

US President Donald Trump is appearing to rule out deeper American military intervention in Syria beyond the airstrikes he ordered based on US evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad attacked civilians with chemical weapons.

“Are we going to get involved with Syria? No,” Trump told Fox Business News in an interview that aired Wednesday.

Trump also warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that in backing Assad, Putin was supporting someone who is “truly an evil person.”

“I think it’s very bad for Russia. I think it’s very bad for mankind. It’s very bad for this world,” Trump said.

Later Wednesday, Trump planned to hold talks at the White House with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, while Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was scheduled to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow.

Since Trump took office in January, he has been confronted by European allies who have fear his administration will go easy on Russia. During his 2016 campaign, Trump said he would decide whether to honor the commitment to protect the Baltic republics against Russian aggression, based on whether those countries “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

He has since made his support of NATO allies clear, but has reiterated his stance that European members need to meet their end of the bargain if they are to continue benefiting from the military alliance.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a military alliance of European and North American democracies created after World War II to strengthen international cooperation as a counter the rise of the Soviet Union.

Putin told state-run Mir television that relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated in the early months of Trump’s presidency. “It can be said that the level of trust at the working level, especially at the military level, has not become better but most likely has degraded,” Putin said in an interview broadcast Wednesday.

Putin’s spokesman said Putin may meet with Tillerson “if it is decided” that Putin needs to be briefed on the Tillerson-Lavrov talks.