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Following reports of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, President Trump authorized the launch of Tomahawk cruise missiles against a base in Syria. The Russian government was notified prior to the launch as they have resources in the area that was attacked.
According to NBC News:
The United States launched dozens of cruise missiles Thursday night at a Syrian airfield in response to what it believes was Syria's use of banned chemical weapons that killed at least 100 people, U.S. military officials told NBC News.
Two U.S. warships in the Mediterranean Sea fired 59 Tomahawk missiles intended for a single target — Ash Sha'irat in Homs province in western Syria, the officials said. That's the airfield from which the United States believes the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fired the banned weapons.
There was no immediate word on casualties. U.S. officials told NBC News that people were not targeted and that aircraft and infrastructure at the site were hit, including the runway and gas fuel pumps.
Also at Al Jazeera:
The United States has launched 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Syrian government targets in retaliation for what the Trump administration charges was a Syrian government chemical weapons attack that killed scores of civilians, a US official says.
The targets hit from US ships in the Mediterranean Sea included the air base in the central city of Homs from which the Syrian aircraft staged Tuesday's chemical weapons attack, the US official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
[...] He [Trump] called on "civilised nations" to join US in "seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria".
Syrian state TV said "American aggression targets Syrian military targets with a number of missiles".
The poison gas attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province on Tuesday killed at least 86 people, including 27 children, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Turkey said samples from victims of Tuesday's attack indicate they were exposed to sarin, a highly toxic nerve agent.
The New York Times adds:
The Pentagon informed Russian military officials, through its established deconfliction channel, of the strike before the launching of the missiles, the official said, with American officials knowing when they did that that Russian authorities may well have alerted the Assad regime. "With a lot of Tomahawks flying, we didn't want to hit any Russian planes," he said.
[...] It was Mr. Trump's first order to the military for the use of force — other operations in Syria, Yemen and Iraq had been carried out under authorization delegated to his commanders — and appeared intended to send a message to North Korea, Iran and other potential adversaries that the new commander in chief was prepared to act, and sometimes on short notice.
The airstrikes were carried out less than an hour after the president concluded a dinner with Xi Jinping, the president of China, at Mar-a-Lago, sending an unmistakably aggressive signal about Mr. Trump's willingness to use the military power at his disposal.
Mr. Trump authorized the strike with no congressional approval for the use of force, an assertion of presidential authority that contrasts sharply with the protracted deliberations over the use of force by his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.
[...] Mr. Trump moved with remarkable speed, delivering the punishing military strike barely 72 hours after the devastating chemical attack that killed 80 people this week.
Wikipedia notes: Use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war .
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 07 2017, @01:13PM (3 children)
Perhaps you'd like to take your chances with rule by Rwandans, or pine for the could-have-been utopia of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Or, perhaps you optimistically hope to replicate the dramatic uptick in fortunes that occurred in Zimbabwe after Mugabe's Zanu PF seized power? Or maybe you're talking about something with a little more salsa in it and want to see what South American death squads can do. No? How about race/religious riots that kill people by the thousands like they have in India?
Look, white men have a mixed record. They should be and are held accountable for their failings. They have also done good things, and having non-white men and women perennially completely elide those is tedious and itself racist. My Korean wife, herself an immigrant, was bemoaning all the evil white people last week after Trump did something. I pointed out that without the evil white people there wouldn't even be Korean people such as herself, because the Japanese colonial power was literally erasing the Korean language and culture when US marines bled their way across the South Pacific to free them, and then a second time when the evil white people literally saved her parents' lives by bleeding out their life's blood on the sands of Inchon.
It's also worth pointing out to all the people working themselves into an apoplectic fit over Trump's stance on immigration that we wouldn't even be having this conversation in Japan or China. There is no Statue of Liberty off the coast of Shanghai or in Tokyo harbor.
The Japanese are so xenophobic in fact that before they had the ethnic Koreans (imported as slave labor during the colonial period) to beat on and disenfranchise they had to invent a class of people to beat up on called the burakumin, literally leatherworkers and those unclean who interacted with animals in Buddhist feudal Japan.
So, in short, take a breath and pull yourself together. Stop watching CNN, and stop thinking in sound bites.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @07:44PM
Ah, your racism apologia is starting to make sense now.
I've been getting those vibes off your posts for a while now, just didn't really click until now.
You are that uber-white bernie bro type who really doesn't care all that much about racial justice, too hung up on pretending racism isn't really a big problem anymore.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday April 07 2017, @11:54PM (1 child)
What was your wife's response?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday April 08 2017, @01:09AM
She realized she had overstepped and fell silent. It's a bit understandable because working in nonprofit in NYC all day long she hears people bashing white men all day long. And that's on top of her having grown up in a city where racism and tribalism are second nature. She and her brother forget themselves occasionally and disparage white people until i make some tongue in cheek remark like how they can't see their own racism for what it is because they have such little eyes. Then they laugh and apologize.
Washington DC delenda est.