Marble And Mud

We got some chemical plants but didn't scratch Assad's marble floor

-by Dorothy Reik

Wars do not hurt the leaders of the battling countries but they do devastate the citizens. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, shop owners, taxi drivers, and especially children, lose everything. Men and women who had homes, cars, lives worth living, are turned into beggars pleading for refuge from strangers in strange lands or are warehoused in refugee camps awaiting their fates in muddy fields at the mercy of the elements in skimpy tents. We bombed Syria to punish Assad for using chemical weapons to kill his citizens instead of using bombs and you can see below how he suffered. His suit is freshly pressed, his tie is nattily tied, his shirt is whiter than white and no hair is out of place as he strides purposefully across his marble floor headed, no doubt, to a meeting to decide which of his citizens to kill next-- and how.

Ordinary Syrians forced from their homes are not doing as well. Of course, mud floors don't scratch

It seems that Assad has used chemical weapons to against the Syrian people at least 50 times since the Russians promised Obama they had all had been removed from Syria. It is passing strange that we knew exactly where they were when we launched our missiles. "The United States accused the Syrian government on Friday of using banned chemical arms at least 50 times since Syria’s civil war began seven years ago-- substantially higher than previous official estimates.” The bombing attack was ostensibly to defend the people of Syria, destroying the chemical weapons so that Assad is limited to barrel bombs and cluster bombs that cause so much damage to the human body that no one will look. Out of sight... Chemical weapons leave whole bodies for us-- and Trump-- to look at. Reconstructing a body blown apart by a bomb is too hard, too gruesome, so those deaths are not displayed for the world to see

Of course if Trump really cared about the Syrians he would let them come here and continue their lives in relative safety, threatened only by our homegrown racists, but so far this year we have only accepted ELEVEN Syrian refugees. Trump is keeping his campaign promise: "I'm putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they're going back," he said in a rally in 2015. Numbers suggest that he has translated that rhetoric into policy.

In the first year of the Trump administration, 2,002 refugees were admitted into the U.S., compared with 16,419 in Barack Obama's final year.

In 2016 there were 13.5 MILLION Syrians in need of assistance. 6.5 million displaced inside their own country and 5 million outside of the country.