Mission accomplished: déjà vu

It’s always a little sad to see someone who really can’t be expected to know better, take credit for completing a job when they’ve barely even started. Worse still, they may have started down the wrong route. A child, say, who carefully paints all the parts of his new model before assembling it, only to find they no longer fit together afterwards.

Or the US President who claims to have achieved his objective when he has achieved nothing – or, worse still, achieved the opposite of his intent.

Dubya in 2003

That was my first thought when I heard that Donald Trump had claimed ‘mission accomplished’ following the US-French-British missile strikes on Syria. It was exactly the same claim as made by Dubya Bush back in 2003, giving me a thoroughly dire sense of déjà vu. That followed the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Dubya clearly felt he’d achieved a major success, a view that looks jaded fifteen years on, with fighting still raging in the region and the only winners in Iraq being the West’s great bogeyman, Iran.

That didn’t stop Trump making the same claim for his missile strikes. And I suppose he was right in the most limited possible sense: he gave the world notice of his intention to use missiles against Syria, and he has indeed used missiles against Syria. If that was the extent of his mission – to demonstrate the military power at his disposal – then I suppose the mission was indeed accomplished.

Donald Trump in 2018

One might imagine, however, that such an action ought to deliver more than that, however. More than allow Trump a feel-good macho glow (Macron of France, too, I suppose, though whether May enjoys machismo it’s hard to say – but then, little surprises me about her any more). Generally, one would expect the use of massive military force to advance some cause or another, beyond the purely personal. 

Topple President Assad, maybe? 

End the suffering of Syrian civilians after seven years of civil war? 

At least ensure that chemical weapons would not be used against them again?

Maybe that last goal may be achieved, though I think it would take a brave man to assert it. We shall see. And even if it, it’s unclear to me that being killed or crippled is that much less unpleasant by artillery fire than by chemical weapons.

As for overthrowing Assad or ending the war, it would take a high degree of naivety to believe that the missile strikes will have achieved that much. Or even that bringing Assad down, however desirable in itself, would do any more in Syria’s current crisis than the equally attractive overthrow of Saddam did in Iraq.

Perhaps there’s one negative benefit the strikes have produced: they seem not to have destroyed any Russian equipment or inflicted any Russian casualties. That suggests that we may have avoided a third world war for now.

No. It’s hard to believe that these strikes have done anything very much, except persuade people in the west that, because something had to be done about the chemical attacks, it was legitimate to just about anything, which is what has now been done.

That may have made Trump, Macron and May feel better about themselves. Which I suppose is a benefit of sorts. Though they’re unlikely to have done anything for the Syrians or, indeed, for anyone in the West.

Still, Mission accomplished. Again. In some sense of the expression.