The missiles were aimed at Syrian fighter jets, hardened aircraft shelters, radar equipment, ammunition bunkers, sites for storing fuel and air defense systems.
Robert Parry turns to a different movie to signal his conviction that blaming Syria for the initial sarin attack in northern Syria was a flawed "rush to judgment".
Parry suggests that the eagerness with which US neocons in the US "treated the Syrian government's responsibility for the poison-gas incident as flat-fact", might be Donald Trump's Wag the Dog moment.
It may have been Assad or it may have the rebels. Or maybe it was an accident. In any event, the Trump response did not reflect careful deliberation.
Parry began his analysis of Trump's Wag the Dog moment with a different reading from that of the main stream media.
Just two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime's guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.
Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory Nov. 8.
Parry also points out that the New York Times' "lengthy story did not even deign to include the denials from Syria and Russia that they were responsible for any intentional deployment of poison gas."
Parry maintains that the Times story was as emotionally flawed as was the President's decision to fire the missiles.
Logic and respect for facts no longer prevail inside Official Washington, nor inside the mainstream U.S. news media.The mainstream U.S. media has presented the current crisis with the same profound neocon bias that has infected the coverage of Syria and the larger Middle East for decades.
Parry also finds that the eagerness of the Times to bring Trump into the neocon orbit, and move him away from his previous nationalism, is consistent with its 2003 cheer-leading for George Bush's "shock and awe" attack on Saddam Hussein's Iraq forces.
The two films, The Searchers and Wag the Dog, do not offer exact parallels to the initial chemical attack and Trump's eagerness to attack Syria. The two films, each in its own way, however, do point to two certainties: Trump's irrational grab for revenge and the ability of government officials and the media to "change the narrative" for the President.
Michael Gordon, who was one of the authors of the Times piece about Trump's attack, has long served as a reliable Times neocon advocate.
The use of military power is the preferred neocon change method.
This was evident in 2002 when Gordon was "the lead author with Judith Miller of the Times' bogus "aluminum tube" story in 2002 which falsely claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program".
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