Tomahawk Missiles

David A. Leuthold is a Wise Guy rancher from Montana, professing at Univ. of Missouri these past 50 years with specialties in political campaigns & public opinion analysis. Below is an excerpt from  a weekly lecture  offered to citizens in Columbia, Missouri concerned with public policy.

April 10, 2017 Osher Lecture-David A. Leuthold

What is it with U.S. Presidents and Cruise missile strikes?

            

            I bet you weren’t surprised to have another week of the Trump saga.   As in previous weeks, the attention is almost entirely on Donald Trump, the key figure in policy making, and the overwhelming subject of all publicity.   Almost every online news story carries a picture of Trump, Trump on the White House grounds, Trump addressing some group, Trump participating in some meeting, Trump signing some proclamation or order.   Trump even draws you here on a sunny spring afternoon—I know, we are all trying to figure out “what hath we wrought?”

Air Strike in Syria

            One big event this week was Trump sending Tomahawk missiles to strike a Syrian air base, thereby showing he was not a wimp like Obama who in the same situation delayed action and eventually settled for an agreement to remove all gas weapons from Syria.  Secretary of State John Kerry had claimed at that time “We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.”   PolitiFact was forced to revisit and revise its assessment of Kerry’s claims, saying “We don’t know key details about the reported chemical attack in Syria on April 4, 2017, but it raises two clear possibilities: Either Syria never fully complied with its 2013 promise to reveal all of its chemical weapons; or it did, but then converted otherwise non-lethal chemicals to military uses.”.

             On the other hand, Russia's defense ministry said on Wednesday that the poisonous gas contamination was the result of gas leaking from a rebel chemical weapons depot after it was hit by Syrian government air strikes.    The Russians claimed that the chemicals had been used by rebels in Aleppo last year, saying, "The poisoning symptoms of the victims … shown on videos in social networks are the same as they were in autumn of the previous year in Aleppo."

That raises an interesting question—are you more likely to believe President Trump or the Russian defense ministry?  What a choice?

The Tomahawk missiles cost about $1 million each, and 59 of them were fired.   Tomahawks were first used during the Gulf War of 1991.     The missiles were last used in October to strike targets in Yemen after attacks on U.S. Navy ships.   The value of the Tomahawk comes from their long range, their precision, and the fact that they don’t require putting a pilot in hostile airspace.

Nation magazine had an interesting article, titled What is it with U.S. Presidents and Tomahawk-Cruise missile strikes?   The article reminds us that Bill Clinton lobbed missiles at Iraq in 1993, in retaliation for a purported assassination attempt against George H. W. Bush.  In 1998, Clinton lobbed missiles on an Al Qaeda meeting in Afghanistan and on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in retaliation to attacks on U.S. embassies.    President George W. Bush began his war on Iraq with a cruise missile “decapitation” strike against Saddam Hussein in 2003.   President Barack Obama began his air assault on the Islamic State group in eastern Syria in 2014 with 47 Tomahawk missiles.  In most of these cases, the intelligence was bad and the missile strikes were ineffective militarily, but they may have been helpful in boosting the President’s approval rating at home, or distracting attention from other problems, such as the Monica Lewinsky affair.