Who Knew? (Sarin edition)

Not long ago, President Trump "discovered" to his amazement that healthcare is complicated.  "No one knew," he tells us, how complicated it was.  Because our President lives in an impenetrable shell of ignorance, we should not be surprised that he is shocked to learn that nerve gas is bad for babies.  But we should not mistake "his" response to Assad's recent gas attacks for something approaching sentience.  Rather, this attack was the smart move of the smart acorns that our blind pig in chief reluctantly put in charge of the NSC.

The Tomahawk attack had one goal: to cause Assad to stop using chemical weapons and, having no use for them, to stop producing them or storing them lest his stockpiles fall into his enemies' hands.  Our object is not to save Syrian babies.  We don't have a way to do that.  Conventional bombs are lethal, too, and we can't stop them.  We are not trying to change the outcome of the Syrian civil war.  We are not even trying to "punish" Assad the man.  We are instead trying only to make the production of nerve gas a bad idea.  If none is made, none can be sold to or stolen by people we cannot persuade not to use it.  That alone is reason to make the use of sarin unprofitable for Assad.

The strategic decision to make Assad regret using chemical weapons is worthy of a national discussion.  Instead, our foolish media obsess over the morality of its use, the legality of our intervention, slippery slopes, palace intrigues, and everything else that has nothing to do with this act.  The Pentagon has tried to make clear that this attack was intended to discourage the use of the weapons, not to change our policy on Syria per se.   Of course, that's not what the President himself said in his mawkish blather about babies, but who cares what he says?

I am a big fan of Miller's law, a bit of communication theory that tells us to interpret statements in whatever reasonable way will make them true.  That won't turn "Obama tapped my phones" into "my associate's conversations were picked up by legal surveillance of foreigners," but it does facilitate an understanding of what people acting in good faith are trying to communicate.  The spirit behind Miller's law extends to analyses of public policy.  We should interpret each action in whatever reasonable way will make it the right thing to do, completely ignoring as irrelevant any defenses of the action that don't hold water.  Just because an actor offers a bad reason for doing something does not mean that the thing was the wrong thing to do.

In the case of the attack on Syria, discouraging proliferation of sarin is the good reason for doing it.
Viewing the attack in that light, I come out in favor of the raid and give the Administration credit for conducting it.  That the White House chooses instead to go off on a moralizing tangent is beside the point.  According to news accounts, the Pentagon (not the White House) has put forward a reasonable defense and strategic context for the action.  That's where our attention should be focused, and if our President's brain weren't such a muddle, we could in fact focus it there.

Update, 4/14/17.  Sean Spicer got in trouble for saying that not even Hitler used gas on his own people.  On the same day, Sec. Mattis was saying that not even Hitler used gas on the battlefield.  The people on the left who get outraged for a living went nuts over Spicer's version, but no one made a peep about Mattis's statement.  Spicer, of course, is an inarticulate spokesman, a quintessential first hire for Trump.  Loyalty, first, then, when that doesn't work, settle for competence.  But finding a good spokesperson will be hard for Trump, because a press secretary can't speak any more clearly than his principal thinks.  Better to have a liar like Conway, who doesn't care whether she's making sense, or a dimwit like Spicer, who doesn't know whether he's making sense.

But I digress.  The real difference between Spicer's gaffe and Mattis's statement is not that the Defenese Secretary speaks more clearly than the Press Secretary.  The difference is captured in this article.  Mattis attacked the weapon, whereas Spicer, like his boss, attacked the user.  Mattis compared Syrian war-fighting and German war-fighting.  Spicer compared Assad's war crimes and Hitler's war crimes.  On his Sunday show "Reliable Sources," Brian Stelter made the interesting point that Trump's talk about the pictures out of Syria reflects the fact that we don't see the pictures of the damage done by conventional weapons.  As Stelter put it, Trump only saw the gas victims because their bodies were intact.  The pictures of conventional bombing victims are so horrific that news media won't show them.  Those attacks didn't move Trump, but the gas bombs did.  As our wordsmith in chief might say, sad.

Anyway, Spicer got in trouble for making a moral argument about someone not being worse than Hitler.  That's a no-no, because the survival of the Jewish people may hinge on no one ever being publicly judged worse than Hitler, even though any number of tyrants and psychopaths in power could give the guy a run for his money.  But it all starts with the idea that Trump was moved by the immorality of the gas-bombing and not by our national interest in having gas-based weapons go away.  Mattis didn't say anything about the relative evil of people, just about the threat to humanity posed by the unique power of the weapon itself as a force multiplier.

Spicer is a constant reminder of Trump's inadequacy as a President.  If the President had anything to say worth hearing, he'd be forced to find someone capable of saying it.  So far, however, nothing useful has been lost in translation.  If the guy steps in it from time to time, the Left's outrage machine can huff and puff if it likes, but there's really no substance there, and we ought not to be distracted by it.