Here is an interesting take from Bix Weir:  https://youtu.be/mKk3vMVZj1Y

Genius move from trump

Hi my friend!
I voted and subscribed to your page!
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with love @andrianna

FUCK.

This dude has no idea what the fuck he's talking about.

DEFCON has nothing to do with nuclear war.  It's a generalized threat level and used to tell our military what level of readiness to apply to their operations that day.  Defense Condition 2 means we're ready to deploy our armed forces.

I'm not seeing confirmation we bothered with going to DEFCON 2, but since we were engaged in combat it would have made sense.  Eitherway, DEFCON is currently 5 which is the lowest level of readiness.

The USA notified Russia because we're in a pact with them to regulate Syrian airspace, so we kept our word.  Russia did nothing to stop Assad from bombing his people and they did nothing to stop our missiles from taking out Assad's airbase, despite having the ability to.  Think about that for a moment.

Russia has to stand up and feign outrage because they promised Syria to provide defense of their airspace.  Yet when the USA came knocking, with 2hrs warning no less, they got out of Dodge as fast as they could and left the front door open with a welcome sign saying "Help yourself to the fridge!".

His claim about the start of war is just fear mongering.
There's only 365 days in a year, yet there are a near infinity of events in history.  There is nothing special about dates of attack.  Start of the wars, end of wars.  Humans have been killing eachother every day for eons.  No matter what day you choose you can find the start or end of some major aggression or another.

This false flag claim is bogus too.  Assad launched an attack on a rebel stronghold.  That stronghold did have chemical weapons stored in it.  He knew that when he ordered the attack, because he's the one that left them sitting there.  To make matters worse, 2 hrs after the attack he bombed the hospital the evacuees were taken to.  He has never denied this.  He has only denied "launching a chemical attack", but never denied "launching an attack where chemicals were released."

Assad killed a bunch of innocent people who disagreed with him, in order to get at people who disagreed with him who weren't innocent.  He committed a war crime, and rather than us taking him out, we took some of his toys away.

The facts are these...

The President has a single unique job.  That is to be "Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces".   He needs authorization from congress to "declare war", but he does not need any authorization at all to engage in combat in places where our troops already are and he doesn't need any authorization from anyone to perform any military action that does not put our troops in danger.  

When he commands our military, that literally is him fulfilling his job description.  It was setup that way, because our founding fathers recognized that a military cannot be effectively directed or controlled by a council, committee,  or a congress.

An Official Act of War, declared by Congress is used to make resources available to the President, such as the ability to break treaties, invade countries and instate a draft.  Not every military action requires that level of resource mustering and once resources are mustered, they are at the disposal of the Commander in Chief in order to engage with any belligerent.
Congress can respond by cutting military spending, revoking budgets and cancelling contracts in order to reign in the military.  It's called "The Power of the Purse".  Congress does not get to decide who we are or are not going to kill on a given day, just how many dollars we're able to spend to do it.

This was NOT a "soft target".  It was a "hard target", and it's considered fair game in all the rules of warfare.  Assad bombed a hospital, we bombed his air base, we could have bombed his palace instead.  Frankly I think we acted with extreme restraint.

What Trump did is remind the world stage that USA won't hesitate to act unilaterally anymore if you attack your own people.  

Russia can balk at this all they want, but they aren't likely to retaliate against the US over Syria and if they did, nukes or not, it would be like a 90lb nerd trying to go toe to toe with a 300lb Sumo Wrestler.

The fact is that Russia does not have the resources to go toe to toe with the USA.  In Dollar Terms, this single missile strike was an expenditure greater than the GDP of [many small countries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)).  

Our military budget is greater than the combined budgets of [China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the UK, India, France and Japan](https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/).  

And if you compare those 2 charts, you'll also see that our military budget is higher than Russia's entire GDP.

While budgets aren't all there is to battle, you can't win a war if you can't buy bullets.  So the comparison of budgets is telling in who would win in outright total war.  

As you can see, the combined spending of 2/3rds of the world's population would be required in order to counter the USA in a total war situation.  Meaning we could take them on if we had to.

This also means, there isn't a nation on earth that can handle going a single round with the USA if the USA decides to *actually end them*.  

This all means that the USA, has enormous power and enormous responsibility in the global stage.  

Trump I think, felt the need to remind the world who we are.  
Assad acted like a child and did a bad thing, so he got spanked.

I see @matrixdweller flagged this post so I'm sending some upvotes to cancel him out.