Friday, April 21, 2017

Current Events Write-Up: Ann Coulter on the Bombing of Syria

I only have one article that I want to share for my Current Events Write-Up this week.

Townhall: Lassie Come Home, by Ann Coulter. 

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter criticizes President Trump’s bombing of Syria, and she expresses reservations about war in the Middle East, period.

This is ironic, since she was a strong supporter of the Iraq War during George W. Bush’s Presidency.  Has she changed her mind on that?

In this particular column, she does not explicitly say.  On the one hand, one can get the impression from this column that she believes that the Iraq War and the War on Terror were justified, but not the bombing of Assad’s Syria.  To quote from the column:

“Assad is one of the least bad leaders in the entire Middle East. He’s not a murderous thug like Saddam, has no rape rooms, isn’t into jihad, protects Christians and is fighting ISIS. He provided us with intelligence on al-Qaida after 9/11. He does not have crazy Islamic police slapping women around or throwing gays off buildings. (That would be our beloved ally, Saudi Arabia.)  Trump was also correct about Assad’s opponents being far worse, containing large helpings of both ISIS and al-Qaida.”

On the other hand, there seems to be some acknowledgment in the column that regime change and war in Iraq did not work:

“We have never succeeded at turning a Third World dictatorship into a paradise. The history of these things is that removing a Middle Eastern strongman always makes things worse — for example, in Iran, Iraq, Libya and Egypt.”

“Our enemies — both foreign and domestic — would be delighted to see our broken country further weaken itself with pointless wars.  Was America strengthened by the Iraq War? The apparently never-ending Afghanistan War? Vietnam? This is how great powers die, which is exactly what the left wants.”

Is there a change of position here, or ambivalence?