{"id":357175,"date":"2018-04-17T15:58:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T14:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-bogus-credibility-argument-returns\/"},"modified":"2018-04-17T15:58:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T14:58:00","slug":"the-bogus-credibility-argument-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-bogus-credibility-argument-returns\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bogus ‘Credibility’ Argument Returns"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Originally appeared on The American Conservative<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Trump reportedly deferred to Mattis\u2019 advice<\/a> and ordered a smaller attack on Syria than he and Bolton had originally wanted:<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump deferred to his Pentagon chief\u2019s caution and tempered his preference for a more robust attack on Syria over allegations it used deadly gas on civilians, the first hints at the direction of his revamped national-security team. <\/i><\/p>\n

It is better that Mattis\u2019 view prevailed over Bolton\u2019s, but one problem with taking any military action in response to demands to \u201cdo something\u201d is that there will always be a chorus of hard-liners demanding that the U.S. \u201cdo more\u201d than it already has. Once a president has conceded that military action is an appropriate response to a foreign government\u2019s behavior, he has put himself in a trap of his own making. When the first strikes don\u2019t \u201cwork\u201d or are deemed to be inadequate to \u201cget the job done,\u201d the pressure to escalate increases. Since Trump is especially sensitive to accusations of looking \u201cweak,\u201d he is probably more likely than most presidents to listen to the hard-liners that fault him for not doing enough in Syria. It makes me wonder how long Mattis can hold off the president when Bolton is going to keep agitating for more aggressive actions.<\/p>\n

Marc Thiessen complains<\/a> that Trump should have done far more than he did:<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s be clear: Friday night\u2019s strikes were \u201cjust muscular enough not to get mocked.\u201d As a result, they did more damage to the United States\u2019 credibility on the world stage than they did to the Assad regime<\/strong> [bold mine-DL].<\/i><\/p>\n

Hawks invoke \u201ccredibility\u201d when they want to attack someone, and then even when the attack happens they will claim that it undermines \u201ccredibility\u201d because it wasn\u2019t big enough. Following through on unnecessary threats with illegal military action isn\u2019t enough for the \u201ccredibility\u201d-obsessed, because they are simply using \u201ccredibility\u201d as an excuse to plunge the US into more conflicts. If a limited US military action doesn\u2019t get them that, they will insist on more and bigger attacks until they get the war they want. While sane people everywhere were relieved that last week\u2019s attack was small and didn\u2019t provoke retaliation, quite a few hawks were dismayed for the same reasons.<\/p>\n

Thiessen continues:<\/p>\n

Far from being chastened, the US response will embolden Assad, Russia and Iran. And it will embolden other US adversaries as well.<\/i><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s attack on Syria last week was illegal and useless, but it is very doubtful that it will have the effect Thiessen describes here. The people that use the bogus \u201ccredibility\u201d argument don\u2019t understand how states actually judge these things<\/a> in the real world, and so they always predict that any action that isn\u2019t aggressive enough for them will \u201cembolden\u201d every adversary in the world. Curiously, this never happens, and the people obsessed with \u201ccredibility\u201d are never held…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally appeared on The American Conservative. Trump reportedly deferred to Mattis\u2019 advice and ordered a smaller attack on Syria than he and Bolton had originally wanted: President Donald Trump deferred to his Pentagon chief\u2019s caution and tempered his preference for a more robust attack on Syria over allegations it used deadly gas on civilians, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2519,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-357175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2519"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}