monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

At least five people have died and several more have been injured after a hijacked truck ploughed into a shopping centre during a terror attack in Stockholm.

It is the fourth truck attack within a short time.
Stockholm, Berlin, Nice and London.

Trump took office more than 30 days ago, and he still hasn't destroyed ISIS as he said he would. That was a campaign promise.

Well, you've made up for your absence.

Back in January in an in interview with NPR, Obama national security adviser Susan Rice was still touting the Obama administration's success at removing chemical weapons in Syria, saying, "We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile."

President Trump’s Real-World Syria Lesson

It was naïve because ISIS does not exist in a vacuum — nor is it the only bad actor in the region. ISIS was produced as a Sunni Muslim reaction to massive overreach by Iran in Iraq, where Iranian-backed Shiite militias and the Iraqi government forces of Nouri al-Maliki tried to crush all vestiges of Sunni power in that country and make it a vassal of Iran. (If you think ISIS is sick, Google the phrase “power drills to the head and Shiite militias in Iraq” and you will discover that ISIS did not invent depravity in that part of the world.)

The Iranian/Shiite onslaught against Iraqi Sunnis ran parallel with Assad’s Shiite-Alawite regime in Syria, turning what started out as a multisectarian democracy movement in Syria into a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Assad figured that if he just gunned down or poison-gassed enough Syrian Sunnis he could turn their democracy efforts into a sectarian struggle against his Shiite-Alawite regime — and presto, it worked.

The least bad solution is a partition of Syria and the creation of a primarily Sunni protected area — protected by an international force, including, if necessary, some U.S. troops. That should at least stop the killing — and the refugee flows that are fueling a populist-nationalist backlash all across the European Union.

Obama has killed at least as many Muslims as any president.
I had hoped the next president would seek some way to break the generational cycle of war, but he is as warmonger as they come. Then, Hillary today gave her take on what the asshole should bomb in Syria.

As far as I am concerned, no president I could name was worth a crap in that part of the world. Each one compounds the mistakes of the last.

You guys were r anting and raving before the election that Hillary would start a nuclear war if she was elected. Now, less than 100 days in, Trump has launched 50 missiles against Syria, a Russian ally. The Russians have promised retaliation (unspecified) if the US takes military action agains Syria. Trump, apparently with NO foresight or forethought has done just that. Seems apparent that the real threat of war was never from Hillary, but from Trump. When will the first Russian cruise missile take out the White House?

I just read that the Trump administration has filled only 22 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation. This makes me worry that the administration will not have enough manpower to produce the same volume and standard of incompetence that we’ve come to expect so far.

georgeob1 wrote:

The Gulf war was a major error:

Indeed... No need to go back to the Sykes-Picot agreement to make sense of the current mess. It all started with the gulf war. Now it's hard to imagine what the world would look like without ISIS, without the Syrian civil war and the mass emigration of Syrians to Europe, or with a stabilized Afghanistan (Afghanistan went to the Taliban dogs once the US lost their focus there and moved to Iraq).

We just helped ISIS, which is par for the course since we created them. We are now without a doubt the bad guy in the world.

I don't hang it on Trump. This is a long-standing Deep State operation. Check out the competing pipelines across Syria. We're the world's best armed robber-barons--Dems and Reps. Hillary would've been at this game earlier.

By far the vast majority of victims of terrorist attacks over the past 15 years has been Muslims killed by Muslims. In the latest instance, an Islamic State suicide bomber struck a Kurdish wedding in southeastern Turkey on Saturday, killing more than 50 people.

Of 167,221 terrorism-related fatalities reported from 2001 to 2015, almost all — 163,532 or 98 percent — occurred outside the United States and Western Europe, according to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. The U.S. government-funded GTD is the world’s largest public database on terrorist attacks.

The violence has involved Islamic State militants killing Kurds in Turkey, Sunni suicide bombers targeting Shiite mosques in Pakistan, Shiite extremists assassinating Sunni religious figures, Taliban bombs killing civilians in Afghanistan, Islamic State suicide bombers blow up Shiite shrines and massacring members of the Yazidi minority in Iraq, and Boko Haram militants killing peaceful Muslim worshipers and restaurant guests in Nigeria.

Proportionally, Shiites, who make up about 10% of the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims, are killed in increasingly large numbers as Sunni extremists from Iraq to Pakistan target members of a minority sect they view as heretical, according to Bulliet.

Progress is not what Trump promised. He failed to keep most of his promises.

the latest worst of his presidency.