title: Trump’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Moment
text: 21st Century Wire says Robert Parry, best known for breaking the Iran-Contra affair, takes us through what we know so far surrounding Donald Trump s recent decision to send Tomahawk missiles into Syria and also explores what lies behind the  plans within plans  of the White House and those who now celebrate yet seemingly manipulate Trump behind the curtain.Patrick Henningsen of 21st Century Wire was joined by Robert on 1100KFNX  Patrick Henningsen LIVE  and is an interview you don t want to miss.More on this report from Consortium News  Robert Parry Consortium NewsJust two days after news broke of an alleged poison-gas attack in northern Syria, President Trump brushed aside advice from some U.S. intelligence analysts doubting the Syrian regime s guilt and launched a lethal retaliatory missile strike against a Syrian airfield.Trump immediately won plaudits from Official Washington, especially from neoconservatives who have been trying to wrestle control of his foreign policy away from his nationalist and personal advisers since the days after his surprise victory on Nov. 8.There is also an internal dispute over the intelligence. On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. intelligence community assessed with a  high degree of confidence  that the Syrian government had dropped a poison gas bomb on civilians in Idlib provinceBut a number of intelligence sources have made contradictory assessments, saying the preponderance of evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels were at fault, either by orchestrating an intentional release of a chemical agent as a provocation or by possessing containers of poison gas that ruptured during a conventional bombing raid.One intelligence source told me that the most likely scenario was a staged event by the rebels intended to force Trump to reverse a policy, announced only days earlier, that the U.S. government would no longer seek  regime change  in Syria and would focus on attacking the common enemy, Islamic terror groups that represent the core of the rebel forces.The source said the Trump national security team split between the President s close personal advisers, such as nationalist firebrand Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, on one side and old-line neocons who have regrouped under National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army general who was a prot g  of neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.White House InfightingIn this telling, the earlier ouster of retired Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser and this week s removal of Bannon from the National Security Council were key steps in the reassertion of neocon influence inside the Trump presidency. The strange personalities and ideological extremism of Flynn and Bannon made their ousters easier, but they were obstacles that the neocons wanted removed.Though Bannon and Kushner are often presented as rivals, the source said, they shared the belief that Trump should tell the truth about Syria, revealing the Obama administration s CIA analysis that a fatal sarin gas attack in 2013 was a  false-flag  operation intended to sucker President Obama into fully joining the Syrian war on the side of the rebels   and the intelligence analysts  similar beliefs about Tuesday s incident.Instead, Trump went along with the idea of embracing the initial rush to judgment blaming Assad for the Idlib poison-gas event. The source added that Trump saw Thursday night s missile assault as a way to change the conversation in Washington, where his administration has been under fierce attack from Democrats claiming that his election resulted from a Russian covert operation.If changing the narrative was Trump s goal, it achieved some initial success with several of Trump s fiercest neocon critics, such as neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, praising the missile strike, as did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The neocons and Israel have long sought  regime change  in Damascus even if the ouster of Assad might lead to a victory by Islamic extremists associated with Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State.Wagging the DogTrump employing a  wag the dog  strategy, in which he highlights his leadership on an international crisis to divert attention from domestic political problems, is reminiscent of President Bill Clinton s threats to attack Serbia in early 1999 as his impeachment trial was underway over his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky. (Clinton also was accused of a  wag-the-dog  strategy when he fired missiles at supposed Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 in retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.)Trump s advisers, in briefing the press on Thursday night, went to great lengths to highlight Trump s compassion toward the victims of the poison gas and his decisiveness in bombing Assad s military in contrast to Obama s willingness to allow the intelligence community to conduct a serious review of the evidence surrounding the 2013 sarin-gas caseUltimately, Obama listened to his intelligence advisers who told him there was no  slam-dunk  evidence implicating Assad s regime and he pulled back from a military strike at the last minute   while publicly maintaining the fiction that the U.S. government was certain of Assad s guilt.In both cases   2013 and 2017   there were strong reasons to doubt Assad s responsibility. In 2013, he had just invited United Nations inspectors into Syria to investigate cases of alleged rebel use of chemical weapons and thus it made no sense that he would launch a sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs, guaranteeing that the U.N. inspectors would be diverted to that case.Similarly, now, Assad s military has gained a decisive advantage over the rebels and he had just scored a major diplomatic victory with the Trump administration s announcement that the U.S. was no longer seeking  regime change  in Syria. The savvy Assad would know that a chemical weapon attack now would likely result in U.S. retaliation and jeopardize the gains that his military has achieved with Russian and Iranian help.The counter-argument to this logic   made by The New York Times and other neocon-oriented news outlets   essentially maintains that Assad is a crazed barbarian who was testing out his newfound position of strength by baiting President Trump. Of course, if that were the case, it would have made sense that Assad would have boasted of his act, rather than deny it.But logic and respect for facts no longer prevail inside Official Washington, nor inside the mainstream U.S. news media Continue this report at Consortium News READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT:  21st Century Wire SYRIA FilesSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV