text: This attack seems to be a first for the U.S. — the first time the the U.S. has bombed both sides in a war. Trump's jingoistic tough guy act was celebrated by the cable news outlets that inform Trump's world view as if he had just been anointed homecoming king, much as they fawned over Bush's "Mission Accomplished" puppet show. However Trump and his novice foreign affairs team don't fully appreciate that the war in Syria is not a simplistic, binary conflict. It's a multilateral conflict that is lacking a simplistic good-guys-vs-bad-guys framework that Trump might understand. Instead, the players are all bad, and many of the players and their motives are the predicted fallout of the Iraq War (in which Iran was the biggest geopolitical winner). Perhaps the only upside of this mess is that Steve Bannon and the white nationalist fringe seem to have lost some of their White House power.