Syriasly?

Alternative Column: I voted for Donald Trump. No kidding.
As Trump was running for president, he declared U.S. policy in the Middle East to be a disaster. How could I not vote for the guy?
The other candidate declared something else, “We came, we saw, he died.” She was referring to Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who had dismantled all his weapons of mass destruction according to an agreement made with Western powers in 2003. The result of her execution of Gaddafi is that Libya is now slave market to the world.
It used to be so simple. Conservatives and liberals opposed each other.
The drive for war in Syria is so all-encompassing it boggles the mind. The talk is about what we do about Assad's (alleged, presumed) gas attack. There is nothing about why in the world that government, who is winning the war, would do such a thing. There is nothing about who would benefit. Whether Assad's government did it or not is hardly mentioned as our rulers and their media salivate over more military expenditures and more death.
Liberals and conservatives are allied against the producers, the people who long ago threw up their hands in disgust. “Furnish us weapons. Furnish us skilled workers. We want free stuff!” they cry. We are obligated to conduct theft and murder around the world despite the fact that in hindsight, it always seems to make matters worse. The 9/11 attack was retaliation.
What about The Ten Commandments? Isn't that supposed to be law, or at least a guide to behavior in our Judeo-Christian culture? There are people who think tax dollars are as much a given as the sun coming up in the east. What those tax dollars represent are wages for our servants in government. If our servants commit murder, are we guilty of murder ourselves?
It is shocking to me as I talk to people who are outwardly concerned about social justice, gay wedding cakes, racial or homophobic slurs and such that there is no outcry about the genocide in Yemen that we support for Saudi Arabia or our support for Al-Qaeda (known as moderate Muslims) in Syria. Why are we not a bit appreciative of the Russians and Iranians for defeating ISIS?
The media tries to make things simple in order to maintain the attention of their viewers. In order to do this, a lot of important facts get overlooked. One of those facts is that different segments of Islam hate each other even more than they hate the West. What achievable goal could we have over there?
President Trump's claim that we have spent $7 trillion in the Middle East since 9/11 looks like a wild guess to me. We destroy. We rebuild. We bribe. Russia just sent “dozens” of diplomats home to America. What do “we” need dozens of diplomats there for anyway? Or anywhere? Doesn't all this make it seem possible that $7 trillion might even be a low estimate?
We don't know all the facts. But $100,000 for every five-person household in the United States doesn't need to be spent over there. It needs to be spent here, by the people who earned it, any way they choose. Tune in to Fox News and listen to Tucker Carlson. My aunt had him as a student in elementary school. She did a good job.
Any opinions on this column are welcome at 4selfgovernment@gmail.com or through a letter to the editor. The blog is updated almost daily at www.alternativebyfritz.com. Try it. You’ll like it.