Commentary — This is a theory that has a lot of currency in Russia.
US President Donald Trump appears to have been psychologically profiled and manipulated into ordering cruise missile airstrikes against Syria, former US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.
03:50 08.04.2017
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On Friday, US senior military officials disclosed declassified intelligence information to lay out reasoning behind the attack on the Syrian military airfield in Ash Sha’irat near Homs late Thursday.
“Trump appears to have been easily manipulated into this response,” Kwiatkowski said on Friday. “It could have not been more effective if President Trump had been psychologically profiled and specifically manipulated into this ‘surprise’ decision.”
Trump’s instinctive response to the first pictures of the use of chemical weapons “would have been easily predictable from a psychological analysis,” Kwiatkowski stated.
Kwiatkowski pointed out that parts of US foreign policy, defense and intelligence community and their supporters in the media had been very concerned over Trump’s long-expressed “America First” foreign policy approach.“Reported events [on] Tuesday in Idlib served these interests well, and I believe it was an opportunity for these factions to attempt to prolong the wars in the Middle East, and ultimately further entrench their business and political interests,” she observed.
Kwiatkowski noted that Trump had ordered the missile strikes against Syrian military targets without taking action to carefully confirm Damascus had actually delivered the weapons and detonated them.
“Because evidence at the Syrian Air Base in Homs has likely been compromised by the impacts of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles, the investigation will be even more difficult to conduct,” she remarked.
Kwiatkowski said she was surprised at the eagerness with which the US media joined the call for an attack, given the lack of concrete analysis of what happened in Idlib on Tuesday.
“It is as if the western media, time and time again, receives talking points from various governmental factions and republishes them uncritically and without verification,” she said.
Kwiatkowski expressed the hope that Trump would come to realize his cruise missile order had been premature and that he would revert to his previous efforts to reduce US military involvement across the Middle East.
“I personally believe that the percolation of correct intelligence will soon reach the White House, and US policy will revert back to Trump’s original position in the region, which is military disengagement and real self-determination for people there,” she said.
Some US officials were working to try and protect Islamic State fighters from being captured by Syrian government forces and finding protection for them after all the outrages they had perpetrated, Kwiatkowski warned.
“It seems to me that in Mosul and throughout Syria, IS fighters and leaders who have worked with the US are trying to ensure that they will be protected, and the US may be trying to ensure that many of its former ‘rebel’ colleagues are… provided safe haven out of the countries,” she said.
However, the search for truth about what really happened in the chemical weapons attack at Idlib would continue aggressively, Kwiatkowski concluded.
