And excellent question - why did we give them advance notification?

And Yes, this theater...

We used to "get" nuance. Now we don't. It's not convenient.

You hit Russian staff, you've killed Russians. It's a different can of worms than just killing Syrians. If both the US and Russia have proxies, to a large extent, and both have their targets on the ground, that's sort of how the Cold War was fought. (We like to think that Russia didn't actually supply weapons and manpower to a lot of insurgencies and civil wars during the Cold War because most of those were implicitly supported by at least some Americans left of center, and we wanted to think of those as "grass roots" and, later, "indigenous"; not supported and guided by a bunch of white European imperialists.)

It's different when the two behind-the-scenes powers kill each others' guys.


I'd say that a different story may also be at work: If Russia was told the day before, communications had to flow a certain way. If the information goes to directly help Assad, then it means that the purpose of the communication link isn't what it's been claimed to be. It's no longer coordinating the military activities of the Russians and the Americans in a way to avoid fatalities to either side--which is what Obama had set up, and apparently a lot of DUers think is crap. Instead it's now used to funnel information to Assad in an obvious manner.

Too many want surface-level analysis and immediate results, yet praised Obama's "3-D chess" and long-term strategies. Odd.

How could we know that? They could have been driven there from another location.

Planes, trucks, bombs and munitions, personnel . . . .

Keeping in mind my comments are based on what has been reported, an hour or two lead time would have been plenty. Other then going to where the chemical weapons were stored and bringing them to the flight line, it wouldn't take any longer to prep the planes then a conventional air attack.

perhaps the real killer got away with it.....?

But their proxies did.

"Someone said it looked like a Syrian plane" isn't good enough.
Did trump burn our Constitution and carry out an act of war without knowing the facts?

Was all the well-advertised air strike carried out to deflect from #TrumpRussia and to prevent his poll numbers from going below 30%?

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away why he did what he did.

Did the Russians know that the Syrians had chemical weapons, probably yes.
Did the Russians know Assad was going to use chemical weapons on civilians that day? Unknown
Could the Russians have stopped Assad from using chemical weapons on civilians that day? Probably no.

I'm inclined to think Russia needs that warm water port more then Syria needs Russian assistance and while Russia would have greatly preferred Assad not use chemical weapons, the Russians were not in a good position to stop him.

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