Is Trump being manipulated into a massive ground war in Syria? World War III looms large

04/09/2017 / By JD Heyes

The same investigative journalist who broke the story that former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice was abusing U.S. intelligence in “unmasking” Team Trump members after the Nov. 8 election is now reporting that close advisors of President Donald J. Trump may be maneuvering him into a massive ground war in Syria.

Mike Cernovich, writing at Medium, claims that Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster “is manipulating intelligence reports” that are shared with Trump in a bid to “sell a massive ground war in Syria,” with the assistance of retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus, who was convicted of sharing sensitive intelligence information with a female biographer with whom he was having an affair.

“As NSA, McMaster’s job is to synthesize intelligence reports from all other agencies,” Cernovich writes. “President Trump is being given an inaccurate picture of the situation in Syria, as McMaster is seeking to involve the U.S. in a full scale (sic) war” in what’s left of Syria.

The McMaster-Petraeus plan, he says, calls for 150,000 U.S. ground troops. (RELATED: Rice, Kerry, Obama Lied Repeatedly About Ridding Syria Of Chemical Weapons; Did They EVER Tell The Truth?)

While, as Cernovich notes further, Petraeus’ influence within the National Security Council remains very strong, others within the national security structure are raising serious concerns about the alleged plan. One of them is Gen. Joseph Votel, a special operations veteran and current commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Cernovich’s report comes after Trump made the decision to strike the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, following the use of sarin gas by government forces in an attack that left scores of noncombatants dead last week, including dozens of children. While Trump campaigned on a pledge to keep the United States out of the Syrian civil war, reports claimed he was so outraged by televised pictures of the dead he changed his mind.

Trump ordered a massive Tomahawk cruise missile strike on an airbase near Homs where U.S. intelligence said the sarin gas attack was launched. The strike left the base almost completely destroyed.

Though the president has said he would hit the Assad regime once again if it used chemical weapons, the strike angered the Russian and Iranian governments, both of whom claimed in a joint statement Sunday that the U.S. attack was a violation of international law and that “red lines” had been crossed that neither government would tolerate in the future.

As reported by Zero Hedge:

A statement issued on Sunday by a joint command centre consisting of forces of Russian, Iran and allied militia alliance supporting Syrian President Bashar al Assad said that Friday’s US strike on the Syrian air base crossed “red lines” and it would “respond with force” to any new aggression while increasing their level of support to their ally.

In the statement published by the group on media outlet Ilam al Harbi, the pro-Assad alliances says that “what America waged in an aggression on Syria is a crossing of red lines. From now on we will respond with force to any aggressor or any breach of red lines from whoever it is and America knows our ability to respond well.”

Obviously, the deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. troops to Syria would cross those “red lines,” and despite Cernovich’s reporting, it’s certainly not clear that Trump is ready to do that. (RELATED: Russia, Iran lay down gauntlet following Trump strike in Syria)

And yet clearly there are some in government who are in favor of a more robust U.S. ground presence. Among them: Sens. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., and John McCain, R-Ariz., who have been stumping for more American ground forces in both Iraq and Syria for years.

Just this week Graham called for deploying between 5,000 and 7,000 U.S. troops in the wake of Trump’s missile strike to “take down Assad,” which would, of course, enmesh the United States in yet another war in the Middle East.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

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Tagged Under: Iran, President Donald J. Trump, Russia, Syria, World War III