Last night president Trump bombed Syria without any congressional debate or approval.  Though you would not know it by watching our mainstream media, this is actually a big problem.  Here’s why.

First, the US Constitution prohibits the president from taking such unilateral military action.

Second, there is still no evidence that a gas attack took place in Ghouta, much less that Assad would have been involved.

If you did not know this, please listen to this analysis from Max Blumenthal (an independent, investigative journalism who focuses on the Middle East) who carefully unpacks the many falsehoods underlying the mainstream reporting on this matter.

Also, listen to James Jatras, a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer with the US Department of State, make similar observations explaining how the US has effectively become the Air Force for Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Third, the AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force), passed after the 9/11 attacks and now being used to justify whatever aggressive military action the US wants to take around the world, has become a blank check for perpetual war.

This cannot be allowed to stand.  Bombing Syria has nothing to do with “keeping America safe from terrorism.” If anything, it continues to have the opposite effect.

Fourth, we need to ask why the president ordered this attack one day before a team of independent investigators, who were already on the ground in the area, were scheduled to begin their study of the alleged gas attack?

Why couldn’t the president at least have waited a few days?  Is he hiding something?

Is this another “way the dog moment” where a president uses military action to distract from his domestic problems? (I am no fan of Rachel Maddow, but here she is asking very pertinent questions.)

Check out this frightening study that correlates Trump’s Twitter activity with the airing of the Fox program, “Fox & Friends” (also here, here and here on the Trump/Fox feedback loop).

Is it only accidental that Fox & Friends suggested that Trump should bomb Syria in order to distract from the release of James Comey’s new anti-Trump book?

Fifth, this attack on Syria is one more example of American hypocrisy.  Let’s not forget that we happily support, finance and arm oppressive dictators around the world when it suits our purposes.  Think of el-Sisi in Egypt, Santos in Columbia or Hernández in Honduras. (In all three cases, the US encouraged, supported and financed the military coups that put

these men in power).

We also happily tolerate and encourage chemical attacks – when they truly do happen! – as long as they are carried out by our allies.  Don’t forget that the US supplied Saddam Hussein with the chemical weapons he used mercilessly against Iranian forces during the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988).

In all those years, the US never stopped the flow of nerve agents we supplied to the Iraqi army.

Furthermore, the US does not bomb countries for “humanitarian” purposes but for geo-political reasons.  American neoconservative leaders began looking for ways to overthrow Assad’s government in Syria long before the last Iraq war (see here, here, here and here).  Why?  Neoconservatives are closely allied to the Likud party in Israel, the party of president Benjamin Netanyahu.  In effect, the US is acting as a proxy for the Israeli government in Syria.

So, the US has just bombed Syria for the very same reasons that it says and does nothing about Israel’s crimes against humanity now being committed against the people of Gaza.

Finally, people who say that they follow Jesus Christ are called to be advocates for peace and diplomacy.  Disciples don’t adopt this position because we think America is a Christian nation (it’s not), or because God is guiding US foreign policy (no one but God can know this), or because Trump is God’s chosen leader (if he is, then he was sent to punish America in the way that Assyria and Babylon were sent to punish ancient Israel).

Disciples of Jesus will always insist on honesty and fair play.  But these qualites are entirely absent from the American conversation on Syria right now, as the interviews (see above) with Blumenthal and Jatras reveal.

For now, America continues its clumsy tumble towards the junk heap of has-been empires.  The most pressing question now is how much damage, death, confusion and chaos will our struggle to maintain our historic, global dominance cause for the rest of the world?

The American church, especially its so-called “evangelicals” (that is, disciples who surrender themselves to be dominated by the Good News of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension), people who truly want to be like Jesus – which has always been the center of real Christianity – must ask themselves,

Why have we become cheerleaders for a modern-day Caligula; a licentious ego-maniac drunk with power; a man without conscience, entranced by the shiny baubles of war?

When the author of the New Testament book of Revelation described the whore of fall of Babylon and her fall – which was also Rome, which was also every subsequent world empire, including the United States of America – he warned those claiming to be Christian,

“Come out of her, my people, so that you do not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.” (Revelation 18:4-5)

When will American evangelicalism stop its complicity in US war crimes?

When will it rip off the blinders of patriotic nationalism and see this world through the eyes of Jesus Christ?

A line is being drawn between the true church and the false, between the wheat and the tares, between the church militant and the church acquiescent, between disciples with their eyes firmly fixed on Jesus (Hebrews 12:2) and those blinded by the “worries and deceits of this world” (Mark 4:18-19) whose cheer-leading for wickedness reveals that they have abandoned their seat at the Messiah’s banquet table (Luke 14:15-24).