Hi again Jimmityg, a repost - this time with links.
Here's
some older tweets on the element of surprise and some
others on intervention in Syria.
As per your rhetorical question, there are people - otherwise perfectly functional people - who lack a sense-of-self within the context of a broader humanity. This is just speculation, but perhaps we are wondering about a leader who is truly alone despite the loyalties of the mafia style acolytes that have enabled him to parlay the practices of a real estate empire
admittedly assisted
by Russians onto a global stage. A leader who is probably taking direction from isolationists outside the White House while possibly trying to avoid the ire of foreign powers who are suspected by many to have compromised members of his election campaign. But also a leader who has an ego and a will to power that few can rival.
You may have heard the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. It is taught to career intelligence trainees as part of the education that prepares them to go into the fray with some of the most sophisticated manipulators of human psychology in the world. Knowing that any vices will be used against you weeds out risky applicants and preempts the compromise and blackmail that gets people killed. Unwary politicians and those doing business with Russia would of course be more prone to this kind of compromise.
And speaking of the Russians, their UK embassy recently implied that the newly recovered and discharged
victim of the UK poisoning is being held
against her will, while the official line out of Russia on the Syrian gas attack is that it is a hoax. Many people actually buy this. That should give us an idea of what the world is now dealing with.