Why now indeed?
After all these years, the US pulls a punch out of its bag of latent tricks and popped a farmhouse inside Syria on Sunday, supposedly chasing after some bad al-Qaeda types from inside Iraq.

Maybe one of Decider George’s final sword thrusts?

From Syria Comment:

• I think we can assume that this cross border raid was not inspired by Patreaus.
  It has the finger prints of the White House.
  Patreaus and Rice have consistently fought to improve relations with Syria in order to win better coordination on the border.
  This would explain why press releases on this issue are being released from “sources” in Washington and not being made by boots on the ground in Iraq.
  My hunch is that Centcom in Iraq is furious about being pressed to carry out this raid during the last minutes of Bush authority.
  They understand that it will complicate any future efforts to improve Syrian-US relations, which is the only real way to get better cooperation on the border issue.
  By ordering this raid, the Bush administration has administered a poison pill to US-Syrian relations and to Syrian-Iraq relations.
  …
  The White House may be counting on Syria not to respond to this provocation, believing that Damascus will be constrained by its interest in cultivating a new relationship with an Obama administration.
  There is much hope in Damascus that an Obama administration will resume dialogue and allow the Defense Department to re-establish intelligence sharing and allow the State Department to restore proper relations with Damascus.

Politics before life.
Yes, of course, the old ‘poison pill’ routine.

And this was a boots-on-the-ground operation.
From antiwar.com:

• In a report from local witnesses later confirmed by a Syrian government spokesman, Two US helicopters landed in the Syrian border town of Al-Sukkariya while others remained in the air and eight American soldiers exited.
  The soldiers killed at least eight people in the attack, and wounded 14 others before reboarding the helicopters and returning to Iraqi territory.

Decider George will continue to shit out bile until the day he’s run out of the White House.
Juan Cole, an expert on this kind of war-political bullshit, says it all at Informed Comment:

• It seems to me more likely that the attack was aimed at making sure that what the administration calls “al-Qaeda in Iraq” did not have the means to mount a spectacular bombing or assassination campaign that would hurt McCain and help Obama.
  I was told by NGOs when I was in Amman last summer that the Bush administration had for the first time pledged money to help Iraqi refugees, and that US officials had admitted to them that the reason was that the administration wanted the refugee crisis kept off the front pages this fall.
  Scott McClellan has already told us that the Bushies are in campaign mode 24/7.
  I’d say that every single thing they are doing, whether raiding Pakistan or raiding Syria, is intended in some way to help the Republican Party in the election, in addition to whatever local military goal the action had.

When Decider George is finally gone!