Category Archives: Lands

So Trump attacked Assad. What now?

Charles Lister writes: After six years of committing unrestrained and uninhibited violence against his own population, the regime of Bashar Assad experienced the first pangs of justice early Friday morning Syria time, as 59 American Tomahawk cruise missiles struck the strategically vital Al-Shayrat air base in the center of the country. Syrian military aircraft, hardened hangars and refueling facilities were among the targets of America’s first explicit attack on the Assad regime.

This was a justified, proportionate and necessary response for what had been a flagrant war crime committed three days earlier, when chemical nerve agents were dropped by planes from Al-Shayrat onto residential areas of Khan Sheikhoun, a town in Syria’s northwest. As men, women and children alike lost control of their muscles, succumbed to uncontrollable convulsions and began foaming from the mouth and nose, emergency and medical personnel rushed to the scene. They then found their facilities targeted in a series of follow-up bombings, possibly by Russian jets. At least 87 people lost their lives and more than 300 others were injured. This was merely the latest of dozens of chemical attacks conducted by the Assad regime since 2012, the worst of which killed more than 1,400 people east of Damascus in August 2013.

It was that heinous act in 2013, conducted within eyesight of Assad’s own presidential palace, that famously crossed then-President Barack Obama’s self-declared “red line.” That same attack led to Obama’s subsequent decision to back away from the use of force in favor of an agreement brokered by Russia to remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles in their entirety, a move that angered America’s Arab allies and effectively ended any potential U.S. efforts to threaten Assad’s rule. At the drop of the hat, overt affiliation with the United States became a politically toxic label that moderate opposition groups sought either to hide or to dissolve.

Recent events have not only demonstrated the clear failure and abrogation of that agreement by the Assad regime, but the presence of Russian troops and possibly also aircraft at the Al-Shayrat airbase appears to suggest that Russia was not only aware of Assad having retained some portion of his chemical weapons, but may also have been in a position to prevent their use.[Continue reading…]

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Stopping Assad requires standing up to Moscow

Molly K. McKew writes: As U.S. Tomahawk missiles soared over the Mediterranean toward Syria’s al-Shayrat airbase, speculation was already flying about how the attack would affect the thaw in U.S.-Russia relations anticipated since Donald Trump took office. Was this a first sign that America’s new president was willing to stand up to Putin?

Arguably the more critical factor in the equation is Russia. To understand the Kremlin’s response to the U.S. strike, and to the preceding chemical attack in Syria, it’s important to face some brutal truths about Russia in Syria.

The U.S. warned Russian forces about the coming strike because we knew they were there. We knew Russians were at Shayrat airbase since at least November 2015. This is why Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that this strike was “on the brink of combat clashes with Russia”: We were bombing a base from which he knew Russian forces guided operations.

In August 2015—well before the Kremlin announced its new Syrian campaign — Russia signed a comprehensive military agreement with Assad. This agreement gave Moscow virtual carte blanche in Syria, and gave Syria a status equivalent to occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia rather than to other sovereign nations where Russian forces are housed.

Russian commanders coordinate the military strategy in Syria, and have been critical to reversing the course of the war against Assad. Russian forces coordinate all aspects of Syrian air power and airstrikes. They reinforced the infrastructure of Shayrat airbase—which supposedly had its chemical stockpiles removed in 2013. There is no chance that, in the course of reconstructing elements of the base, they were not made aware that there were chemical munitions present. [Continue reading…]

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As warplanes return to scene of sarin attack, Trump defends missile launch

The Guardian reports: In the quiet streets of Khan Sheikhun, people mourned the dead from a sarin attack, bracing for the next raid. At an airbase near Homs, government warplanes roared back into action, their targets unknown. And not far from his golf course in south Florida, the president of the United States cried out a defense on Twitter.

“The reason you don’t generally hit runways,” Donald Trump wrote, “is that they are easy and inexpensive to quickly fix (fill in and top)!”

The president’s exclamation followed a more formal justification of his decision to launch 59 missiles at a Syrian government airbase on Thursday, the first direct attack by the US against Bashar al-Assad after six years of civil war.

Trump sent Congress a letter invoking war powers as the authority behind his order, saying the strike was directed “in the vital national security and foreign policy interests” of the United States.

The missiles were meant “to degrade” Assad’s ability to conduct chemical weapons attacks, Trump wrote, and “to dissuade the Syrian regime from using or proliferating chemical weapons”.

On Saturday, with the airbase in action, warplanes killed a woman and injured one other person in Khan Sheikhun, monitoring groups said. It was not immediately clear where the planes came from, although the Syrian government and its Russian allies are the only airforces operating in the area.

It was also reported by monitoring groups that air strikes killed at least 18 people including five children in Urum al-Joz, another town in Idlib province, on Saturday. The toll was expected to rise.

The casualties were a bloody reminder that while Trump may have redrawn the US red line on chemical weapons use, there have been no clues to his views on the wider conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq’s Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr urges Syria’s Assad to step down

AFP reports: Influential Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, also calling on Washington and Moscow to stop intervening in the conflict.

The Najaf-based Shiite cleric condemned the killing of 87 people, including 31 children, in a suspected chemical attack last week in a rebel-held Syrian town that has been widely blamed on Damascus.

“I would consider it fair for President Bashar al-Assad to resign and leave power, allowing the dear people of Syria to avoid the scourge of war and terrorist oppression,” he said in a statement. [Continue reading…]

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To charm Trump, Paul Manafort sold himself as an affordable outsider

The New York Times reports: Paul Manafort is the rarest of professional pitchmen: one who knows how to sell to a salesman.

That was evident by the effort he made last year to gain a foothold in President Trump’s campaign, a successful pitch documented by letters and memos that were made available by a former Trump associate.

On Feb. 29, 2016, Mr. Manafort, the former lobbyist and Republican operative who now sits at the nexus of investigations into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, reached out to Mr. Trump with a slick, carefully calibrated offer that appealed to the candidate’s need for professional guidance, thirst for political payback — and parsimony.

The letters and memos provide a telling glimpse into how Mr. Trump invited an enigmatic international fixer, who is currently under investigation by United States intelligence services, a Senate committee and investigators in Ukraine, to the apex of his campaign with a minimum of vetting. The answer? Through family and friends, handshakes and hyperbole.

Mr. Manafort, who has not been accused of any crimes — and who denies any wrongdoing in his political, business and investment dealings — is nonetheless a central figure in the investigation into the interactions of Trump campaign officials with foreign governments. How he got to know Mr. Trump, and how he rose from overseeing the candidate’s operations at the Republican convention to the entire campaign, is very likely to be a focus during coming Senate hearings about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. [Continue reading…]

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Assad, taunting Trump, mounts new attacks on the town he gassed

The Daily Beast reports: Just hours after the U.S. damaged a Syrian airbase linked to a chemical weapons attack, the Assad regime and its Russian ally launched three airstrikes against the very same rebel-held town where Assad was accused of using poison gas to kill more than 100 men, women, and children on Tuesday.

The attacks on Khan Sheikhoun and seven other towns appeared to be both a taunt and a warning to President Donald Trump’s administration: that cruise missiles may have damaged the Shayrat air base, but Syria has many other bases, ample munitions, and the political will backed up by Russia to continue targeting civilians.

The latest airstrikes on Khan Sheikhoun utilized small conventional rockets, and there were no reported injuries, given that much of the population had fled the town. But at least 10 people were killed in a regime or Russian airstrike against Hish, just north of Khan Sheikhoun, a few hours before the 4:00 a.m. U.S. cruise missile attack.

In Irbin, east of Damascus, a woman and two children were killed and many civilians wounded in a regime airstrike on a public market and a mosque. There were also attacks on Jisr al Shughour, west of Idlib, the city of Douma east of Damascus, Dara’a, Latamnah, and Kafr Zeta in northern Hama.

Those who remained in Khan Sheikhoun, a town in the south of Idlib province, welcomed the U.S. intervention, but said they were worried that the Assad regime still has a powerful air force and 20 other air bases. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s words mean nothing

David Frum writes: If there was any one foreign policy position that Donald Trump stressed above all others, it was opposition to the use of force in Syria. Time has helpfully compiled Trump’s tweets on the subject dating back to 2013. For example:


These were not the idle thoughts of a distracted mind. Promises of no war in Syria were central to Donald Trump’s anti-Hillary Clinton messaging. Take, for example, to his interview with Reuters on October 26, 2016.

“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump, as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton. You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right?”

That message—a vote for Clinton is a vote for World War III beginning in Syria—was pounded home by surrogates and by Trump’s social-media troll army.

Not even 100 days into his presidency, Trump has done exactly what he attacked Hillary Clinton for contemplating.

Some have described this reverse as “hypocritical.” This description is not accurate. A hypocrite says one thing while inwardly believing another. The situation with Donald Trump is much more alarming. On October 26, 2016, he surely meant what he said. It’s just that what he meant and said that day was no guide to what he would mean or say on October 27, 2016—much less April 6, 2017.

Voters and citizens can expect literally zero advance warning of what Donald Trump will do or won’t do. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s attack on Syria ‘divorced from any strategic political vision’ says analyst

Christian Science Monitor reports: [W]hile [the cruise missiles fired at Syria’s Shayrat airbase near Homs] may have chastened Mr. Assad, analysts say, they do not appear to signal a broader change of US policy on Syria that would pose a longer-term threat to his hold on power.

“This [missile attack] clearly indicates the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters late Thursday. “I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a change in our policy or posture relative to our military activities in Syria today. There has been no change in that status.”

Those comments might offer some reassurance to Assad that the air strikes were more a slap on the wrist than the beginning of a knockout blow. And with the war in Syria slowly turning in his favor – and with his two key allies, Russia and Iran, continuing to stand by him – Assad looks likely to stay in power, a reality that Syria’s neighbors and the international community reluctantly have had to accept.

“We should not invest the limited American military attack with any strategic connotations so far,” says Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics (LSE). “It’s an attack divorced from any strategic political vision. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration has any concrete ideas to find a political solution. I’m very skeptical.”

Mr. Gerges warns, however, that military action on its own, absent a strategy, is inherently hard to contain, and could lead to an unintended deepening of US military involvement if Russia and Iran redouble their support for Assad even as Syrian rebels try to use the US strikes as leverage. [Continue reading…]

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Syria strike gives Trump anti-Kremlin credential

Politico reports: In Russia, they call it kozyrnut’. It means “to play a trump card.”

Donald Trump’s missile strike this week against the Russian-backed Syrian regime not only damaged its chemical weapons program, it also happened to give the U.S. president a useful political tool.

Now, whenever anyone accuses Trump of being too cozy with Russia, he can point to the strike against Syria as evidence that he’s willing to defy the Kremlin: Kozyrnut’.

The missile strike on a Syrian airbase came just days before Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is due to visit Moscow, and the implications could be wide-ranging for Trump’s relationship with Russia, which kept its push-back largely rhetorical.

The political side effect, meanwhile, could burnish Trump’s defense against claims he is too close to Russia amid ongoing federal probes into whether Moscow tried to swing the 2016 election his way. [Continue reading…]

Or, as the most truthful purveyor of fake news, The Onion, tells the story: After ordering the first U.S. military attack against the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, President Donald Trump held a press conference Friday to express his full confidence that the airstrike had completely wiped out the lingering Russian scandal. “Based on intelligence we have received over the past several hours, the attack on the al-Shayrat air base in Homs has successfully eliminated all discussions and allegations about my administration’s ties to the Russian government,” said Trump, adding that at approximately 4:40 a.m. local time, 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from U.S. naval ships obliterated all traces of the widespread controversy in news outlets across the media. [Continue reading…]

As for Politico’s claim that the missile strikes “damaged [Assad’s] chemical weapons program,” that would be very hard to substantiate on at least two counts. Firstly, given that this is a program that had supposedly already been dismantled, there’s been no indication that outside Syria there’s currently any reliable information on how much of the program was secretly kept in place. And secondly, the choice of the al-Shayrat air base as target for missile strikes appears to have derived solely from intelligence indicating that was the location from which chemical weapons-carrying aircraft took off — not the location at which these weapons were manufactured.

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Trump might be going to war. But he has no plans for establishing peace

Ilan Goldenberg and Nicholas Heras write: President Trump’s decision to launch missile strikes against Syria’s Shayrat airfield after a chemical weapons attack on civilians was an appropriate response to an act of unspeakable horror. Yet as analysts who have argued for greater U.S. military engagement to end the Syrian civil war, we find ourselves conflicted about the president’s decision: We fear there is simply no plan for what comes next.

To succeed beyond Thursday’s limited strikes, American leaders must decide on a clear set of objectives, a realistic desired final outcome, a theory of the case for how to get there and a solid understanding of the risks. We see three potential options for how the president could move forward.

The United States could pursue a limited strategy focused on one-off strikes in response to the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. In that case, the strike on the air base from which this week’s chemical attack was launched will probably be enough. President Bashar al-Assad and his generals will get the message and stop using those types of weapons.

However, Trump may soon find this outcome dissatisfying. The regime will continue to terrorize civilians through airstrikes, artillery and surface-to-surface missiles against densely populated areas. It will continue to employ tactics such as starvation sieges and population transfers to tear communities apart.

Pictures of dead children and “beautiful babies,” as the president remarked, will continue to appear on television. And Assad’s forces and their Russian allies may up the scale of attacks to humiliate Trump and demonstrate the fecklessness of American military force. Thus, the pressure may grow on the United States to respond, and it may be hard for Trump to resist. [Continue reading…]

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Rattled by U.S. strike, Assad lashes out at ‘arrogant aggression’

The Washington Post reports: Just a few days ago, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad looked like he had little to fear.

After six years of war, his army had penned what remained of Syria’s armed rebellion into shrinking swaths of territory, and European leaders were preparing for a conference that could fund the reconstruction of his war-shattered country.

That sense of security appeared shaken Friday after the U.S. military launched a raft of missile strikes at a Syrian military airfield in retaliation for a chemical attack that killed scores of civilians on Tuesday. The images of lifeless bodies splayed across the ground drew international condemnation and dragged the Syrian army’s tactics back into the spotlight.

“The difference between now and one week ago is that Assad and his backers had reasonably concluded they could fight their war however they wished, with impunity, and that the United States was a nuisance but not a threat,” said Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington.

The missile strikes, authorized by President Trump, marked a significant escalation of American engagement in Syria, broadening the U.S. role beyond the fight against the Islamic State militant group.

The operation contrasted sharply with the Obama administration’s policy toward Syria’s crushing war, which was characterized by strong rhetoric but little political appetite to back words with force.

“Now, we can say that when the United States takes an official position on an issue . . . in this conflict, its rivals will have to factor that into their plans,” Itani said. [Continue reading…]

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Trump just exposed the ‘moral depravity’ of the Obama administration — says former Obama administration official

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon writes: “I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria…we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will, in the end, prevail.”

Those are the words of an American president who launched military strikes against the Syrian regime after pictures of babies gasping for air under grey medical blankets seized the world’s attention and punctured international indifference to the Syrian civil war, now entering its seventh year.

The speaker is not Barack Obama, the president who won the Nobel Prize and argued for ‘just wars,’ but his successor, Donald Trump, who tried to keep Muslims and Syrian refugees out of America.

Overnight, those who worked to convince the Obama administration to act against Assad — especially from Foggy Bottom — are watching Trump do what Obama would not: act decisively against the regime and send the message that more will not be tolerated. They sound as shocked as anyone that it was Trump who carried out the path they counseled.

“This shows the moral depravity of the last administration,” said one former Obama administration official. “I am stunned.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s vision on Syria’s foreign policy is still completely incoherent

ThinkProgress reports: President Trump ordered the launch of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield late Thursday in response to a chemical weapons attack that killed 70 people earlier in the week. The decision represented a huge shift from the administration’s earlier approach toward the Syrian government, but it is also remarkable because it shows the lack of any coherent foreign policy.

Last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN ambassador Nikki Haley told reporters that the Trump administration wouldn’t try to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power. “Do we think he’s a hindrance? Yes. Are we going to sit there and focus on getting him out? No,” Haley said. “What we are going to focus on is putting the pressure in there so that we can start to make a change in Syria.”

Even after Thursday’s airstrike on the Shayrat airbase, which the Pentagon has identified as holding chemical weapons, the Trump administration claims it has still not changed its position on Syria.

“I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a change in our policy or posture relative to our military activities in Syria today. There has been no change in that status,” Tillerson told reporters after the strike. “I think it does demonstrate that President Trump is willing to act when governments and actors cross the line and cross the line on violating commitments they’ve made and cross the line in the most heinous of ways.”

International relations experts say that this is a sign of the Trump administration’s incoherent foreign policy.

“Trump made an 180 on this and it is a pretty striking 180. Just last week, senior officials were talking about coming to terms with Assad and legitimizing Assad,” said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the The Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. “It is concerning that Trump’s approach to Syria and maybe to foreign policy writ large is completely incoherent.”

Hamid said it’s strange that Trump would meet with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi earlier in the week, given his disastrous human rights record, and then make the decision to launch cruise missiles in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s ineffectual military strike on Syria was an empty political gesture

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U.S. investigating possible Russian involvement in Syrian gas attack

The Hill reports: The Pentagon is looking into whether Russia participated or assisted in the April 4 chemical attack in Syria, as well as well as an attack on a local hospital, senior U.S. military officials said Friday.

“We have no knowledge of Russian involvement in this attack, but we will investigate any information that might lead us in that direction,” a senior official told reporters during a background briefing at the Pentagon. “We’re not done.”

Officials said a Russian-made drone hovered over the hospital where victims of the chemical attack, which left at least 70 civilians dead and hundreds injured, were being treated. Syrian forces own Russian-made aircraft and drones, making it difficult to determine who controlled the craft.
Five hours later, the drone returned and the hospital was struck by munitions dropped from a separate fixed-wing aircraft.

“We don’t know why somebody or who struck that. We don’t have positive accountability yet, but the fact that somebody would strike the hospital potentially to hide the evidence of a chemical attack, about five hours after, is a question that we’re very interested in,” the official said. [Continue reading…]

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A practical guide for avoiding fallacies on Syria

Shadi Hamid writes: Military action does not equal regime change. The two, understandably, have become conflated because of the Iraq war. But military action can help, rather than undermine, diplomatic efforts. It is abundantly clear that the Assad regime will not negotiate in good faith or make any significant concessions on its own. We’ve hoped for that since the earliest Arab League efforts in 2011. The credible threat of force (or its use) is the only thing that is likely to change Assad’s calculus. If his survival isn’t at stake, he has little reason to negotiate much of anything.

Not everything is Iraq. There is the danger of seeing airstrikes as a low-risk catch-all solution, a kind of military pixie-dust. At the same time, though, not everything is an Iraq-style invasion. America has any number of choices in between these two models of engagement. In Bosnia, air power forced the Serbs to the negotiating table, eventually leading to the Dayton Accords (a key example of military action in the service of diplomacy). Similarly, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime showed an openness to talks only after the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, with Qaddafi envoys engaging in cease-fire talks within weeks.

The fallacy of anti-interventionism. The presumption is that not acting is neutral. But it’s not. “Do no harm” can do tremendous harm. In the case of Syria, it has. Deciding not to act in the face of war crimes is a very conscious decision. Just as we judge the consequences of intervention, we must be willing to judge the consequences of non-intervention. [Continue reading…]

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America struck Syria, and the media swooned. Trump will remember that

James Downie writes: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Donald Trump is always in want of praise from his television. Though other presidents have been busy with the job of being president, cable news — and tweeting about what he’s watching on cable news — is the centerpiece of Trump’s morning and evening routines. It’s clear that what the media cover and how they portray him has a tremendous influence on Trump: This week, the pictures of Tuesday’s chemical attack by Syria played a crucial role in Trump’s decision to order a missile strike Thursday against a Syrian airfield. The president’s sensitivity to his media image makes it all the more important for outlets to be cautious in their coverage of the missile strike and its aftermath.

Fourteen years ago, the media breathlessly reported the George W. Bush administration’s charges against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and then rhapsodized over “shock and awe” in the war’s early months. One would hope that the United States’ subsequent struggle in Iraq (and Afghanistan) might lead talking heads to be more muted or skeptical this time, but Thursday’s coverage suggested otherwise. MSNBC anchor Brian Williams described Pentagon footage of missile launches as “beautiful.” The New York Times headlined one piece in treacly fashion, “On Syria attack, Trump’s heart came first” (before later changing it). Parades of guests largely praised the missile launches as the right course of action.

By contrast, the networks did not focus much on whether it was concerning that Trump had flipped within a week on intervening in Syria, or what Trump’s next steps would be. (It’s worth noting that, after sending 400 Marines to Syria in March, the administration has stopped disclosing how many U.S. troops are deployed there.) There was even less discussion of the legality of the strike, even though Congress had not authorized it. (The Trump administration even forgot to include a justification in its original set of internal talking points.) And absent almost entirely, with the notable exception of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, was any extended dwelling on the United States’ not-so-stellar record of Mideast interventions. [Continue reading…]

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Removing Assad’s capacity to bomb his own people

 

Reuters reports: In her first interview since her stunning presidential election defeat by Republican rival Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for the United States to bomb Syrian air fields.

Clinton, in an interview at the Women in the World Summit in New York, also called Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election a theft more damaging than Watergate.

Asked whether she now believes that failing to take a tougher stand against Syria was her worst foreign policy mistake as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, Clinton said she favored more aggressive action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“I think we should have been more willing to confront Assad,” Clinton said in the interview, conducted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

“I really believe we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.”

Clinton noted that she had advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria after leaving government, something that Obama opposed. [Continue reading…]

Following the U.S. missile strikes on a single airfield in Syria, Code Pink, voicing what is no doubt widely-held anti-war sentiment, tweeted: “We need to end the war in #Syria, not escalate it. US intervention will not end this horror. We need a ceasefire and a political solution!”

Bashar al-Assad, on the other hand, this week asserted he sees no “option except victory” in the war.

Assad’s pursuit of victory precludes the possibility of a political solution to the conflict. His ability to pursue that goal has been sustained, with Russia and Iran’s support, by his ability to control the skies over Syria and from there rain down terror (mostly in the form of barrel bombs) on a population that is essentially defenseless from aerial assault.

The demolition of Syria’s airfields — most of them, not just one — far from representing a reckless escalation of the war, should on the contrary be seen as a kind of embargo on the transportation and dropping of bombs.

But don’t innocent people always get killed whenever military action takes place?

Consider last night’s cruise missile strikes: Reuters reports that the Syrian army said the attack killed six people at its air base near the city of Homs.

However, the Pentagon said: “Russian forces were notified in advance of the strike using the established deconfliction line. U.S. military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield.”

So why were there any casualties?

The most likely reason is because Syrian commanders wanted to parade a few bodies of their own soldiers as victims of American aggression.

If American restraint actually had the effect of hastening a political solution in Syria, the war would already be over — whatever else can be said about President Obama’s approach to Syria, no one can plausibly argue that it was lacking in restraint.

The question now revolves around the mercurial intentions of his successor who just days ago was offering Assad a free pass to remain in power.

Does Trump fire cruise missiles more carefully than tweets?

I’m willing to assume so, not because I think he’s discovered a new sense of responsibility but mostly because they can’t be launched from his phone.

At this moment at least, Trump is largely following directions and a script — from his national security advisor, Gen. H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary Mattis.

Now more than ever, however, it should be clear what a massive liability is imposed both on America and the rest of the world when the voice of an American president has such little credibility.

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