US LAUNCHES AIRSTRIKES ON SYRIA AFTER GAS ATTACK
President’s order to attack Syria welcomed by most, but critics say he should’ve asked Congress
WASHINGTON: The United States on Friday fired a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in retaliation for a suspected chemical attack that killed more than 70 people, most of them children, and sparked horror and outrage across the world.
They were the first direct US assault on the government of Bashar al-Assad in six years of civil war and potentially signals a U-turn for President Donald Trump who was earlier reluctant to insinuate America into a complex conflict. The US strikes drew a furious condemnation from Assad and his closest ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin who described it as an “aggression against a sovereign state... and on a made-up up pretext”.
Putin demanded an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and immediately suspended a deal with the US aimed at avoiding clashes in Syrian airspace. The Syrian president called the strikes an “outrageous act”.
President Donald Trump may not have reached that place yet where the entire country rallies behind him, critics and all, but the strikes he ordered against the horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria on Friday might be the closest he has gotten to it, with reactions ranging from “welcomed” to “cautiously welcomed”.
Criticism, of which there was no shortage from both liberals and conservatives, came mostly on the grounds that the president’s actions — launching military strikes against another country — amounted to an act of war and he should have sought Congressional approval for it, as laid down in the constitution.
For the most part though, even Trump’s critics were supportive. The president was “right to strike at the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using a weapon of mass destruction, the nerve agent sarin, against its own people,” wrote Antony J Blinken, deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, in an op-ed in The New York Times, in which he went on to argue for the need for “smart diplomacy” now.
Blinken’s one-time boss Obama’s refusal to follow up on his threat of US retaliation when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crossed a “red line” by ordering a chemical weapons attack in 2013 was among his most egregious foreign policy failures, and many in his administration and the party had felt frustrated by it.
Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was one of them, who had felt let down then. “Tonight’s missile strike was an appropriate response to Assad’s most recent chemical weapons attack on the Syrian people,” he said in a statement, adding, “War crimes have consequences.”
And there were those who wanted more. Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham praised the strikes and urged the president to go after “Assad’s air force — which is responsible not just for the latest chemical weapons attack, but countless atrocities against the Syrian people — completely out of the fight”.
Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the US Senate, was among those who offered cautious support.
But Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic leader who is among the highest-ranking US functionaries to have met Assad in person recently, condemned the strikes saying it could lead to a “possible nuclear war between the United States and Russia”.