Assad won’t be laughing now

Concetto La Malfa writes that “the whole exercise by the coalition seems to have been about being seen to do something in order to save their reputation” (‘Assad will laugh at coalition’, Irish Independent,

Letters, April 16).

I beg to differ – before the airstrikes, the narrative of the so-called Putinverstehers, such as Dr Paul Craig Roberts, was that attacking Assad means risking a nuclear war with Russia (he even went as far as suggesting in his article ‘Ten Days Before the End of the World’ that Russia should carry out pre-emptive strikes against Saudi Arabia and Israel – forgetting that Russia has signed multi-billion-dollar weapons and energy deals with Saudi Arabia and is Israel’s largest supplier of crude oil).

The fact these strikes were carried out and we don’t have a nuclear war shows how ludicrous that scaremongering campaign was.

Murderous regimes like Assad’s need to know that allying with regimes like Putin’s will get them nowhere. Considering the above, I find it disappointing that President Trump reversed the announcement by Nikki Haley of additional economic sanctions on Russia (shortly after the Russian investigative journalist Maxim Borodin, who exposed the substantial presence of Putin’s mercenaries in Syria, was found dead after falling from a balcony).

The so-called Putinverstehers will probably say Russia was fighting Isil in Syria – but only the so-called useful idiots will believe them, as Reuters’ analysis of Russian defence ministry data showed 80pc of Russia’s Syria strikes didn’t target Isil.

Grzegorz Kolodziej

Bray, Co Wicklow