How Trump torpedoes his own warnings
Tweets, assaults on intelligence officials could dampen effect of alarm on Syria
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has sent the kind of dire warning — that Syria is planning another chemical weapons attack, and would pay “a heavy price” if it follows through — that requires a credible messenger to have a receptive national and foreign audience.
Yet the initial bafflement among U.S. defense officials after the warning came late Monday, coupled with the simultaneous distraction of President Donald Trump’s unrelated tweets, by Tuesday seemed to undercut the seriousness of the charge. More broadly, the episode is a test of the damage Trump has done to his and his administration’s trustworthiness by his assaults on the U.S. intelligence community and other perceived enemies.
Trump has spent months attacking the credibility of the intelligence community, at one point comparing operatives’ tactics to Nazis’ and repeatedly dismissing findings of Russian meddling in the election as a “hoax” and “witch hunt” — even as foreign policy experts cautioned that he was diminishing the reputation of a community he would need in times of crisis to rally public support.
His military threat to Syria, which is closely allied with Russia, comes as Trump is also moving to send more troops to fight in Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan, and a separate crisis builds with nucleararmed North Korea. That suggests Trump will need to lean more and more on the work and reputation of intelligence officials tomake a case for his administration’s actions overseas.
“At a moment of crisis when U.S. decisions and actions rest upon information coming from the intelligence community, (Trump) may have diminished the credibility of that information in the eyes of the public and the eyes of the international community,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
Kimball called the preemptive White House statement on Syria“unusual .” He said such messages would normally be sent through private diplomatic channels and, once public, should be followed by presentation of evidence to the United Nations Security Council.
The ominous warning received relatively little attention on Capitol Hill or in the media on Tuesday.
The United States struck Syria with 59 missiles after the April chemical attack. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed Tuesday that preparations for a chemical attack were observed at the same base in Syria from which its military launched a sarin nerve gas attack that killed 86 people, including children.
“We have observed activities at Shayrat AirBase that suggest possible intent by the Syrian regime to use chemical weapons again,” Pentagon spokesman Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway said in a statement. “These activities are similar to what we observed prior to the regime chemical weapons attack against Khan Sheikhoun in April.”
But some senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials reached late Monday and early Tuesday were caught off guard by the White House statement. “Some knew, some didn’t,” said a U.S. official who sought anonymity to discuss the intelligence matter.
The official described the release of the nighttime statement as “ungraceful” but said the assessment that Syria was preparing for an attack is “sound.”
Such official statements are typically distributed widely across an administration for internal vetting before they’re publicly released. The White House said the relevant agencies were informed before the statementwas published.
Top officials at the State Department, the Defense Department, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency were “fully aware” of the statement, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday.
By going public, the White House hoped to prevent Assad from launching another sarin gas attack, Sanders said.
Trump raised questions about the urgency of the matter, and his own level of concern, by sending out a tweet about domestic politics only minutes later. He cited a Fox News report about the FBI’s Russia investigation, writing as he often does about the probe, “WitchHunt!”
Russian officials denied there is evidence of an imminent chemical attack and called the WhiteHouse threat “unacceptable.”