Trump team ponders tougher Syria response
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his advisers on Tuesday weighed a more-robust retaliatory strike against Syria than last year’s missile attack, reasoning that only an escalation of force would look credible and possibly serve as a deterrent against further use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians.
A pair of Navy warships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea were capable of launching the same sort of missile barrage Trump ordered against a Syrian air base a year ago in response to a chemical attack then that killed more than 80 civilians.
But White House and national security officials worried that an operation of the same scale, as punishment for another suspected and deadly attack that killed dozens over the weekend, would not be effective at curbing the Syrian military’s war effort.
Administration officials said they expected any new strike to be more expansive than last year’s, but the question was how much more. Possible options included hitting more than a single target and extending strikes beyond a single day.
But even so, Trump remained reluctant to deepen U.S. involvement over a longer term.
Trump and his team enlisted support for action against the government of President Bashar Assad. U.S. officials expressed confidence they would have the backing of France, which has been vocal about the need for a strong response, as well as Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, all of which called for Syria to be held accountable for the suspected chemical attack. It remained unclear, however, whether any of the allies would participate.
As of early evening, Trump had made no comment about Syria on Twitter or in his public appearances. Instead, he left it to a guest, the visiting emir of Qatar, to express determination to stop atrocities in Syria.
“We see the suffering of the Syrian people,” Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said with Trump in the Oval Office. “And me and the president, we see eye to eye that this matter has to stop immediately. We cannot tolerate with a war criminal, we cannot tolerate with someone who killed more than half a million of his own people.”
Trump spent part of the day huddled with John Kelly, his chief of staff; John Bolton, his new national security adviser; and other officials.
Heavily backed by Russian air support and Iranian ground forces, Syria is in a different league than adversaries in other places where the United States is at war. Unlike the Islamic State in various parts of the Middle East, the Taliban in Afghanistan or al-Shabab in Somalia, the Syrian government has extensive air-defense and missile systems capable of shooting down foreign planes.
There are indications Assad was moving key aircraft to a Russian base near Latakia, a port city on the Mediterranean Sea, and taking pains to secure important weapons systems.
The Pentagon does not have an aircraft carrier in the area at the moment, which focuses attention on the USS Donald Cook or the USS Porter, two Navy destroyers already in the Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, the OPCW, an international team of chemical weapons investigators, prepared to deploy to Syria on Tuesday, and the United States and Russia used their vetoes at the United Nations Security Council to cancel out each other’s proposals for investigations into the attack.