Offering their support
World leaders rally around U.S. over Syria strike.
Somebody once said attacking Syria could start the Third World War. That it was a terrible idea, that strikes required congressional approval, and that there might be dark political purposes for the president attempting such folly: boosting poor poll numbers.
Who said all these things? Donald Trump, of course.
But that was back when he was a Barack Obama-loathing Twitter pundit and not the commander-in-chief. After all the barrel bombs and gas attacks since those tweets of 2012 and 2013, something has apparently changed.
Trump said he was stirred to act by the sight of children killed in sarin-gas attacks. His decision to strike a Syrian airfield has received broad backing in Washington, though Democrats want a discussion in Congress, it has dismayed some early Trump supporters and the Russians are apparently livid.
But Trump’s team says it was a cautious, targeted move. They say the Russians were given a heads-up, allowing them to clear out the targeted airfield before it was pulverized by American cruise missiles.
“This clearly indicates the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” Rex Tillerson said. He delivered a subliminal contrast with Trump’s predecessor, who set a red line then wavered on it.
“President Trump is willing to act when governments and actors cross the line.”
But he added a significant word of caution, which leaves open the question of just what long-term objective Trump was trying to achieve in blowing up a single airfield, among the many belonging to the Syrian military: Tillerson said this targeted strike does not signal a change in military posture on Syria.
It’s not even clear if Trump wants regime change — the most basic question of all.
The director of George Washington University’s Project on Middle East Political Science penned an opinion piece that looked ahead at four such questions that will be raised in the fallout of these strikes.
One: Will it affect the Syrian civil war? No, Marc Lynch wrote in the Washington Post. He called the strike on a single airbase one of the smallest military moves Trump could possibly have made.
“On its own, it is a symbolic action which has virtually no impact on the course of the long, complex Syrian civil war,” he wrote.
His second question: can Trump avoid mission creep? Lynch said people pushing for Assad’s ouster will now be emboldened, and this could turn into the slippery slope Obama feared.
His third question is whether Trump is now really a mainstream Republican, on military questions. It appears so, Lynch said. That’s infuriated some Trump supporters. His talkradio booster Laura Ingraham tweeted Friday: “The same officials and think-tank generals who helped destabilize the Mideast (with) misguided foreign policy itching to get back in power.”
Fourth, Lynch asks: Can he contain the fallout?
Syria has proven to be a historically explosive tinderbox, and the Americans have just pounded it with rockets. Lynch’s concerns include escalating tit-for-tat with Russia, advances by the so-called Islamic State, and reprisals against U.S. troops in the region.
Then there’s the Russia question. The Assad regime — detested by vast swaths of Syrian society, hailing from a minority Alawite sect, resented by the region’s Sunnis — has always had a friend in Moscow.
The base targeted early Friday, the one the Pentagon says stored deadly sarin gas used by Assad, reportedly had a Russian contingent on it. Now the U.S. says it’s investigating whether Russians were complicit in the chemical attacks.
This with a new quasi-Cold War already underway.