What the commentators said
Prepare for “something spectacular” from the US, said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. In devising his retaliation for the Douma attack, the president will want to find an impressive gesture that makes a sharp contrast with Barack Obama, whose “timidity” in the use of American strength he condemned. What’s more, Trump has a new National Security Adviser at his elbow who is even keener than his boss on the deployment of US military might, said Elias Groll in Foreign Policy. John Bolton “has rarely found an American adversary whose relationship with the United States would not be improved by a bombing campaign”.
It’s hard to see what good that would serve, said Robin Wright in The New Yorker. The awkward truth is that Syria offers few good targets that the Russians could not quickly rebuild. When the US hit a Syrian base with cruise missiles last year after a previous gas attack, the damage was reportedly repaired in a few days. Anyhow, it’s far too late to affect the war’s outcome. With Assad back in control of most of Syria’s major cities, his opponents face “almost impossible odds”. Western outrage smacks of hypocrisy, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Some will ask what the difference is between the use of chlorine or sarin and Nato’s “horrific cluster bombs and white phosphorous”. As for the killing of civilians, our own forces are hardly blameless. The monitoring group Airwars reckons 8,000 were killed in the fall of Mosul last summer, mostly by “inevitably indiscriminate Iraqi, American and British missiles”.
On the contrary, said William Hague in The Daily Telegraph, there’s an overwhelming case for military intervention. When Assad first used sarin in 2013, I was foreign secretary and recommended that Britain should join the US in a missile strike. MPS chose to disagree and we are seeing the consequences in an emboldened Damascus regime. For nearly 100 years, we have prevented the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. If we once again fail to register our outrage with sufficient force, they could soon become “just another aspect of war”.