Trump aides: Assad’s ouster on priority list

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s national security adviser on Sunday left open the possibility of additional U.S. military action against Syria after last week’s missile strike but indicated that the United States was not seeking to act unilaterally to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“We are prepared to do more,” H.R. McMaster said in his first televised interview. “The president will make whatever decision he thinks is in the best interest of the American people.”

McMaster said the U.S. goals of fighting the Islamic State extremist group and ousting Assad were somewhat “simultaneous,” and that the objective of the missile strike was not simply to target the air base that Trump said was used to launch a chemical attack Tuesday. The chemicals were used on a rebel-held area in northern Syria and killed at least 72 people, including 20 children.

“[The strike] was to be a very strong signal to Assad and his sponsors that the United States cannot stand idly by as he is murdering innocent civilians,” McMaster said.

McMaster said the strike was also intended to seek a global political response for regime change.

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Sunday described regime change in Syria as “something that we think is going to happen.”

“We know there’s not any

sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime,” she said on CNN. “If you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad.”

If Trump needs to do more in Syria to oppose Assad, “he will do more,” Haley said, adding that other U.S. priorities in Syria are defeating the Islamic State and getting “the Iranian influence out.”

But Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested that last week’s American airstrikes, conducted in retaliation for a chemical attack by the regime on Syrian citizens, hadn’t really changed U.S. priorities toward ousting Assad.

“We’ve seen what that looks like, when you undertake a violent regime change in Libya, and the situation in Libya continues to be very chaotic,” Tillerson said. “We have to learn the lessons of the past and learn the lessons of what went wrong in Libya when you choose that pathway of regime change.”

He said the Syrian people will decide Assad’s fate, and that defeating the Islamic State is the top U.S. priority.

“Once the ISIS threat has been reduced or eliminated, I think we can turn our attention directly to stabilizing the situation in Syria,” Tillerson said, using an acronym for the extremist group.

The hope, he said, is that “we can navigate a political outcome in which the Syrian people, in fact, will determine Bashar Assad’s fate and his legitimacy.”

Trump’s decision to launch the strikes — which President Barack Obama did not do after a 2013 chemical attack — has raised optimism among U.S.backed rebels in Syria that Trump will more directly confront Assad.

Several lawmakers said Sunday that the decision on whether to oust Assad shouldn’t entirely be up to Trump.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, praised Trump’s initial missile strike for sending a message to Assad, Russia, Iran and North Korea that “there’s a new administration in charge.” But he said Trump and Congress needed to set a course together.

“Congress needs to work with the president to try and deal with this long-term strategy, lack of strategy, really, in Syria,” he said. “We haven’t had one for six years during the Obama administration, and 400,000 civilians have died and millions of people have been displaced internally and externally in Europe and elsewhere.”

Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agreed.

“What we saw was a reaction to the use of chemical weapons, something I think many of us supported,” he said. “But what we did not see is a coherent policy on how we’re going to deal with the civil war and also deal with ISIS.”

But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he believed that Trump didn’t need to consult with Congress on any additional strikes against Syria.

“I think the president has authorization to use force,” he said. “Assad signed the chemical weapons treaty ban. There’s an agreement with him not to use chemical weapons.”

RUSSIA CRITICIZED

Tillerson said he’ll use a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week in Moscow to challenge Russia about chemical weapons in Syria. Russia has been a steadfast ally of the Syrian government and in the U.N. Security Council has defended the regime against claims of chemical weapons use.

“Russia gave certain assurances under the chemical weapons agreement in 2013 and in accordance with the U.N. Security Council resolutions that they would be the guarantor of the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles,” Tillerson said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “Russia has failed in that commitment. And the result of their failure has led to the killing of more children and innocents.”

Tillerson had previously said Russia had either been “complicit or simply incompetent” in its failure to deliver on the 2013 commitment to ensure that Syria got rid of its chemical weapons stockpile.

McMaster was also critical of Russia, which he said needed to re-evaluate its support of Syria.

“It’s very difficult to understand how a political solution could result from the continuation of the Assad regime,” McMaster said. “Now, we are not saying that we are the ones who are going to effect that change. What we are saying is other countries have to ask themselves some hard questions. Russia should ask themselves … ‘Why are we supporting this murderous regime that is committing mass murder of its own population?’”

McMaster said U.S. officials should ask Russia, “How could it be if you have advisers at that airfield, that you didn’t know?”

Haley also questioned how Russia didn’t know about the weapons.

“Either they knew that there were chemical weapons and they knew there was going to be chemical weapon use, and they just hid it from the international community, or they are being played for fools by Assad,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Graham said Russia “intentionally, in my view, left chemical weapons in the hand of Assad, their proxy.”

“So if I were President Trump, I would go after Russia through sanctions, not only for interfering in our elections, but aiding and abetting the use of chemical weapons by a war criminal, Assad,” Graham said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Moscow has said it doesn’t believe Assad’s forces carried out the Tuesday attack and called for a “thorough and impartial” investigation.

SYRIAN ALLIES RESPOND

In a phone call with Assad, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called the U.S. strike a “blatant violation” of Syrian sovereignty, Syrian state media reported. Assad accused the U.S. of trying to boost the morale of “terror groups” in Syria. The government refers to all those fighting against it as terrorists.

A statement carried on the military media arm of the Hezbollah extremist group condemned the American strike in much stronger language, saying it had “crossed red lines” and vowing to “reply with force” to any future aggression “in a variety of ways.”

The Lebanese militant group has sent thousands of fighters in the defense of Assad’s government. The statement was made in the name of a previously unheard of “shared operations room” between Russia, Iran and allied forces.

The Kremlin said in a statement that Rouhani also spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone.

“Both sides noted the inadmissibility of aggressive U.S. actions against a sovereign state in violation of international law,” the statement said. “Vladimir Putin and [Hassan] Rouhani spoke in favor of an objective, unbiased investigation of all the circumstances of the chemical weapons incident on April 4 in the Syrian province of Idlib.”

Rouhani said the U.S. strike would not affect Iran’s Syria policy, while Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran would not withdraw in the face of such aggressions.

“What the Americans did is a strategic mistake and offense. They are repeating offense of their predecessors,” Khamenei was quoted as saying by the official Iranian news agency.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, a Syrian Sukhoi jet took off from the Shayrat airbase targeted by the volley of U.S. strikes, Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV channel reported Sunday, saying repairs to the base began within hours of the attack.

And Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Sunday played down concerns of a rift with Russia over Ankara’s support for the strike, saying Turkey was committed to the cease-fire mechanisms it has developed with Russia for Syria.

But he said Turkey could not “remain silent” on the Syrian government’s chemical weapons use, and he insisted that Moscow work with Ankara to establish a transitional government in Damascus.

“We want to continue our efforts with Russia in the Astana process in terms of measures to increase trust and establish a cease-fire,” he told reporters in Antalya, referring to peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Information for this article was contributed by Hope Yen, Josh Lederman, Philip Issa, Zeynep Bilginsoy, Jim Heintz and Nasser Karimi of The Associated Press; by Todd Shields and Ros Krasny of Bloomberg News; and by David E. Sanger of The New York Times.