AFTER KILLING HIS OWN SYRIAN CITIZENS, TRUMP HAS NOTHING TO SAY AGAINST al-ASSAD

….The terrible effects of using Chemical Weapons.

 

"Bombing your own civilians with chemical weapons is unquestionably a war crime, and they must be held to account."

 

If you follow the international news, you will have read about the disgusting attack this week with chemical weapons on innocent men, women and children in Syria.  The Syrian government launched an airstrike on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in the country's northwestern Idlib province. Scores of civilians were reportedly killed.  (The death toll was unclear at this time of writing, with aid agencies and monitoring groups putting the number anywhere from 50 up to 150 killed.)

 

As usual, video footage surfaced on social media of small, frantic children being hosed off by rescuers in the hopes of washing away whatever lethal chemical agent had hit them. Other gruesome video showed corpses hastily wrapped in blankets, victims with foam coming out of their mouths and a chilling scene of lifeless boys, eyes open and limbs contorted in shock.

 

The French President François Hollande said in a statement: "Once again the Syrian regime will deny the evidence of its responsibility for this massacre."

 

British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson stated: "Bombing your own civilians with chemical weapons is unquestionably a war crime, and they must be held to account."

 

The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said the attack was a crime against humanity that could derail the fragile Syrian peace process.

 

 

...A Syrian man that was in the wrong place at the wrong time

 

Such strikes are a classic Assad regime tactic to further demoralize the flagging rebellion. "Assad calculates, reasonably, that military dynamics play in his favor. By using chemical weapons and other weapons, he is demonstrating the powerlessness of international actors," said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and to the Washington Post.

 

But then, what did our American president have to say about this devastating chemical attack which by the way, was reportedly delivered to the Syrian residents by the same Russian aircraft provided to al-Assad by Russian president Putin.

 

Our president Trump however, didn’t have anything to say against Syrian President al-Assad.

 

Instead, in Washington DC, the Trump administration initially chose to blame its predecessor, President Obama.  It was just another sign that the White House is far more comfortable operating as if it's still running an election campaign rather than the world's only superpower.

 

"Today's chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world," said White House press secretary Sean Spicer. "These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration's weakness and irresolution."

Spicer, speaking at his daily press briefing, added: "President Obama said in 2012 he would establish a red line against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing. The United States stands with our allies across the globe to condemn this intolerable act."

 

What was even more bizarre, is what the supporters of the President al-Assad regime had to say about this attack on civilians with chemical weapons.

 

Supporters of the Syrian regime rejected any link to a chemical weapons strike. They claimed the reports were fabricated by terrorist groups and suggested the fatalities were the result of an explosion at a phantom al-Qaeda chemical weapons factory. Russian authorities, whose warplanes were spotted flying during the attack, said they had not conducted a strike in the area around the town.  But the broader international reaction was vehement and they have put the blame squarely on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

 

The shot at the former US president by Trump is a bizarre line of attack for the current administration to choose.

 

In 2013, the Obama administration did contemplate a military response after a suspected regime chemical weapons attack on rebel-held districts in the suburbs of Damascus killed more than 1,000 people. The mounting international pressure at the time compelled Assad to agree to eliminate its chemical weapons program.

 

The fact that Obama chose to back off from confronting the Assad regime directly, which had used chemical weapons numerous times in the years since, this will forever haunt the former president's legacy.  And much of the Washington foreign policy establishment has excoriated Obama for it as well.

 

But what’s so strange about the latest Trump accusation is that as a private citizen, President Trump, back in 2013, with his same itchy Twitter finger, he was opposed to any American intervention in Syria.

 

The total irony is that Trump's position on today's Syrian conflict isn't that much different from Obama's.  Yes, Trump is more indifferent to the plight of Syrian refugees. But the previous administration had called for Assad's departure, though it did little to actually push for regime change.  That was because it feared that deeper involvement in the Syrian conflict would risk the sort of blowback and chaos that Iraq had after the 2003 US invasion.

 

Trump, meanwhile, has also insisted on multiple occasions that he is not interested in nation-building in the Middle East or dictating regime change. His lieutenants indicated as recently as last week that the White House does not prioritize removing Assad from power.

 

"No one, not even President Obama, as far as I could tell, was satisfied with the Obama administration’s approach to the conflict in Syria," wrote Andrew Exum, in the Atlantic.  Exum is a former Obama-era Pentagon official.  "If you assembled all of the Obama administration’s critics in one room, they would not agree on an obvious alternative. The problem is wicked enough to confound easy solutions, and each policy alternative had strategic and moral deficiencies."

What Secretary Spicer described as "weakness and irresolution", one gets the impression that Trump has decided to brush it all aside in favor of his aggressive posturing and an escalation of the military campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS).  It’s the kind of Trump brazenness that comes with deep costs today, due to the scores of Iraqi civilians killed by a recent American airstrike in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

 

"This president would be wise to remember what his predecessor knew: War is a very imperfect instrument of policy," wrote Exum.  But that would indicate that Trump even has a concept of what going to “War” against a nation actually means.  This is the same man that actually once said “If we didn’t intend to use them, why did we build all those nuclear war heads?”

 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did put out a more appropriate statement that singled out the "brutal, unabashed barbarism" of the Assad regime. It scolded Assad's boosters, Russia and Iran, for not ensuring the regime's "compliance" with a cease-fire they were supposed to have guaranteed and said they "bear great moral responsibility" for Syrian civilian deaths.

 

However, as an analyst noted, this was a more meagured message in the face of a an extremely complex challenge.

 

But as expected, for Tillerson’s boss, he seems content to ignore the complexity altogether.  Because as we all know, Trump is just a simple, self-involved American man.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017