In retaliation for a gassing of civilians, the US launched 70 Tomahawk missiles on a Syrian Air base.
From CNN:
There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons … and ignored the urging of the UN Security Council,” he said during short remarks to reporters at Mar-a-Lago. “The refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize.
Trump’s statement is enraging in many respects, not the least of which has been his attitude towards the refugees.
Earlier Hillary Clinton said
“Assad has an air force, and that air force is the cause of most of these civilian deaths as we have seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days,” Clinton said in a speech at the “Women in the World” summit in New York City. “And I really believe that we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.”
The former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee against Trump in 2016 reiterated her support for a no-fly zone over Syria and more direct support for protesters.
Clinton went on to repeat her criticism that Obama Syrian policy was too passive. She initially made that criticism in 2014.
Obama argued against Syrian involvement, telling Bloomberg:
asked the president if, in retrospect, he should have provided more help to Syria’s rebels earlier in their struggle. “I think those who believe that two years ago, or three years ago, there was some swift resolution to this thing had we acted more forcefully, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the conflict in Syria and the conditions on the ground there,” Obama said. “When you have a professional army that is well-armed and sponsored by two large states who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict — the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”
I doubt this is much more than for appearances. It does little to change the equation on the ground. There is even a case for some sort of strike given the use of gas in Syria.
In the larger context, I always believe that Obama was right and Clinton was wrong about Syria.
Which path Trump takes is unknowable.
