Syria Isn’t Just About Syria

Source Link

Only last week the president was demanding that U.S. generals draw up plans to pull all assets out of Syria as soon as possible. But on April 7, almost as if to force the U.S. not to withdraw, Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army attacked a civilian population with chemical weapons and laid siege to Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus. Scores were murdered, including civilian men, women, and children. Hundreds were admitted to hospitals with grievous signs of poisonous gas inhalation.

Whether Trump’s public statements about withdrawing from Syria provoked Assad into using chemical weapons cannot be known, and western commentators and politicians should avoid implying that anyone but Assad is responsible. The timing is notable for reasons other than Trump’s recent comments: Almost exactly one year before the latest chemical attack—on April 4, 2017—Assad’s forces attacked residents of Khan Shaykhun using sarin gas, provoking an almost immediate U.S. missile attack on the Syrian army’s Shayrat airbase.

It may be that Assad enjoys one-year timing. On August 20, 2012, President Barack Obama enunciated his famous “red line” ultimatum: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground,” the president remarked on a Sunday news show, “that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” Almost precisely one year later—at 2:30 a.m. on August 21, 2013—Assad’s forces carried out a chemical attack on civilians outside Damascus.

The Obama administration’s response was to refrain from responding. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the attack “in the strongest possible terms,” and that was about it. The meaning was clear: The Obama administration was willing to cede Syria to Iran and Russia in order to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, then in its final stages.

Even if Assad’s one-year timing is coincidence, it’s clear that he is playing a game with the U.S.: The Americans say they will punish him if he engages in certain activities, he waits about a year, and then engages in those very activities.

We trust the administration understands that this isn’t merely about Bashar Assad. In the April 2017 strike on the Shayrat airbase, the U.S. effectively obligated itself to respond militarily to Assad’s use of chemical weapons—and rightly so. A year later, Assad has done it again, and every thug regime in the world is waiting to see what will happen. Those regimes include Iran and Russia, Syria’s principal backers, but also, perhaps especially, North Korea. In remarks broadly similar to Obama’s “red line” ultimatum, Trump in August 2017 vowed that if Kim Jong-un’s North Korea continue to threaten the United States—probably meaning that if North Korea should ever act on its threats—it will be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

So Vladimir Putin in Russia, Ali Khamenei in Iran, and Kim Jong-un in North Korea anxiously await the U.S. response to Assad’s provocation. Inasmuch as Kim’s regime has for years actively assisted Syria in its quest for nuclear weapons, we may be assured that Kim and his generals are gauging how far they, too, can push the U.S.

There is almost certain to be some sort of U.S. response. Reports on Sunday indicate that Trump and French president Emmanuel Macron agreed that a “strong, joint response” is necessary, and at Monday’s cabinet meeting the president strongly implied that Assad’s “barbaric act” was “about humanity” and so couldn’t go unpunished. Even bolder was the third of Trump’s three tweets about Syria on Sunday: “If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago!”

That implies that Obama should have taken care of Assad for good in 2013. It’s hard to disagree. But tweeting such a remark and responding weakly would be as bad as, if not worse than, Obama’s milquetoast non-response.

In short, U.S. credibility is at stake. Lobbing a few cruise missiles at an airfield may satisfy some high-ranking members of the foreign policy elite, but it won’t punish the Assad regime or deter it from future chemical attacks. The American response must involve enormous U.S. and allied firepower and bring heavy consequences on the Assad regime and its leader. The Israelis began the work with a Sunday night attack on the Tiyas Iranian airbase, but we hope the U.S. won’t let the Israelis do the hard work of retribution.

If Donald Trump wants to honor his office and lead the globe’s free democracies against the axis of global gangsters, this is the time to do it.