If you wonder what prompted my last post, consider what’s being said.
New York Times editors
On the plus side, the airstrikes have given Mr. Trump a lift in Sunni states in the Persian Gulf, which chafed at Mr. Obama’s refusal to take direct military action against Mr. Assad. European allies and members of Congress also endorsed his decision. But the action lacked authorization from Congress and the United Nations Security Council, raising questions about its legality and spotlighting a rich irony. In 2013, Mr. Trump argued that Mr. Obama must get congressional approval before attacking Syria. Congress, with a long history of ducking its war-making responsibility, refused to give it.
Studies show that one-off military strikes achieve little. Whether this one has given Mr. Trump any leverage with which to press Russia for a diplomatic solution may become clearer when Mr. Tillerson visits Moscow next week. But the greater need is for a comprehensive strategy and congressional authorization for any further military action. There are risks the president simply cannot take on his own.
Was refusing to give authorization for military action in Syria Congress shirking its Constitutional responsibilities, Congress disagreeing with a feckless policy, or partisan and/or racist opposition to the Obama Administration? We may know soon.
Nicholas Kristof
My proposed course in Syria is the same one that Hillary Clinton and many others have favored: missile strikes to ground Assad’s small air force. This should help end the barrel bombs and make Assad realize that he has no military solution, and that it’s time for negotiation. The most plausible negotiated outcome would be a long-term ceasefire and de facto partition of Syria, putting off reintegration until Assad is no longer around.
Draw a map. What partition does he have in mind? As I’ve noted Assad isn’t the only problem. The next Alawite strongman to replace him will do exactly what Assad has done. An Islamist Sunni government will ethnically cleanse the Alawite minority out of existence.
Washington Post editors
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S decision to strike a Syrian air base in response to a chemical weapons attack by the regime of Bashar al- Assad was right as a matter of morality, but it could also yield a host of practical benefits. The Assad regime may be deterred from again using deadly gas on civilians — a heinous war crime that, if tolerated, would make not just Syria but the world more savage.
Russia and Iran should have new cause to consider whether they will continue backing the blood-drenched Damascus dictator, or cut a deal to get rid of him.
Spell it out. Do you mean just replacing Assad or replacing the whole Alawite regime? With what? What do you think will happen if that is done?
Fareed Zakaria
U.S. policy on Syria remains unclear. The Trump administration had repeatedly announced that it had shifted away from the Obama administration’s calls for regime change in Syria. In fact, Trump had indicated that he was happy to leave the country to Assad as long as this would help defeat the Islamic State. Last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson basically affirmed that approach. On Tuesday, the day of the chemical attack on Idlib, White House press secretary Sean Spicer reiterated it. The missile strike appears to have reversed that policy.
If so, it is a major shift and raises important questions: Is the United States now engaged in the Syrian civil war? Will it use military force to help oust Assad? Do these actions help the Islamic State and al-Qaeda — which are fighting against the regime? And what happens next in the overall war against the Islamic State?
Robert Kagan
American missile strikes against Syria are a critical first step toward protecting civilians from the threat of chemical weapons, and President Trump deserves credit for doing what the Obama administration refused to do. But Thursday’s action needs to be just the opening salvo in a broader campaign not only to protect the Syrian people from the brutality of the Bashar al-Assad regime but also to reverse the downward spiral of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East and throughout the world. A single missile strike unfortunately cannot undo the damage done by the Obama administration’s policies over the past six years.
Trump was not wrong to blame the dire situation in Syria on President Barack Obama. The world would be a different place today if Obama had carried out his threat to attack Syria when Assad crossed the famous “red line†in the summer of 2013. The bad agreement that then-Secretary of State John F. Kerry struck with Russia not only failed to get rid of Syria’s stock of chemical weapons and allowed the Assad regime to drop barrel bombs and employ widespread torture against civilian men, women and children. It also invited a full-scale Russian intervention in the fall of 2015, which saved the Assad regime from possible collapse.
The major media outlets are deluging us with a torrent of opinions from neoconservatives and liberal interventionists with only one thing in common: the desire to increase our use of military force to solve a problem which has no good solutions and in which other than humanitarian concerns we have little interest.
We can’t solve every problem and in particular we can’t solve every problem with military force.
Update
Wall Street Journal editors
The alternative to this surrender is to reassert U.S. influence with diplomacy and military force, and Mr. Assad’s chemical attack is the opening. Mr. Trump may understand this as he ordered an attack on the air base from which the chemical attack was launched, and Mr. Tillerson said Thursday that Mr. Assad has no future in Syria.
The quickest way to punish Mr. Assad for his aerial chemical attacks, and to ensure they won’t happen again, is to destroy his air power. This is the plan that Mr. Obama flinched at in 2013 when he let Mr. Assad cross his “red line.†He has now crossed that line again—this time after having promised to destroy his chemical stockpiles.
We know how this movie ends. We’ve seen it unfold before in Libya. IMO inflicting the chaos of Libya on Syria would be worse than the present civil war.
So, yes, if the regime uses chemical weapons, punish it. But recognize that the regime, reprehensible as it is, remains the best of a lot of very bad alternatives.
One commentator I like on this is General Barry McCaffrey, and his advice is simple: provide serious support for Jordan and Lebanon in dealing with the crushing load of refugees. Less bombing, more check writing.
I am one of those liberal interventionist types, but I like to think I learn from recent history. Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – whatever we think we’ve been doing it isn’t working. More depressing in a way is Egypt, which had a shot at something like democracy but made all the wrong choices and is now right back with Mubarak, er, Al-Sisi.
I always believed, and said frequently, that if we were seriously determined to ‘fix’ the middle east it was going to take something much more like Japan 1945 – brute force, the total subjugation of existing institutions and their replacement, followed by decades of armed baby-sitting. But Bush-Cheney decided to do it all on the cheap and we are where we are now, having managed only to make bad into worse.
I think now McCaffrey has it right. Let’s try to do the decent thing and help Jordan and Lebanon cope with the human toll. That’s something we and the Europeans and Turks can agree on and can actually do. It’s not a solution, but it’s not nothing.
I can endorse that. I would also add that we need to recognize how Turkey is aggravating the problems.
” Mr. Trump a lift in Sunni states in the Persian Gulf, which chafed at Mr. Obama’s refusal to take direct military action against Mr. Assad. ”
I think Obama was correct to resist the Gulf states talking him into going deeper into the Syrian mess. I also wish we would not be involved in the war in Yemen.
The media has been obsessed with Russia’s ties to Trump. I don’t see how Russia has harmed the US under Trump. It is the Saudis who get the US military to do their bidding at the same time they promote a version of Islam close to ISIS I see as the corrupting influence in Washington.
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11275354/saudi-arabia-gulf-washington
All the propaganda about Sunni state approval relies on Gulf government collaboration and with the compliant US media and does not represent man in the street views.
Where are our intelligence agencies in all this? I haven’t heard anything yet regarding this incident from any of them.