President Trump’s decision to use American military force in Syria is an extraordinary about-turn. He campaigned for the presidency on a platform of keeping the United States out of foreign entanglements and opposed any idea that the America should use its military might to intervene in the six-year-old Syrian civil war.
But the chemical attacks on a small town held by the rebels in Idil province changed his mind. He ordered a cruise missile strike on the airfield from which the chemical weapon attack is believed to have been launched. The president says it is a limited strike intended solely to deter any future use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime. But the barbaric civil war goes on. So what does President Trump’s intervention mean for what should happen now?
Mr Trump’s decision marks not only a change in his own policy but is in marked contrast to the conduct of his predecessor. President Obama had warned the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad that it would cross a ‘red line’ if it used chemical weapons against its own civilians. But when Assad did just that in 2013, killing nearly a thousand civilians in a Damascus suburb by deploying sarin gas against them, the American president did nothing. Instead, he accepted an offer from Assad’s ally, President Putin of Russia, to persuade Syria to give up all its chemical weapons so that such attacks could never happen again. Despite appearances, it now seems that this commitment was never fully carried out.
American intelligence believes that the horrific attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun was authorised by the Syrian regime. About a hundred men, women and children died and about 500 were injured by sarin gas, one of the deadliest of poisons.
The Assad government denies this and is backed by its Russian allies. Their version of events is that a conventional rocket attack hit a warehouse storing rebel-held chemical weapons which then exploded. But few people believe them. Experts argue that such an attack would destroy rather than detonate such a weapon store and the Guardian’s Kareem Shaheen, the first reporter into the town, says there is no evidence of any such warehouse having been hit; that there is a crater where the rocket landed; and that surviving locals report four air strikes delivering the gas.
President Trump clearly was convinced. He ordered the cruise missile attack from US navy ships in the Mediterranean both to give a signal to the world that the United States was not impotent in the face of such humanitarian outrage and to deter any further such outrages. He made clear that the military action was limited, targeted and had no implications for further action. In this he was backed by Britain and other American allies.
Russia condemned the American action as ‘an act of aggression against a sovereign nation’ and therefore against international law. It said the action would inevitably harm US/Russian relations.
It is possible that with regard to American involvement in the Syrian civil war this is both the beginning and the end of the story. But there are reasons to doubt it. Now that America has taken this action will the logic of events draw it in further?
The first reason to think it may is that the civil war, which has already claimed approaching half a million lives, displaced millions from their homes and caused a massive refugee crisis, continues to inflict humanitarian suffering on an appalling scale. Using chemical weapons may in some people’s eyes constitute crossing a ‘red line’, but from the point of view of those civilians targeted by Syrian government (and Russian) air strikes, it perhaps does not much matter whether you are killed or injured by chemical weapons or by the barrel bombs which have caused human suffering on a far larger scale. There is no obvious reason why President Trump’s apparently sincere sense of outrage at what happened to the people of Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday should not also be felt about everything else that is going on in Syria, encouraging him to take a more activist approach in attempting to stop it.
The second reason is what his own administration is now saying. This week his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, suggested that the Trump government now believed in regime change in Syria. Only a week ago the American ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, said the administration was ‘not prioritising’ regime change. Following Tuesday’s events, Mr Tillerson said: ‘With the acts that he has taken, it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.’ He went on to add: ‘The process by which Assad would leave is something that I think requires an international community effort.’ But it seems clear that America is now likely to take a big role in bringing this about.
This would amount to a major change in Donald Trump’s approach. Up to now he has responded to the complexity of the Syrian situation by adopting what some would regard as a simplistic view. To him there was only one aim: defeating jihadi terrorists, many of them operating in Syria. Insofar as such terrorists are fighting the Syrian regime, President Assad appeared to Mr Trump as a potential ally rather than an enemy, hence Ms Haley’s remark a week ago. To have cooperated with the Assad regime against the jihadis would also have allowed Mr Trump to do deals with Assad’s ally, Russia, something for which the American president has in general also shown enthusiasm. But in now seeing Assad as needing to be replaced, that strategic approach has to be wholly rethought.
Some will argue that Mr Trump is now simply discovering reality. Many people, especially those who support the non-jihadi opposition to the Assad regime, have long argued that if Mr Trump’s main aim is to defeat the terrorists of so-called Islamic State, then regime change is essential simply because the barbarism of Assad’s conduct of the civil war acts as the main recruiting sergeant for the jihadis among the Sunni majority population Assad is oppressing. Backing Assad against the terrorists will just lead to a strengthening of Islamic State, they claim.
President Trump’s attack on the Assad regime may well lead him to follow this line of reasoning. But if it does, two obvious consequences follow. First, it will lead him into direct confrontation with Russia, which has essentially saved Assad from defeat in the civil war and continues to provide him with vital military support. And second, it will raise the question of whether America can get rid of Assad without escalating its own military involvement. If Mr Trump decides that he needs to, that will then further raise the issue of whether to ask America’s allies, like Britain, to help.
So what should be our response to Mr Trump’s military intervention? Do you think it was justified given what we know so far about what happened in Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday, or do you still doubt whether the Assad regime was behind the attack on the town? Do you think this will prove to be just a limited, one-off intervention by America or do you think it will now start to take further military action in the civil war? Do you think President Trump should aim to depose President Assad and, if so, should he use military force? How worried are you by the prospect of confrontation between America and Russia over Syria? And if President Trump decides to escalate military intervention, should Britain be willing to help him?
Let us know your views.
