President Trump’s missile strike against Syria’s Assad has many consequences
ANALYSIS: President Trump’s use of force against Bashar al-Assad sends a strong message to the Syrian dictator as the world asks: ‘What comes next?’
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IT’S taken six years, but enough is enough.
US President Donald Trump has made a stand for humanity and put the writing on the wall for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose fine Saville Row suits cannot conceal his true identity as the world’s most murderous terrorist-tyrant.
In ordering US naval warships in the Mediterranean to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Shayrat, an Assad-controlled desert air base southeast of Homs, Trump may have not fully thought through the consequences, including how Assad’s close ally, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian leadership, will react.
But that only amplifies the authenticity of Trump’s action: it is swift, decisive and heartfelt, coming only two days after Assad’s jets launched deadly nerve gas agent — probably sarin — at non-combatants in the township of Khan Sheikhoun, in Idlib province, leaving at least 80 dead.
Trump has ordered the first direct attack against the Syrian regime by the US since the conflict began in 2011 and intensified with the arrival of ISIS in 2014. It marks the end days for Assad and changes the entire calculus of the conflict.
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While the strikes will no doubt be characterised as the defining moment in the 77-day-old Trump presidency — and he will simultaneously be criticised for his own previous position that the US should keep its powder dry on Syria — what happened on Tuesday in Khan Sheikhoun changed everything.
The world has seen the victims of such attacks many times before, but something about this — the terrified children foaming at the mouth, not understanding what was happening to them, and the futility of hosing down gas-wracked bodies when the damage was not on their skin but in their lungs — was too much to bear.
Trump was far from immune, saying in the immediate aftermath that “my attitude towards Syria and Assad has changed very much.”
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Barack Obama spent years making calculations on what it would mean if he went beyond battling ISIS and got to the other main problem in Syria, which is Assad. Obama vowed in 2012 that if Assad used illegal chemical weapons on his people, that would mark him as crossing the “red line” that would provoke a US military response.
Those chemical attacks by Assad came again and again, including in 2013 when he was blamed for gassing to death 1400 of his citizens outside of Damascus. Obama did nothing.
Trump, new in his presidency, could hardly take pleasure in ordering these attacks, which could bring uncertain fallout. His strong desire is to concentrate on rebuilding his country and trying to limit US engagement in the Middle East to routing the Islamic State.
But while Obama could turn away, Trump could not. Knowing the UN Security Council will authorise no intervention, due to Assad’s close ally Russia exercising its power of veto, Assad has been granted tacit permission to visit upon his people an horrific and unending parade of cheap and deadly weapons, from barrel bombs to nerve gas.
Trump did not seek Russia’s permission or approval for the strikes, a fury of 1000lb conventional warheads carefully targeted to hit Syrian war planes and to damage an airfield without cost to civilian life.
And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — who will have an interesting meeting with his counterpart when he visits Moscow next week — said “Russia has been complicit or Russia has been simply incompetent” by failing in its 2013 promise to destroy Assad’s chemical weapon stocks.
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Trump knows this will put him in a difficult position with Putin, with whom he hopes to have better relations, but that is secondary to the underlying message borne by the Tomahawks: that Assad is an enemy of all civilised people who must go.
The White House has called it a “proportionate” response to the massacre at Khan Sheikhoun, with no signs — so far — that it will follow the strikes up with further assaults on the Syrian military. But the effect of it is that Assad’s military is now confined to using conventional weapons against rebel forces, or will face further barrages from the US.
Trump’s use of force brings multiple consequences, mostly positive: it breaks a stalemate that has dragged on for years, in which Assad has been allowed to perversely grow stronger; it sends a message that the US will not retreat when the innocent are slaughtered; and it demands that Russia rethink its relationship with Assad, or further isolate itself from the world.
And it finally sets out the case that Assad is intolerable, and his position untenable. Any actions his military takes from now on, whether on the ground or in the air, will be scrutinised intently by the US. In essence, Trump has dared Assad to try gassing his people again.
The missile strikes will be severely demoralising for Syrian soldiers and aircrew who grimly carry out Assad’s orders to destroy all opposition, whether they are armed or not. In everything they do from now on, they will be watching the skies, rendering them potentially inert if not mutinous.
This could mean — depending on Russia’s response, which is so far muted, apart from calling for a meeting of the UN Security Council — that Assad forces could be limited to defending Damascus from rebel attacks.
Trump, speaking from Florida hours after the strikes, left no doubt that he now considered Assad a terrorist. “There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the chemical weapons convention and ignored the urging of the UN Security Council,” he said.
“Tonight, I call on all civilised nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria. Also, to end terrorism of all kinds and all types.”
There is no suggestion that the US will seek to send its infantry into Syria; nor make any demands that its allies, such as Australia, make further commitments in the immediate future. The best-case scenario is that Russia will lean on Assad to give up the game, and provide him an escort out of Damascus.
That would lead to a power vacuum in Syria, although there has been one for six years as the regime holes up in the western part of the country, with much of the middle and east still overrun by ISIS.
Russia will be reluctant to give up its naval and air bases on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and if Putin acts responsibly, it is unlikely Trump would demand they exit the country while an interim government is formed.
With Assad gone, the chances the US-led coalition finishing off ISIS and al Qaeda will be greatly improved. And Russia will have the chance to join in and demonstrate if its stated aims in Syria, of destroying terrorism, are genuine.
The biggest unknown is Iran, which has sent troops to fight alongside Assad’s men. As expected, it “strongly condemned” the US attacks, but it is not expected to react with force. Its interest is not so much Assad, but maintaining a Shia foothold in a region which is largely Sunni.
But Trump’s contempt for Iran, which likes to play in the shadows of war in both Syria and Iraq, is such that it likely figured little in two intense days of discussion leading up to the decision to order the navy destroyers USS Ross and Porter to launch.
What is apparent is that neither Syrian nor Russian air defence systems were either prepared or able to prevent the strikes on what should be a well-guarded military base.
Turkey, which through autopsies confirmed the use of nerve agent on bodies carried across the border, and had asked the UN Security Council to “punish” Assad, welcomed the US intervention.
Trump’s homegrown supporter base, who had hoped that their president would begin to unravel America’s involvement in the Middle East, must now consider what this action means for them after their long years of war.
Trump will hope that the message to Assad will see him slip from view, and that the US will not be required to invest more than this sharp arms-length shock to the dictator.
And he will hope the people see the same thing he saw in Khan Sheikhoun. “It was a slow and brutal death for so many,” he said. “Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”
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