How US Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama handled the Syrian crisis
ANALYSIS: US President Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama took a ‘tough line’ on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
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ANALYSIS
BARACK Obama didn’t know what to do. He fed weapons to Syria’s anti-regimen militia, but they soon fell into the wrong hands; or those fighting President Bashar al-Assad waited so long for help that never came they became extremists themselves.
In 2012, Obama promised a tough line on Assad, explaining that he would still resist military intervention but “the red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized”.
They started seeing those chemical weapons all the time. In 2013, at Ghuota, outer Damascus, a Sarin attack sheeted home to Assad killed up to 1400 people. Obama did nothing.
Assad, whose forces bomb hospitals to psychologically terrorise people into believing there is nowhere left safe for them, has had a free run, ably assisted by Russia and Iran.
No more.
Donald Trump has seen the red line, and it was Khan Sheikhoun, in Idlib province, on Tuesday. Assad’s jets delivered four canisters of deadly nerve agent gas on innocent civilians, on the apparent justification there were rebels in the area.
By blowing up a regimen airfield with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles, Trump did what Obama refused. There is already plenty of analysis about how Trump is a hypocrite, because he had urged Obama to stay out of Syria.
Trump is president now. He has different responsibilities to a sideline commentator. And has explained that what he saw in Khan Sheikhoun changed his mind on Assad.
This action by Trump is the circuit-breaker Syria needs. If it brings trouble from Russia and Iran, so be it: let them explain to the world that filling the lungs of young children with nerve agent and watching them writhe to death is acceptable.
The cruise missile attack is, as the White House says, “proportionate”. It did not target civilians but hit the air base that delivered the chemical weapons on Tuesday.
Assad knows his days are now numbered. Obama should have ended them four years ago, after Ghuota.
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