#OyVeyDonaldTrump's Confusing Strike on Syria.If President#OyVeyDonaldTrump broadens his aims against Assad, he will enter the very morass that Candidate #OyVeyDonaldTrump warned against.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

On August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda suicide bombers struck two U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing two hundred and twenty-four people, most of them Africans. Two weeks later, President Bill Clinton launched Operation Infinite Reach, a fusillade of cruise missiles aimed at a reported Al Qaeda meeting in Afghanistan, and at a factory in Sudan, which was suspected of involvement with chemical weapons. “There will be no sanctuary for terrorists,” Clinton declared. The retaliation produced few tangible benefits. And yet, since then, from Kosovo to Waziristan to Libya, the United States has repeatedly threatened or carried out missile and drone attacks and air strikes for limited and sometimes imprecise purposes. In the modern Presidency, firing off missiles has become a rite of passage.

Last Thursday, his seventy-seventh day in office, President Donald Trump pressed the cruise-missile button, sending fifty-nine Tomahawks to strike an airbase in Syria. He did so after concluding from intelligence reports that President Bashar al-Assad’s Air Force had, on April 4th, killed or sickened hundreds of people in a chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a town held by rebels seeking Assad’s overthrow. Trump said that his strike was aimed at ending “the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria.”



The President’s decision was familiar for being both spontaneous and confusing. As has happened before, he was apparently inspired to act by what he saw on TV—in this case, distressing images of stricken women and children. Yet, despite having previously seen similarly horrifying pictures, Trump had been skeptical of military action in Syria. In 2013, Assad’s forces attacked civilians and rebels near Damascus with sarin, a banned nerve agent, killing more than a thousand people. Trump advised President Obama, via Twitter, “Do not attack Syria. There is no upside and tremendous downside.” (Obama had called Assad’s use of chemical arms crossing a “red line,” which might lead the U.S. to take military action, but he did not strike. Instead, Russia helped broker an agreement by which Assad gave up many—but evidently not all—of his chemical arms.)

Trump has said, “I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.” In the case of Syria, however, he seems to have acted without a clear plan in place. During the campaign, he promised to “bomb the shit out of” isis, which holds territory in Syria, but he also said that it was foolish to become mired in the civil war, or to target Assad, who has opposed isis—at least, rhetorically. As recently as March 30th, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that Assad’s future would be “decided by the Syrian people,” words that signalled a sharp departure from Obama’s insistence that Assad must leave office. Then, last Thursday, Tillerson seemed to shift direction, saying that “it would seem there would be no role” for Assad in Syria’s political future. But he later said, “I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a change in our policy or our posture relative to our military activities in Syria today.”

Syria’s civil war is the worst geopolitical disaster of the twenty-first century. It has claimed at least four hundred and seventy thousand lives; prompted a refugee crisis that has destabilized European politics and fuelled the rise of nativist populism; and created a playing field for Russian and Iranian adventurism in the Middle East. Six years of efforts to end the war through diplomacy have failed. The interference of regional and global powers, combined with the fragmentation of militias and guerrillas on the battlefield, have made the conflict appear all but unresolvable. During the past year, the more mainstream rebels opposing Assad have suffered repeated setbacks, including the loss of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city.

Why, then, would the Trump Administration want to lob a few dozen cruise missiles into this splintered landscape? One limited rationale might be that Syria’s conflict has eroded global treaties banning the use of chemical arms—every time Assad gasses civilians, he increases the likelihood that another dictator or general will use them. It seems odd, though, to initiate armed intervention to prevent one sort of Syrian war crime but not others. Assad has tortured and executed thousands of his own people. Syrian and Russian forces routinely violate international law by targeting civilians, physicians, and rescue workers with bombs and artillery shells. And, if Trump has suddenly been moved to address the suffering, he might start recognizing the legitimacy of Syrians as refugees of war and welcoming them to resettle in the United States.

If President Trump broadens his aims against Assad, to establish civilian safe havens, for example, or to ground Syria’s Air Force, or to bomb Assad to the negotiating table, he will enter the very morass that Candidate Trump warned against. He would have to manage risks—military confrontation with Russia, an intensified refugee crisis, a loss of momentum against isis—that Obama studied at great length and concluded to be unmanageable, at least at a cost consistent with American interests.

Since the Cold War’s end, the United States has led or joined more than half a dozen wars or armed interventions lasting longer than a few months, including the ouster of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, in 1991; the conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo; the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11; and, in 2011, during the Arab uprisings, the removal of the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. A few of these wars achieved their aims, albeit at a cost in lives and treasure; others went sideways or turned into disasters, as in Libya, where Obama’s intervention has been followed by six years of chaos, civil war, and the rise of a branch of isis. You don’t need an advanced degree in military history to identify the main lessons: once started, even limited wars upend initial plans and assumptions, violence produces unintended consequences, and conflicts are much easier to begin or escalate than to end.

Canadian, European, and Middle Eastern allies, as well as some sections of the Washington foreign-policy establishment, applauded Trump for his strike, pointing out its narrow scope, and noting that Assad had brought it on himself. Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s continual search for approval seems to contribute to his unpredictability. Perhaps he will soon rediscover his inclination to proceed cautiously in Middle Eastern wars. Given his bombast, his inconsistency, and his preference for gut instinct over policy knowledge, he always seemed likely to be a dangerous wartime President. The worry now is that he will also be an ambitious one. ♦

While Syria Burns: Friction and Ignorance among the Republicans Ticket. Difference of Opinion between Obama and Clinton

Gov. Mike Pence had said the United States should push back on the Russians. His running mate Donald Trump disagreed during the 2nd Presidential debate on Sunday in front of 67 millions Americans  in the USA and 200+ million interested parties million.

 For more than a year, Syria’s civil war has vexed and divided the Obama administration. Now, barely a month before the election, those tensions are finally spilling into the presidential race.

On Sunday, at their second debate, Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton both struggled to explain how they would handle the five-year-old war, which President Obama has refused to get drawn into despite a dire humanitarian crisis.

In Mr. Trump’s case, he disavowed the hawkish stance toward Russia of his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, advocating an entirely different set of strategic objectives. In Mrs. Clinton’s case, she threatened to widen a policy split over Syria with the president she served as secretary of state.

Mr. Trump’s response was the more striking one: He countered Mr. Pence’s pledge, made only five days earlier in his debate with Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, to use airstrikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad as a response to Russian provocations.


“He and I haven’t spoken, and I disagree,” Mr. Trump said, not just throwing Mr. Pence under the bus, but rolling it over him once or twice.

Mrs. Clinton did not contradict Mr. Obama’s basic policy. But she reiterated her call for a no-fly zone over northern Syria, a step the president and his senior military advisers have long rejected. Such a move, she argued, would pressure the Russians, with whom Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, tried in vain over seven months to negotiate a cease-fire.

Though Mrs. Clinton did not flesh out her proposal, her wording suggested she might be willing to impose such a zone without Russia’s cooperation. That would be a major break with the administration, analysts said — one that could lead to the United States striking government targets and raise the risk of a clash between Russian and American warplanes.

“That’s a really bold statement,” said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

It was the first time that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump had faced off over Syria at any length in their campaign — a remarkable fact, given that it is arguably the most urgent geopolitical crisis in the world. Their exchange captured the mind-numbing complexity of the conflict, the shrinking number of viable options for dealing with it, and the fast-moving nature of events.

“Between now and the election, a quarter of a million people are going to be starving, and going to be forced to surrender to Assad and the Russians,” Mr. Tabler said. “The next president will have to deal with it in pretty short order.”

By the time Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump is inaugurated, in fact, the besieged city of Aleppo may well have fallen to Mr. Assad and his Russian backers, its exhausted residents may be dead or displaced, and the rebels who holed up there scattered into the hinterland, where analysts believe they would be likely to wage a guerrilla war against the Assad government.

With few good options for protecting the city that do not involve deploying American troops, it made sense for the candidates not to stake out a hard-and-fast position, analysts said. Mrs. Clinton said she would not commit ground troops to such an effort; Mr. Trump, for his part, argued that Aleppo “basically has fallen” already, which is not accurate.

“No one has an easy answer on Aleppo,” said Philip H. Gordon, a former coordinator of Middle East policy in the Obama administration. “But assuming that the mere threat of force or a handful of airstrikes would quickly make it better would be the triumph of hope over experience. If you decide to go that route you had better be prepared to back it up.”

For Mrs. Clinton, there is the added risk of putting daylight between her and Mr. Obama during a campaign in which the president’s support has proved more important than many expected, given his rising approval ratings and popularity with elusive younger voters. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton split with Mr. Obama over providing weapons to the rebels in Syria — a decision the president made after she left the administration.

Mr. Gordon, who now advises the Clinton campaign, said there were other good reasons for Mrs. Clinton not to lay out the details of her strategy.

“Deciding the details of a no-fly zone is not something you do during a campaign,” he said. “You sit in the Situation Room, consult the military, run red teams, and make an assessment.”

Mr. Trump, he noted, does not have experience in the Situation Room to make these judgments. His description of his Syria policy betrayed little preparation and was replete with faulty statements, like the one about Aleppo. To the extent that there was a consistent thread, it was the argument advanced by Mr. Assad and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: that the war is a binary conflict between the Syrian government and Islamic terrorists.

For Mr. Trump, the one and only military objective of American forces in the Syria conflict is to focus on the Islamic State — a position that puts him pretty close to Mr. Obama, who has directed the Pentagon to keep its attention on the group, because it, and not Mr. Assad, pose a direct threat to American interests.

“Right now, Syria is fighting ISIS; we have people that want to fight both at the same time,” Mr. Trump said, using an acronym for the group. “We have to worry about ISIS before we can get too much more involved.”

Without question, Mr. Trump has been consistent: In two interviews with The New York Times, in March and July, he argued that it made little sense to try to unseat Mr. Assad if he is fighting the same enemy the United States is battling. Mr. Pence, who has served a decade on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and received a stream of classified briefings on the many-sided conflict, has taken a more traditional Republican view: Don’t let the Russians dominate a proxy war in a small Mideast nation.

During his debate with Mr. Kaine, Mr. Pence argued that the tragedy in Aleppo was so great that the United States is bound, for humanitarian and strategic reasons, to push back against Mr. Putin. On Monday, he said one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz of ABC News, had mischaracterized his position, though she read aloud his own words.

The difference is more than one of nuance. It goes to the heart of two major issues: whether the United States should intervene in humanitarian crises and how it should deal with Russia.

On the first, Mr. Trump seems clear. While he told The Times that he would consider using American force to prevent a humanitarian tragedy, he came up with no examples of where he might do that. On the second, Mr. Trump has sought at every turn to play down Russia’s influence. He has talked about beginning a new relationship with Mr. Putin and avoided any discussion of pushing back against Mr. Putin’s actions in Syria, or his recent efforts to intimidate former Soviet states that are now part of NATO — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump argued again that there was no evidence Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee or of the emails of prominent Americans — including some Republicans. It was an interesting moment to make the case, 48 hours after the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security publicly blamed Russia, and its leadership, for the actions.

“I don’t know Putin,” Mr. Trump said, trying to put some distance from him. “But I notice, anytime anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians are — she doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia. And the reason they blame Russia because they think they’re trying to tarnish me with Russia.”

Putin's in your Face to Adam Smith..... Guns better than Butter.... Instead of Delivering Assad to the Guillotine , He delivers the most sophisticated Rusky Plane.

Putin's in your Face to Adam Smith..... Guns better than Butter.... Instead of Delivering Assad to the Guillotine , He delivers the most Sophisticated Rusky Plane

The Syrian Air Force has received its first two upgraded Sukhoi Su-24M2 all-weather attack aircraft from Russian armories. According to media reports, they are expected to improve the combat capabilities of Syrian air power in the fight against the terrorists. However, according to experts, Moscow and Damascus may also have a hidden motive.

According to Al-Masdar News, in addition to the two planes already delivered, Syria expects to receive another eight aircraft in the near future. The planes are said to have been retrofitted with new equipment "to enhance their capabilities and improve their combat efficiency," including improved avionics, featuring both GPS and GLONASS, and a new heads-up display. The deliveries are said to be part of a defense order signed back in 2009.

Commenting on the news, Svobodnaya Pressa columnist Anton Mardasov wrote that "at first glance, there's nothing unusual about this news: weakened by years of war, the park of the Syrian Air Force is in need of urgent replenishment. Just in the past month the effort against the Islamists has resulted in the loss of two of its aircraft."

"But what if the logic behind this step lies in more than just the replenishment of the Syrian Air Force?" the journalist asked. "If one places this news into the overall context of what is happening in Syria, one begins to get the impression that the Russian government, in handing these bombers over to Syria, is making a clever move."

"Judge for yourselves," Mardasov suggested: "On July 26, after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke of progress in talks on Syria. In particular, [he talked] of coordination in airstrikes against Daesh (ISIL/ISIS) and the Al-Nusra Front, and a simultaneous halt to the bombing of the 'moderate' insurgents. However, these 'moderates' have not left the front lines and continue to fight Assad's army. If Moscow is on Damascus's side, it has an obligation to help it repel these attacks. It seems that pressure from Washington has forced us to step aside, but what if this is just a formality?"

The heart of the issue, according to the journalist, is that it matters little if the Russian Aerospace Defense Forces are the ones bombing the terrorists, or if it's the Syrian Air Force doing it. "What difference does it make if it's Russian or Syrian pilots at the controls of the Su-24s? The main thing is that the bombs drop on their designated targets. If the Syrians begin using the upgraded bombers, will it be difficult to figure out who blew up another camp of 'moderate' rebels – Russian or Syrian air power? Damascus, unlike Moscow, is not conducting any negotiations with Washington, and consistently calls all armed opposition in Syria 'terrorists'."

Asked to comment on the delivery of the Su-24M2s, military expert Yakov Kedmi, a former high ranking official in the Israeli intelligence services, told Svobodnaya Pressa that the delivery was planned long ago. "After Russia actively got involved in the Syrian conflict, Moscow also simultaneously began activities to restore the Syrian Armed Forces, the Syrian Air Force first and foremost. This included the modernization of the Su-24MK, and their equipment with the SVP-24 special computing subsystem designed to increase bombing precision many times, along with the training of pilots and maintenance personnel."

The decision on the number of planes, according to Kedmi, has to do with the number that the Syrian Air Force is currently capable of absorbing. "Factually," the expert noted, "the Syrian Air Force significantly increased its involvement in the fighting following the withdrawal of Russian aircraft from the Hmeymim Airbase. Syrian pilots began carrying out up to 30 sorties a day, which is a strong showing for this country's Air Force."

"Naturally, closer cooperation between aircraft and armored vehicles, artillery and infantry requires that pilots speak the local language, and are acquainted with the tactics of national units. [Therefore], as I understand it, Russia will continue to supply the Syrian army with arms – both new and upgraded. And this will continue regardless of negotiations with the United States," Kedmi concluded.

For his part, Semyon Bagdasarov, the director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Central Asia, could not rule out Mardasov's suggestion that the delivery of the aircraft was aimed at strengthening the Syrian military's potential, including against the so-called 'moderate' jihadists.

"It's possible that the delivery of the Su-24M2s really is connected with an attempt to circumvent agreements with the United States, even if unlike the Americans, the French, and the British, both Damascus and Moscow have every right to bomb every group they consider terrorists on Syrian territory. Yes, Washington may not like this, but Moscow too isn't exactly thrilled that US Special Forces are deployed in Syrian Kurdistan, and that the head of the US Army's Central Command General Joseph Votel and special envoy to the US president Brett McGurk go there whenever they feel like it."

Finally, for his part, Sergei Balmasov, an expert at the Moscow-based Institute for Middle East Studies, emphasized that Moscow must be careful not to completely ignore Washington's interests in Syria.

"It remains necessary, in one way or another, to coordinate our activity with the Americans, so as not to overstep a 'red line' of sorts. Washington has the capabilities to do us a great deal of harm across the former Soviet Union, as in Ukraine, as well as in Syria. They can increase their deliveries of more advanced weapons systems to the Syrian rebels," for example.

"Additionally," Balmasov noted, "it is important to preserve the possibility of political dialogue with the US, and the Syrian conflict is one of the few topics we can talk about." Ultimately, the analyst noted, fighting against the so-called moderate Syrian opposition "is necessary, but we are forced to try to walk around the lines drawn by Washington." Otherwise, the US may work even harder to step up political and military pressure against both Damascus and Moscow.