Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the
Syrian civil war? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling.
Last week, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s
campaign to recapture the last stronghold of the rebellion, Idlib province: “If
it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get very, very angry. And the United
States is going to get very angry, too.”
In a front-page story Monday, “Assad is Planning Chlorine
Attack, U.S. Says,” The Wall Street Journal reports that, during a recent
meeting, “President Trump threatened to conduct a massive attack against Mr.
Assad if he carries out a massacre in Idlib.”
Idlib contains three million civilians and refugees and 70,000
rebels, 10,000 of whom are al-Qaida.
Friday, The Washington Post reported that Trump is changing U.S.
policy. America will not be leaving Syria any time soon.
The 2,200 U.S. troops in Syria will remain until we see “the
exit of all Iranian military and proxy forces and the establishment of a
stable, non-threatening government acceptable to all Syrians.”
“We are not in a hurry to go,” said James Jeffrey, the retired
Foreign Service officer brought back to handle the Syria account. “The new
policy is we’re no longer pulling out by the end of the year.”
President Obama had a red line against Syria’s use of poison
gas, which Trump enforced with bombing runs. Now we have a new red line. Said
Jeffrey, the U.S. “will not tolerate an attack. Period.”
In an editorial Friday, the Post goaded Trump, calling his
response to Assad’s ruthless recapture of his country “pathetically weak.” To
stand by and let the Syrian army annihilate the rebels in Idlib, said the Post,
would be “another damaging abdication of U.S. leadership.”
What Trump seems to be signaling, the Post demanding, and
Jeffrey suggesting, is that, rather than allow a bloody battle for the
recapture of Idlib province to play out, the United States should engage
Russian and Syrian forces militarily and force them to back off.
On Friday, near the U.S. garrison at Tanf in southern Syria,
close to Iraq, U.S. Marines conducted a live-fire exercise. Purpose: Warn
Russian forces to stay away. The Americans have declared a 35-mile zone around
Tanf off-limits. The Marine exercise followed a Russian notification, and U.S.
rejection, of a plan to enter the zone in pursuit of “terrorists.”
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Is Trump ready to order U.S. action against Russian and Syrian
forces if Assad gives his army the green light to take Idlib? For the bombing
of Idlib has already begun.
What makes this more than an academic exercise is that Vladimir
Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, at a meeting in Tehran last Friday,
told President Erdogan of Turkey that the reconquest of Idlib is going forward.
Erdogan fears that the Syrian army’s recapture of Idlib would
send hundreds of thousands more refugees streaming to his border.
Turkey already hosts millions of refugees from Syria’s civil
war.
Yet the massing of the Syrian army near Idlib and the Russian and
Syrian bombing now begun suggest that the Assad-Putin-Rouhani coalition has
decided to accept the risk of a clash with the Americans in order to bring an
end to the rebellion. If so, this puts the ball in America’s court.
Words and warnings aside, is Trump prepared to take us into the
Syrian civil war against the forces who, absent our intervention, will have won
the war? When did Congress authorize a new war?
What vital U.S. interest is imperiled in Idlib, or in ensuring
that all Iranian forces and Shiite allies are removed, or that a
“non-threatening government acceptable to all Syrians and the international
community” is established in Damascus?
With these conditions required before our departure, we could be
there for eternity.
The Syrian civil war is arguably the worst humanitarian disaster
of the decade. The sooner it is ended the better. But Assad, Russia and Iran
did not start this war. Nor have Syria, Russia or Iran sought a clash with U.S.
forces whose mission, we were repeatedly assured, was to crush ISIS and go
home.
Trump has struck Syria twice for its use of poison gas, and U.S.
officials told the Journal that Assad has now approved the use of chlorine on
the rebels in Idlib. Moscow, however, is charging that a false-flag operation
to unleash chlorine on civilians in Idlib is being prepared to trigger and
justify U.S. intervention.
Many in this Russophobic city would welcome a confrontation with
Putin’s Russia, even more a U.S. war on Iran. But that is the opposite of what
candidate Trump promised.
It would represent a triumph of the never-Trumpers and President
Trump’s relinquishing of his foreign policy to the interventionists and
neoconservatives.