No one should feel good about Trump's attack on Syria - By Eugene Robinson
The United States has become a combatant in Syria’s horrific civil war. The Trump administration, which intervened with deadly military force, gives no sign of knowing what it’s doing or why.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has absurdly tried to suggest that nothing has changed. He is wrong. Fifty-nine cruise missiles constitute a policy shift. So what is the administration’s strategic vision? What is its desired outcome? How does it get there? And what happens next?
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said Sunday that the administration cannot envision “a peaceful Syria” with dictator Bashar al-Assad still in power. Tillerson went on a different Sunday show to say that Assad’s fate is up to “the Syrian people.” Neither statement had much grounding in the reality of a heartbreakingly brutal war that has killed about 400,000 people and displaced half of Syria’s population.
Who’s going to make Assad leave? “The Syrian people” have been trying to get rid of him for about six years, yet he remains. The Obama administration believed it had at least negotiated the surrender of Assad’s capacity to use chemical weapons, but last week’s sarin attack demonstrates otherwise. There is no political process through which Syrians can express their will. There is only a grinding, multi-sided conflict that has allowed the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, to seize huge swaths of territory.
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