Over the past week, the Trump administration has radically shifted its stance on the war in Syria. As such, it’s not surprising that officials are having some trouble articulating the new stance. Still, the administration has done a remarkably bad job in coherently explaining why it went from supporting Bashar al-Assad to bombing him last week.
Donald Trump has expressed his dismay at the footage of children killed in the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, and perhaps was influenced by the outrage of his daughter, Ivanka. That’s certainly fair: the attack was enraging, but hardly unprecedented from this leader in this conflict. Assad did not suddenly become a killer of children last week. He already was at the time Trump was touting him as a potential ally to fight ISIS.
Then, on Tuesday, spokesman Sean Spicer quadrupled down on the moral argument, suggesting that not only did the chemical attack demonstrate Assad’s evil, it showed that he was more even than Hitler. (Unfortunately for Spicer’s argument, he forgot perhaps the one crime Hitler is most famous for.)
What makes this all the more frustrating is that there should be a relatively coherent argument for the Trump administration’s policy shift, and it is not that we just now learned that Assad is a bad guy. That explanation would go something like this:
“In 2013, the U.S. decided not to launch airstrikes against the Syrian government because of a Russian-brokered deal under which Assad agreed to give up his chemical weapons. The previous Trump administration stance, that it was open to Assad remaining in power, was based on the assumption that he was complying with that agreement. The attack last week showed that Syria is in violation of the agreement and that Russia had failed to hold the regime accountable. As such, the U.S. was forced to take military action to uphold international law.”
That explanation isn’t perfect. (For one thing, last week wasn’t the first time since the deal that Assad has been accused of using chemical weapons.) But it would make basic logical sense, clarify the administration’s position, and not commit the U.S. to any additional military action as long as Assad did not use chemical weapons again. (Adding to the confusion, on Monday Spicer suggested that the use of barrel bombs might be an additional red line.)
I suspect that the problem with this argument from the Trump administration’s point of view is that it suggests continuity with the Obama administration policy. Trump would essentially be acting to enforce a deal agreed to by predecessor. Recall that this administration’s first impulse, after the Khan Shaykhun attack, was to blame Obama for not enforcing his “red line” the first time, even though Trump had actually discouraged his predecessor from doing so at the time.
As it currently stands, the administration needs to explain why the U.S. should have attacked Assad in 2013, should have partnered with him in 2016, and also was right to attack him in 2017. This is hard to do, given that Assad’s behavior—in moral or strategic terms—hasn’t changed that much over this period. This is how we ended up with Spicer’s strange remarks about “Holocaust centers.” It may also draw us ever deeper into the war in Syria.
