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The key bit comes at 4:30, a few minutes after he talks about working to remove Assad and ISIS at the same time. Old and busted: Two-front wars. The new hotness: Two-front wars within the same country. Marco Rubio made this same lame point about the same Rex Tillerson comment that McCain is thinking of and got called out on it by Tillerson himself this weekend, as Ed mentioned earlier. Tillerson said on March 30th that it was for the Syrian people to decide whether Assad remains in charge (and doubled down on that position yesterday), a notable break from...

"Trump has escalated military operations in Iraq to a degree that has hugely increased civilian deaths in the war against Islamic State militants.... Furthermore, sending in more U.S. forces to fight alongside the opposition (which includes jihadist groups formerly affiliated with al Qaida) will plunge the U.S. deeper into a conflict against Russia. The destabilizing impact of such a move has to be fully contemplated. While the images and videos of children struggling to breathe and survive is sickening, there must be some sober consideration about the realities on the ground in Syria. The truth is hard to come by...

Is Donald Trump a student of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand? Some of Trump’s recent actions suggest that he is, at least intuitively. I am thinking in particular of Talleyrand’s observation that “non-intervention is a metaphysical idea, indistinguishable in practice from intervention.” The question is not whether a state like America is part of the process. It is, by definition. The question is how effective a role it will play. Thursday night, Donald Trump demonstrated his grasp of that truth. In August 2012, Barack Obama had some stern words for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “We have been very clear to the...

With one fell swoop, 59 Tomahwk missiles made it unmistakably clear to the Muslim world and to America's enemies that the rules have changed and that the U.S. would now stand up for its beliefs -- even at the cost of clashing with a power like Russia. On April 7, 2017, the international Trump era kicked off. In one fell swoop, U.S. President Donald Trump erased the last six years of Obama administration feebleness in Syria. Fifty-nine missiles made it unmistakably clear that a new sheriff was in town, that the rules have changed and that the United States wouldn't...

Chemical weapons have limited military utility, a fact known since the end of World War I. Explosives and machine gun bullets were shown to have killed far more people, to say nothing of disease. The use of chemical weapons today provokes international condemnation, if not always action. Those who order their deployment risk being charged with war crimes. So why would Syria's President Bashar Assad use them? Against civilian populations, chemical weapons are instruments of terror – a demonstration that resistance will bring horrific consequences. But indiscriminate mass murder is a consequence of their use, not the objective.

So far, the American public is behind Donald Trump in his action against the Syrian military. As long as he doesn’t get the US any deeper into Syria, Trump’s likely to keep their support. According to a new poll from CBS News this morning, taken over the weekend, fifty-seven percent of respondents approve of the airstrikes, but less than one in five Americans want to see any escalation that would involve putting boots on the ground: President Trump’s overall approval rating edged up, though most respondents voice unease about his approach to Syria going forward, and say Congress must authorize...

...In recent months, the Russians have had some success in persuading a wide range of parties with interests in the Syrian conflict to join talks in the Kazakhstan capital, Astana. The Americans were not involved. Their earlier, bilateral attempts with Russia to negotiate a ceasefire had failed and, with Barack Obama appearing to give up on Syria diplomacy, perhaps anticipated Trump’s stated view that the US had no vital interest to defend in Syria. In the event, the US absence may actually have helped things along. It meant that Turkey and Iran had to concentrate on the task in hand...

Full Title: Syria crisis: Russia raises prospect of war if it is given G7 ultimatum as it mocks Boris Johnson's no-show Russia and Iran has threatened military retaliation against the US, accusing Donald Trump of crossing “red lines” by ordering a cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base. The two military allies of Syria said the US bombardment had violated international law and, in a statement, added: “From now on we will respond with force.” Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, is understood to be working on a proposal from the G7 group of nations which will demand that Vladimir Putin...

As I blogged yesterday, the claim that Assad ordered a chemical attack on his own people in the past week doesn’t pass my sniff test. For Assad to order a gas attack now – while his side is finally winning – he would have to be willing to risk his life and his regime for no real military advantage. I’m not buying that. But let’s say the world believes Assad or a rogue general under his command gassed his own people. What’s an American President to do? If Trump does nothing, he appears weak, and it invites mischief from other...

First Daughter Ivanka Trump’s intervention may have tipped the balance in her father’s decision to ­order Friday’s strike on a Syrian air base.

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) made a trip to northern Syria to visit U.S. military forces and Kurdish fighters and to discuss the campaign for defeating the Islamic State (ISIS), his office said on February 22.The news of McCain’s trip to Syria was broken by the Wall Street Journal in a February 22 report that cited unnamed officials.Another report from CNN the next day quoted Julie Tarallo, a spokeswoman for McCain, who said he made the official but unannounced visit to northern Syria as the military’s campaign to take ISIS’ de facto capital in Raqqa unfolds.“Senator McCain traveled to northern Syria...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed in on the United States' airstrikes in Syria Friday, saying it was hypocritical to lament the loss of innocent Syrian children in chemical attacks while simultaneously forbidding those those children from entering the United States. Clinton criticized President Donald Trump's attempts to ban Syrian refugees from the U.S. She also emphasized the attacks need to be accompanied by a plan to end Syria's civil war, which the country has been embroiled in since 2011, when she was Secretary of State....

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says there's no "hard evidence" of Russian involvement in Syria's chemical bomb attack, but charges Moscow's been "incompetent" and "out-maneuvered" by Bashar al-Assad. In an interview with ABC News' "This Week" aired Sunday, Tillerson said in his visit to Russia this week, he'll call upon Moscow "to fulfill the obligation it made to the international community when it agreed to be the guarantor of the elimination of the chemical weapons." "Why Russia has not been able to achieve that is unclear to me," he said. "I don't draw conclusions of complicity at all. But clearly,...

What a difference 24 hours and 59 Tomahawk missiles can make. Yesterday if you mentioned the words "Russia and Trump," you were probably having a conversation about the enduring allegations that the Russians somehow colluded with the Trump campaign and that they somehow tipped the 2016 election. But now those words are likely a part of a conversation about how President Donald Trump broke with Russia in his decision to respond to the alleged Syrian nerve gas assault on its own people with Thursday night's missile strike. That's a dramatic flipping of the script in Washington, Moscow, and beyond. It's...

Then why did he do it? He used nerve gas to block a peace process agreed by the US and Russia that would turn Syria into cantons and reduce Alawite control only to those districts where the Alawite minority dominates.

The drums of war are continuing to beat with UN Ambassador Nikki Haley coming out and basically saying the Trump administration is against Syrian president Assad staying in power. Haley said, “regime change is something that we think is going to happen.” “There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime,” Haley said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” set to air Sunday. “If you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government...

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in an interview airing Sunday on CNN that until Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is out of power, she doesn't see a political solution to the conflict in Syria. "There's not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime," Haley told "State of the Union" anchor Jake Tapper. "It just -- if you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it's going to be hard to see a government that's peaceful and stable with Assad."

Beirut: Warplanes on Saturday struck the Syrian town where a chemical attack had killed scores of people earlier this week, as Turkey warned that a retaliatory US missile strike on a Syrian air base would only be "cosmetic" if greater efforts are not made to remove President Bashar Assad from power. The airstrikes on the opposition-held northern town of Khan Sheikhoun, where 87 people were killed in the chemical attack earlier this week, killed a woman and wounded her son, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees, an activist collective. Elsewhere in Syria,...

On Tuesday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime launched a chemical weapon attack against his own people—many of whom were sleeping. Over 70 men, women, and many small children were killed by the nerve agent Sarin, which generally causes agonizing asphyxiation and death. According to CNN, Assad denied he had used the nerve agent on his own people, insisting, instead, that a routine bombing mission hit a rebel-operated nerve gas “factory.” Assad employed a similar excuse after a 2013 Sarin gas attack, arguing anyone could make Sarin, which he called the “kitchen gas.” Needless to say, chemical weapons experts find this...

New airstrikes have targeted a town in northwest Syria that was hit by a deadly chemical attack earlier this week, activists said. It wasn't immediately clear who conducted the strikes on Khan Sheikhoun, which hit on Friday and Saturday, though only Russian and Syrian regime aircraft have been bombing that area of rebel-held Idlib province.