Free Republic

It appears that Mike Cernovich, who earlier this week wrote that Trump's national security advisor, Gen. H.R.McMaster, was planning on sending as many as 150,000 troops to Syria, may have been right again. According to Bloomberg commentator Eli Lake, who has now made a habit of confirming Cernovich "conspiracy theories" (he did so previously with the Susan Rice scoop), Trump may be on the verge of escalating the proxy war in Syria by sending anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 troops on the ground, and - if Cernovich is indeed correct - as much as three times more. Per Lake, after...

Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain released a joint statement on Tuesday urging President Donald Trump to bolster ground efforts in Syria. "As part of a broader strategy, we urge the President to take greater military action to achieve our objectives, including grounding the Syrian air force and establishing safe havens inside Syria to protect Syrians,” the statement reads. “There will never be a diplomatic solution as long as Assad dominates the battlefield,” according to McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, and Graham, who chairs an appropriations subcommittee.

(CNSNews.com) – At a news conference with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Thursday, Russia’s foreign minister said that ousting Bashar al-Assad as Syria’s dictator is something the Russians will not pursue, because it won’t end well. “A successful ouster of a dictator is, for me, very hard to remember. If you have any examples, I’d be glad if you could share them with me,” Lavrov told the news conference. Lavrov said the Russians want Syria’s government to be “democratic” and “secular.” All ethnic groups should feel protected and share power. He said that requires a new constitution. And...

The Syrian Arab Armed Forces are receiving 10 examples of the Sukhoi Su-24M2 'Fencer-D' attack aircraft from Russia, augmenting an unknown number of existing 'Fencers'. Jon Lake reports. Before the on-going deliveries began, Syria had received 22 Su-24s in total. Some 20 downgraded Su-24MK export versions were delivered from the Soviet Union in 1990, and these were augmented in the mid-1990s by single examples of the Su-24MK and the Su-24MR reconnaissance aircraft, which were donated by Libya after Syria provided support for Libya’s own ‘Fencer’ fleet. The aircraft are operated by 819 squadron at T4 (Tyas) Airbase in Central Syria,...

In a particularly divisive interview Wednesday night on “Tucker Carlson Live,” conservative pundit and provocateur Ann Coulter shared her opinion on the escalating situation in Syria: “It's very hard to explain the Syrian attack, it's certainly not a vital national security interest, we generally don't at least conservatives don't go rushing around the world for humanitarian reasons. For that region of the world, Assad is one of the better leaders, there are probably only one or two better than him.” Coulter then claimed that the Syrian dictator wasn't quite “a Saddam Hussein murderous thug,” saying that Assad helped the U.S....

In ordering Friday’s strike on a Syrian airbase, President Donald J. Trump sent the U.S. military into combat without Congress’s blessing. He has punished the Assad regime for its use of sarin nerve gas on its own people and only begun to correct the mistakes the Obama administration made when it allowed the Syrian civil war to metastasize into a conflict that is destabilizing the Middle East. For its troubles, however, the Trump administration has come under fire from his conservative flank. Libertarian senator Rand Paul demands that Trump seek congressional authorization, while distinguished conservative law professor Mike Paulsen and...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called claims that he used deadly sarin gas on his people a “100 percent fabrication” and insisted the US worked “hand-in-glove” with terrorists to carry out the attacks, he said in an interview published Thursday. The Syrian strongman said he couldn’t have unleashed a poison gas strike on innocent civilians because the country has gotten rid of its chemical weapons arsenal. “Definitely, 100 percent for us. It’s fabrication. We don’t have an arsenal. We’re not going to use it,” he told Agence France-Presse. He said the attack was contrived by the US so it could launch...

Update 2:  The Pentgaon has admitted to mistakenly killing 18 Syrians in an airstrike on April 11th... U.S.-LED COALITION AIR STRIKE IN SYRIA MISTAKENLY KILLED 18 SYRIAN DEMOCRATIC FORCES PERSONNEL ON APRIL 11 -PENTAGON - CENTCOM says strike near Taqbah accidentally killed 18 Syrian Democratic Forces fighters on April 11. Had been identified as ISIS position. pic.twitter.com/vUXC8ueek7— Erin Cunningham (@erinmcunningham) April 13, 2017   Update 1: Russia has reportedly dispatched drones to the area to confirm Syria's reports. The Russian military said that it has no information confirming the reports of death as a result of the US-led coalition's...

The US military and intelligence community has intercepted communications featuring Syrian military and chemical experts talking about preparations for the sarin attack in Idlib last week, a senior US official tells CNN.

A professor who challenged the 2013 claims of a chemical attack in Syria is now questioning the Trump administration’s narrative blaming the Assad government for the April 4 attack in the Idlib province town of Khan Shaykhun. On Tuesday, the White House released a declassified intelligence brief accusing Syrian President Bashar Assad of ordering and organizing the attack, in which Syrian planes allegedly dropped chemical ordnance on civilians in the rebel-held town. The report “contains absolutely no evidence that this attack was the result of a munition being dropped from an aircraft,” wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Theodore...

Cruz, up for reelection in 2018, is back home in Texas on a “two-week listening tour” with voters. In an interview with NBC 5 reporter Julie Fine, he explained the problem with pursuing regime change in Syria without a clear strategy or end game. "We are trapped between impossible options. On one hand, Bashar al-Assad is a monster. He has repeatedly used chemical weapons against his own citizens, against innocent men women and children. He is a bad, bad guy,” Cruz said. [cut] “But on the other hand, the opposition – many of the rebels fighting against him – are...

US President Donald Trump gave the order to strike Syria with dozens of cruise missiles “during dessert” with visiting Chinese leader Xi Jinping, he said in an interview aired Wednesday. “We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it,” Trump told the Fox Business television network. “And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded, what do you do?” Trump said. “And we made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on...

Marie Harf, a Fox News contributor and former spokeswoman for Secretary of State John Kerry, scrambled on Wednesday to defend the Obama-era Syria deal from 2013, admitting it was not "perfect." Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked Harf whether she agreed with President Trump's decision to order a military strike against Syria last week. "I did. I thought it was a good response to President Assad's use of chemical weapons," Harf said. "What I'm more focused on now quite frankly is the strategy going forward and what happens next in Syria." Harf said that Congress did not give the Obama...

War is like crack for presidents. It confers instant gravitas, catapulting them to respectability, bypassing all station stops. They get to make macho pronouncements on a topic where every utterance is seen as august. On the other hand, Trump's Syrian misadventure is immoral, violates every promise he ran on and could sink his presidency. Left to his own devices, uncontaminated by Washington group-think, Trump gets it right. Back in 2013, when President Obama was being egged on to attack Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack far more sweeping than this latest one, Trump tweeted:...

Putin propaganda hits first, claiming US plans heinous attacks on Syria Typical of leftist ideologues and regime spinmasters, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin threw the first punch by making a completely unsubstantiated claim the United States is readying to launch an attack on the south side of Damascus. He then said that the United States will use chemical weapons against Syrian citizens and lay the blame at the feet of Bashar al-Assad.

President Trump spoke with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in a wide-ranging interview that aired Wednesday morning, touching on topics like Syria and health care. In the segment, he told Bartiromo the back-story to the missile strike launched last week at a Syrian airfield in retaliation for a chemical attack that killed dozens of Syrian civilians, for which the White House has blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while the mission was executed, and he told Bartiromo about the moment he informed Xi that he had sent 59...

By ordering last week’s Tomahawk strike on a Syrian airbase, the president usurped Congress’s exclusive power to declare war. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. Make no mistake: President Trump’s airstrikes against Syria were unconstitutional. Military action may well have been justified from a moral standpoint. The Assad regime’s war on its own people and its use of chemical weapons required a response, arguably including a retaliatory strike to deter further such attacks. Inaction, as much as action, has profound human consequences. There is a case to be made that America should have taken military action against...

Amid rising complaints that his aides are saying different things about Syria and that his policy is confusing, President Trump emphatically cleared the air Tuesday. “We’re not going into Syria,” he told me in an exclusive interview. “Our policy is the same, it hasn’t changed. We’re not going into Syria.” The president, speaking by phone, called Syrian president Bashar al-Assad a “butcher” and a “barbarian” for using sarin gas on his own people, but said last week’s successful missile strike on an air base there was not the start of a campaign to oust the dictator. “Our big mission is...

"Our U.S. Army contacts in the area have told us...There was no Syrian “chemical weapons attack.” Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died. This is what the Russians and Syrians have been saying and – more important –what they appear to believe happened."

President Donald Trump's 33-year-old son Eric told Britain's The Daily Telegraph that his sister Ivanka, rather than her husband Jared Kushner, convinced the U.S. head of state to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles in retaliation for a sarin gas attack last week. "Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I'm sure she said 'listen, this is horrible stuff.' My father will act in times like that," Eric Trump told The Telegraph in an interview at the Trump Turnberry golf resort in Ayrshire, Scotland. "He also confirmed that President Trump's decision to bomb a Syrian airbase ... was...