As pressure builds on the Trump administration to articulate a clear strategy for U.S. involvement in Syria, White House officials have attempted to straddle the line between supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad's removal and opposing the commitment of American military forces to his ouster.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and other administration officials
have each tried their hand at explaining the new U.S. posture toward Syria in the four days since President Trump ordered a missile strike on an airfield controlled by the Assad regime.
Some have struggled to justify Trump's newly aggressive footing in the context of his past insistence that
the U.S. should not wander into other countries' conflicts in general, and should avoid the Syrian civil war in particular. The occasionally tongue-tied Spicer opened up a fresh wound for the White House when he invoked Adolf Hitler's use of chemical agents in Nazi concentration camps during an unsuccessful attempt to explain the thinking behind Trump's response to the Assad regime's chemical attack.
Administration officials have consistently argued that Assad does not have a future as the ruler of Syria. But they have expressed
vague and sometimes conflicting views on whether the U.S. should play a direct role in his removal and whether regime change has supplanted defeating the Islamic State as America's primary goal in Syria.
Trump protested his predecessors' support for regime change during the presidential campaign, and
his promise to spare Americans from another protracted conflict was appealing to Republicans who had grown disillusioned with the Bush doctrine.
His administration's military strike against the Assad regime and frequent talk of Assad's ouster has
raised suspicions that he won't heed the lessons of Clinton, Bush and Obama when it comes to Syria. And while his team has tried to thread the needle on a policy that somehow supports neither Assad nor his forced removal,
Trump will soon face more questions about how he plans to avoid the mistakes that stained his predecessors' legacies.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/white-house-walks-thin-line-on-support-for-syrian-regime-change/article/2620056
