Lawmakers angry over the latest chemical weapons attack in Syria turned their fire on the Trump administration Tuesday, and argued that his team had given Syrian President Bashar Assad a pass for such brutality.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the gas attack is “reprehensible” and said it resulted from former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy failures. A State Department spokesperson referred the Washington Examiner to Spicer’s statement, adding that a State Department comment might be forthcoming later in the day.
But a bipartisan pair of lawmakers disagreed with Spicer’s assessment, and suggested that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent hint that Assad might be allowed to remain in power after the end of the civil war “empowered” the embattled ruler to carry out the attack.
“Sadly, the Assad regime is likely feeling empowered right now,” New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs committee, said Tuesday. “This week, the Trump administration moved toward appeasing the butcher in Damascus and accepting how Moscow and Tehran have enabled and protected him. Now that Donald Trump has put the world’s superpower firmly on the sidelines, I fear what may come next for the Syrian people.”
The appeasement charge was a reference to Tillerson’s comment about Assad while traveling in Turkey last week. “I think the status and the longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people,” Tillerson said when a reporter asked if Assad must step down after six years of civil war.
Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., echoed both Spicer and Engel’s blame-casting on Tuesday morning. “We’ve seen this movie before when Barack Obama said we would have a red line, they crossed it and we did nothing,” the Arizona Republican said. “Bashar al Assad and his friends, the Russians, take note of what the Americans say … and I’m sure they took note of what the secretary of state said.”
Another senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, criticized the administration for failing to issue any statement at all on the attack.
“As far as I know, as of 11:40 am eastern time on Tuesday, I am not aware of either a State Department or a White House statement condemning what has occurred in Syria,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
