Updated at 10:04 a.m.
President Trump on Saturday praised the “perfectly executed” strikes against Syria, which were carried out the previous night by the U.S, the United Kingdom, and France in response to a deadly chemical weapons attack.
“A perfectly executed strike last night,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished.”
“So proud of our great Military which will soon be, after the spending of billions of fully approved dollars, the finest that our Country has ever had. There won’t be anything, or anyone, even close!” he added in another tweet,” he wrote.
A perfectly executed strike last night. Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2018
So proud of our great Military which will soon be, after the spending of billions of fully approved dollars, the finest that our Country has ever had. There won’t be anything, or anyone, even close!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2018
Trump announced on Friday that he had ordered the U.S. military to launch a “precision strike” against Syria, directed at chemical weapons production facilities. “A short time ago, I ordered the United States Armed Forces to launch precision strikes on targets associated with the chemical weapons,” Trump said Friday at the White House.
Trump said Assad’s use of chemical weapons are the “crimes of a monster,” he added that the U.S. and its allies must ensure an end to the use of these weapons.
U.S., British, and French forces also struck three Syrian facilities that officials believe enabled the use of chemical weapons.
Echoing Trump’s tweet, a Pentagon spokeswoman said Saturday morning that the coalition strike was successful and all the missiles hit their targets.
“I can assure you we took every measure and precaution to strike only what we targeted … and we successfully hit every target,” chief spokesperson Dana White told reporters. “We do not seek conflict in Syria, but we cannot allow such grievous violations of international law.”
In addition the Pentagon said Syria’s efforts to shoot down allied planes and missiles was total ineffective.
Trump’s used of the line “Mission Accomplished!” was met with blow back on Twitter. Seeing parallels to former President George W. Bush’s 2003 speech on Iraq, Ari Fleischer, Bush’s former press secretary, said, “Um…I would have recommended ending this tweet with not those two words.”
The line is one that haunts the Bush legacy to this day. In a televised speech in 2003, Bush spoke about how Operation Iraqi Freedom was “a job well done.”
“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush said aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Above him while he spoke was a banner that read, “Mission Accomplished” in all capital letters.
Despite the celebratory tone, conflict in Iraq waged on, taking the lives of thousands more U.S. troops and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis over another eight years.
“Clearly, putting a ‘mission accomplished’ on an aircraft carrier was a mistake,” Bush admitted in his final press conference as president. “It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently but, nevertheless, it conveyed a different message.”
Daniel Chaitin and Jamie McIntyre contributed to this report.
