President Trump’s team “is determined” to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad for the latest use of chemical weapons in the country’s ongoing civil war, a top American diplomat said Monday.
“We have reached the moment when the world must see justice done,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council. “History will record this as the moment when the Security Council either discharged its duty or demonstrated its utter and complete failure to protect the people of Syria. Either way, the United States will respond.”
With Haley’s remarks, the Trump administration seemed to inch closer to a promise to carry out some form of military strike against the Assad regime, after humanitarian monitors reported that hundreds of civilians were targeted in a chemical weapons attack Saturday. A final decision will be made this week, Trump told reporters earlier Monday, even as Russia defended Assad from the allegations and warned against any attack on its ally.
“[The use of] armed force under mendacious pretexts against Syria — where at the request of the legitimate government of the country, Russian troops have been deployed — could lead to grave repercussions,” Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia said during the emergency Security Council meeting. “We call upon western politicians to scale down their hawkish rhetoric, to meaningfully consider possible repercussions. and to cease the reckless spillover of threats to global security.”
Haley cited those Russian forces, however, to disqualify Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government as an arbiter of the crisis in Syria.
“The Russian regime, whose hands are all covered in the blood of Syrian children, cannot be ashamed by pictures of its victims,” she said during the meeting. “What’s the point of trying to shame such people? After all, no civilized government would have anything to do with Assad’s murderous regime. Pictures of dead children mean little to governments like Russia, who expend their own resources to prop up Assad. And this council, which saw these pictures last year, has failed to act because Russia has stood in its way every single time.”
She added that a failure to retaliate against Assad would inaugurate the return of chemical weapons to military arsenals around the world.
“The United States is determined to see the monster who dropped chemical weapons on the Syrian people held to account,” Haley said. “We are on the edge of a dangerous precipice. The great evil of chemical weapons use, that once unified the world in opposition, is on the verge of becoming the new normal. The international community must not let this happen.”
