The NPR Politics Podcast - US Strikes Syria

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

The question now is what comes next. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, congressional reporter Geoff Bennett, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, here to talk about the missile strikes President Trump ordered Thursday night against a Syrian airbase. We're taping this at 2.12 on Friday, and we realize that things may change by the time you listen. Rest assured, we will be back in your feed next week to catch you up on the weekend's developments. So here's what President Trump said last night. Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death

for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror. Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. And the big question, of course, is what happens next? from where the chemical attack was launched. And the big question, of course, is what happens next. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Jeff Bennett. I also cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor.

A lot to talk about, and let's just start with the basic facts. This was a strike on an airbase that U.S. officials say is where the recent apparent chemical attacks against Syrian civilians originated from. 59 Tomahawk missiles hit between 3 and 4 a.m. local time Friday morning. Domenico, what else do we know at this point? Well, those missiles were fired from two destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean against an airbase in Syria that the U.S. says is where originated the planes that wound up launching the chemical attack with the chemical weapons that were apparently used. The missiles targeted aircraft, aircraft shelters, ammunition, air defense systems, and radars. U.S. officials said planners did everything possible to avoid

civilian casualties and are still doing battle damage assessments to determine the exact results of the raid. And, you know, this is a situation where President Trump saw something that horrified him, that horrified the rest of the world. He said he wanted to take action. He asked his military advisors for a range of options, and he made a quick decision all in the course of just a few days. It was a swift, forceful response to something that was terrible. Everybody who saw this was outraged by it. It was something that President Obama, frankly, was criticized for

years ago for not acting. But I think in terms of this action in this moment versus what comes next, the congressional reaction that we're going to get into tells a lot because there's basically bipartisan approval of what he did Thursday night. But it really splinters after lot because there's basically bipartisan approval of what he did Thursday night. But it really splinters after that because there are a lot of questions of what do you do next? What is the plan? Right. That's the key thing. Democrats and Republicans say that they support the move. But if it goes any further or if there's a wider action, that's where democratic reluctance comes in. One of the questions we were sorting through in the hours after this attack was whether or not the U.S. notified Russia. U.S. officials say they did, in fact, do that.

Why does that matter? The thing is here that Russia has key leverage over Assad and Syria. There are lots of Russian tanks, military personnel, aircraft in Syria. So the United States wanted to give Russia at least a heads up to be able to say, get out of the way before they went in to bomb there. Because the last thing the United States wants to do is get into a shooting war or some kind of conflict with Russia. And we saw today the Russian reaction pretty hot against the United States. There was a line that they had set up to de-conflict. In other words,

if the United States was going to take an action where there could be Russian troops or vice versa, that they could warn each other. That's what they did. It's not like President Trump called up Vladimir Putin and said, I'm doing this. It's that they have this open line that now the Russians say they're cutting off. Okay. So a lot of reaction in our realm of the world as well, the political realm of the world. And Jeff, you have been tracking this on Capitol Hill since the attack itself. A lot of different areas of response that are worth talking through. So let's go one at a time. What's the response been to the attack itself? Well, lawmakers in both parties have been largely supportive of the strikes. Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, said he, quote, very much approved of what the president did.

But you're also hearing praise, thinly veiled praise, I guess, from left-leaning Democrats and party leaders, including Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren. They've also signaled support for Trump's actions, in many ways giving the president political cover. I mean, Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor, it's the right thing to do. Making sure that Assad knows when he commits such despicable atrocities, he will pay a price is the right thing to do. There is this element that we are seeing from some Democrats, including people like Tammy Duckworth, the Democrat from Illinois, and Chris Murphy, the Democrat from Connecticut, that if Trump really cared about Syrian children, he wouldn't

have a ban that prevents them from coming into the U.S. And there was this statement that Chris Murphy released where he said, a solitary airstrike exposes the immoral hypocrisy of this administration's policy in the Middle East. Yeah, I think let's hold off on that conversation later, because I think that's a big part of the questions we have about how President Trump kind of came to this decision and what happens next. But in terms of what people are saying on the Hill, so by and large, generally bipartisan agreement that this isolated event was the right thing to do. But it kind of scatters after that. And one big question is, did Trump have authority to do this? And would there need to be some sort of

congressional approval for additional action? That's right. I mean, to hear some members of Congress tell it, President Trump's decision to launch this missile strike is illegal, because Congress is the only branch of government that can authorize war. And President Trump, like President Obama before him, has launched airstrikes against ISIS targets using as a legal justification this 2001 war authorization that Congress passed after the September 11th attacks. But lawmakers are split over whether that justification covers attacks against the Assad government. And there is this notion that we've heard from Democrats and some Republicans, particularly the libertarian Rand Paul, that as this strategy develops, if this is more than just a one-off thing, the president will need to consult Congress. Yeah. And that's the big point, right? I mean, because there's support for limited engagement. Democrats, even reluctantly, Democrats came out and said that they were at least supportive at this point of what President Trump wanted to do.

But everyone's kind of confused as to what the strategy is. If there is a strategy, what does this mean? Because it's very difficult to square Donald Trump's America First policy, his Syrian refugee ban. You know, he seems to have been moved by these images, as he called it, of beautiful babies that were subject to nerve damage, apparently, by what had happened. And because he was able to see that on cable news, he seemed moved by it. He wasn't moved by it in 2012, moved by it this time around. If they were to take broader action, as Jeff pointed out, they're going to need broader congressional approval. One more thing on Congress before we get into all of that. It's worth pointed out, they're going to need broader congressional approval. of events when President Obama made that threat about chemical weapons in Syria and ended up not doing any sort of attacks was that he asked Congress to pass an authorization and Congress

didn't have the votes to do that. There wasn't the will in Congress at that point in time. I mean, how much has changed between now and then? Well, because they felt burned because of the unpopular Iraq war. And there was a great deal of animus for President Obama himself. But you have to imagine that if Trump went to a Republican Congress and asked for a broad authorization of military force, I would expect that Congress, by and large, would be willing to give it to him. I don't know if there are enough hawks in the party alone to support that. And of course, there are people who, you know, members of Congress who want him to articulate a clear strategy. But I do think the tides have turned significantly in the president's favor,

at least politically, as it relates to this. Domenico, you talked about all the big questions and how this kind of veers from a lot of what Trump has been saying for a while. And I think that's what all of us are trying to figure out. So let's tee this up and listen to some sound from the last year or so to make sense of this before we try and hash this out. So two big picture questions, I think, that we're all working through. How did this happen? How did this happen so quickly? What comes next? So if you go back to the beginning, what's really remarkable here is how this sort of intervention is something that both President Trump and key members of his administration had shown zero interest in. Even looking past Trump's past statements on Syria, a lot of his 2013 tweets have been floating around. Let's just listen to what he said earlier this week. I'm not and I don't want to be the president of the world. I'm the president of the United States.

And from now on, it's going to be America first. And on Syria, Rex Tillerson, the secretary of State, said this just a few days ago. I think the status and the longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people. And then suddenly yesterday. Assad's role in the future is uncertain clearly. And with the acts that he has taken, it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people. And of course, during the campaign, a common thing that Trump said was that, you know, if Hillary Clinton is elected, she's going to want to have a shooting war in Syria and that could lead to World War III. With her plan, you'll end up in World War III with Syria. Steve, you're going to end up in World War III over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton. She's incompetent.

So how did this all change so quickly? You know, it's like the world began when Trump became president. You know, like none of the stuff that Assad had done in the past that had already developed his character that Trump didn't appear offended by back then only started January 20th, you know, because in 2012, when Assad pulled this chemical attack and President Obama didn't act on his red line, it was seen as maybe Obama's weakest moment when it came to foreign policy because he didn't act. Donald Trump, when he was a private citizen, just tweeted out then and said, don't go into Syria. You need congressional approval to go into Syria. It's not worth the cost. All of those same things that were happening to Syrians with the chemical attack then that happened the other day were happening back then.

Jeff? Yeah, there are a couple of things really that I think are in the mix here. One, it had to have entered into his calculations that if he were to do nothing, he would have ended up looking like Barack Obama. So the need to appear different and to have a force of strength, I think, was a strong motivator. Two, because this president has been in trouble politically for the past few weeks or months, this was also a distraction. Not to sound cynical, but I do think that is certainly the case. But, you know, military analysts, military folks will tell you that the first strike is always the

easiest one. Coming up with a strategy, military folks will tell you that the first strike is always the easiest one. Coming up with a strategy, coming up with a policy that informs that strategy is a much heavier lift. So, you know, as we've been talking about, we're all waiting to see what comes next, if anything, as it relates to the president's approach to Syria. I think the key thing here is the other day, President Trump said, I have responsibility. I now have responsibility and I will have that responsibility and carry it very proudly. I will tell you that it is now my responsibility. It was a great opportunity. And he realized the weight of this and the decision he would have to make. I think the confusion comes in for a lot of people because Hillary Clinton probably would

have taken the same action. She would have because actually, I think just in the last 24 hours, she advocated this exact approach. I really believe that we should have and still should take out his airfields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them. Now, that's not surprising at all that hours later, actually, President Trump wound up taking the same action. But it wasn't surprising from Hillary Clinton because this is what she laid out during the campaign. She actually called to go further. She called for no-fly zones. We know that when she was secretary of state that she wanted tougher action to arm the Syrian rebels that were in a stronger position back then and that President

Obama was cautious about and didn't want to do because he maybe was overlearning the lessons of George W. Bush and not wanting to nation build and get bogged down in a country when there wasn't a big multilateral effort to help in that country. So you're seeing President Trump now try to make this move. But a lot of people confuse about what would be coming next and why he made this decision when it really runs contrary to some of what he had talked about during the campaign and how he wanted to be unpredictable. Jeff, I know you've got to hop off the line in about a minute or so because you're on deadline. But in terms of what's next, do we have a sense of what comes next in Congress, other than just people like us asking congressmen what they think about this

whole thing? Well, certainly, as the strategy takes shape, members of Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, want to have some say in it. I think the question that was on the minds of many members that we spoke to today was, have we seen President Trump's red line, the use of chemical weapons? He's already taken an action. Does he repeat it every time Assad uses weapons or some sort of brute force on his own people? The fact that President Obama articulated a red line and then didn't follow up, I mean, that was the essence of the policy failure in that regard. So I think on those two issues, the strategy and then whether he consults Congress or what we're waiting to see next.

And I think one of the tricky dynamics, and again, we've said this before, is that, you know, this is not a good guys, bad guys scenario, by and large, when it comes to all the players in Syria. You know, if we went down a line where the United States was actively pushing for regime change with Bashar al-Assad, like it seems like ISIS would actually be the people who would benefit from that the most. And that's clearly not what the United States wants. So it's then you have Russia and Iran both being very interested in what's happened here as well. It's a it's it's an area where the president needs to tread very lightly in terms of strategic decisions. You know, the thing that I keep coming back to is before this chemical attack happened, his administration had notably shifted away from the Assad must go language just a couple days ago, saying that that was not the focus. Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, his secretary of state, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, saying it's a political reality that Assad is in power at this point, that that's not the focus, that ISIS is the focus.

You saw President Trump this week meet with el-Sisi from Egypt, somebody who President Obama wouldn't meet with because of allegations of human rights abuses. He came to power in a military coup, in a bloody military coup, allegations of kidnapping, torture, jailing of dissidents. And then Trump legitimized him, brought him into the White House, said the United States is a strong backer of Egypt. And that is something that squares veryabilized a lot of countries in the region. Syria and Assad, you may not agree with. Sisi and Egypt, you may not agree with, but they bring stabilization. Trump seemed to be moving toward that. Does this attack now mean Trump is moving in the other direction? Jeff, before you go and write your story, anything else you want to add on all of this? My main takeaway, and this is probably fairly obvious, but I still think it's particularly resonant, is that we now see that President Trump is willing to take military action with

far less hesitation than President Obama ever did. And I'm interested to see how that informs the rest of his time in office. All right. Well, Jeff Bennett, thanks for joining us from Congress. Thank you. Good luck with that all things considered story. See you, Jeff. Good luck.

Bye. Thank you. attention to Syria over the last few years has seen atrocity after atrocity after atrocity, entire city blocks being leveled, these cluster bombs that are completely indiscriminate. So why is this that much worse than all the other death and destruction that has been going on for so long from the government towards its own people? Well, first of all, chemical weapons has always been the kind of thing that is a red line. President Obama talked about a red line and chemical weapons, but that was always even a justification for the Iraq War, that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people in 1988, that George W. Bush and the Bush administration was able to say, look, he's probably got a cache of this stuff somewhere. Which of course he did not.

He did not, or at least wasn't able to be found. WMD, weapons of mass destruction. So chemical weapons have always been an international thing that the United Nations, others have said is a big no-go. The other big part of it is we know President Trump is somebody who watches a lot of cable news. And it's very difficult to see the images, the horrific images of children being put on stretchers or put into ambulances who couldn't move. So to see those images, for an American people to see those images, that makes a big difference. And before we dismiss the power of those kinds of images, those kinds of images turned around the Vietnam War. If you didn't have reporting and images coming out of Vietnam, you wouldn't have had people in think one important thing to look for over the next few days is if the Trump administration

is now moved to kind of advocate for the Syrian victims of this war, how does that square with an executive order that straight up said that refugees from Syria are not welcome in the United States? If that's the case, and it's not just the refugee ban, it's what do you do about the Syrian civil war? I mean, that is the big issue. And again, chemical weapons is one thing, but people by the thousands and millions have been affected by the violence from the Assad government to his own people. I think one thing that sticks with me through all of this as well is that throughout the course of the campaign, seeing the way that Donald Trump presented himself, seeing the way that he gave

interviews, the way he gave speeches, kind of being off the cuff, never scripted. Once he was elected, the thing that I could just never fully envision was him in this setting where you're formally sitting behind a desk or standing behind a lectern giving an address to the nation about a military attack you ordered. Well, and you saw that last night. He's president of the United States. Every president takes some kind of military action. He's always influenced by external events in ways that he could never perceive or understand were going to be likely. You know, we should also say that this happens to come at a point where Trump was at a low point, at an inflection point, really, in his presidency. It was been

marred by chaos in his White House, a lack of action on his domestic agenda. Between this bombing, which his team is now painting as a leadership moment, and the approval of Neil Gorsuch to be Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court. He's hoping to put his presidency back on track. Just a few notes before we go. One thing that happened today. We've been talking about it for a while. It happened today. It is now done.

Neil Gorsuch officially confirmed as an associate justice on the Supreme Court. The final Senate vote this morning, 54-45. When Gorsuch is sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court will have a full bench of nine members for the first time since February 2016. Okay, that's a wrap for today. And for this week, we'll be back in your feed next week. A few more notes. We've been plugging NPR's new morning news podcast up first. Make sure to grab their latest episode first thing Monday morning. They record it at five. The post is up at 6, so you'll know what happened overnight. You'll often hear some of us on there as well.

Domenico, you were on there a couple times this week. What did you think? I was. A lot of fun. Always glad to do it. And I think you're getting a taste of it on Monday, right? I am. Monday will be my first time on Up First.

Awesome. Finally, a crazy week like this may make you think about how much you value the news. NPR and your local public radio station are out there covering all of this every day, helping you make sense of it. You can support the work we all do in partnership with each other by supporting your local public radio station. Go to npr.org slash stations, donate, and tell them we sent you. Thank you to all of you who've done that in the past. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And Jeff Bennett joined us earlier. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.