Scores killed in one of Syria’s deadliest chemical attacks in years.


Activists said airstrikes in the northwest delivered an unidentified chemical agent that killed at least 75 people and filled clinics across the area with patients foaming at the mouth or struggling to breathe. This is the deadliest chemical attack since Assad’s forces dropped sarin gas on the Damascus suburbs in 2013.

 Syria turned a northern rebel-held area into a toxic kill zone  inciting international outrage over the ever-increasing government impunity shown in the country’s six-year war.

Western leaders including President Trump blamed the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and called on its patrons, Russia and Iran, to prevent a recurrence of what many described as a war crime.

After gas attack, Trump says crisis in Syria ‘is now my responsibility’

The president said the images of young victims had a “big impact” on him but would not say how he would address the Assad regime's apparent use of a chemical weapon. Earlier Wednesday, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley assailed Russia in blunt terms for protecting the Syrian government.

By Anne Gearan  •  Read more »

-- Foreign policy has dominated the opening chapters of the Trump administration to a degree the president clearly did not anticipate. If he’s got 99 problems, Syria is now certainly one.

“For Trump, a Focus on U.S. Interests and a Disdain for Moralizing,” by the New York Times’s Peter Baker: “Mr. Trump has dispensed with what he considers pointless moralizing and preachy naïveté. … ‘We would look like, to some degree, rather silly not acknowledging the political realities that exist in Syria,’ said spokesman Sean Spicer. … He has taken foreign policy to its most realpolitik moment in generations, playing down issues of human rights or democracy that animated his predecessors, including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama. … His foreign policy seems defined more by a transactional nationalism, rooted in the sense that the United States is getting ripped off. Rather than spreading American values, Trump’s policy aims to guard American interests.”

-- Trump is learning that the panaceas he promised so often as a candidate do not actually exist. "No one — not even President Obama, as far as I could tell — was satisfied with the Obama administration’s approach to the conflict in Syria," Andrew Exum, who was an Obama appointee at the Pentagon, writes for The Atlantic. "But if you assembled all of the Obama administration’s critics in one room, they would not agree on an obvious alternative. The problem is wicked enough to confound easy solutions, and each policy alternative had strategic and moral deficiencies."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Assad believes he can commit war crimes with impunity,” and he challenged Trump to do something. The question now confronting Washington, he said, “is whether we will take any action to disabuse him of this murderous notion.”