Donald Trump says “jump” and Theresa May replies “how high?” If the US hadn’t decided to send missiles into Syria (perhaps to detract from Trump’s troubles at home) the UK and France would not have bothered. So the Prime Minister’s denial that she launched airstrikes on the US President’s orders is laughable at best. I mean, what the heck was the point of the targeted attacks on chemical weapons stores?
They couldn’t have been to reduce Assad’s chemical weapons capability because he had plenty of notice the missiles were coming thanks to Trump’s tweets, time enough to move his arsenal to another location. Secondly, they didn’t even give the vile dictator a bloody nose because our response to the horrific attack in Douma was designed not to be too strong less it provoke Russia, which backs the Syrian regime.
Neither were the strikes an attempt to change the tide of the war in Syria or to have regime change as Boris Johnson admitted. Nor were they about castigating Assad because under international law you can’t drop bombs to punish bad behaviour, otherwise we’d all be firing motherloads of missiles at dozens of countries every day of the week. Add to this the questionable legal status of our response and May’s snub to Parliament and what we had was a futile exercise.
