MESOPOTAMIA NEWS TODAYS RELEVANT COMMENTARIES : ASSAD MUST GO! – OTHERWISE NO CHANCE FOR SYRIA !
Opinion: One-Off Strikes Accomplish Nothing. Assad Must Go. – Despite Trump’s “Mission Accomplished” bravado, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was more belligerent the morning after the U.S., France and UK launched strikes on military targets.
To Emile Nakhleh, former member of CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, that’s more evidence that the Assad regime must be deposed: • “The key lesson that the Assad regime and the neighboring countries have taken from the American-British-French strikes is that although the United States and its Western allies do not tolerate the killing of innocent people by poison gas, they seem to take a benign attitude toward the killing of thousands of Syrians by air strikes, barrels bombs, shelling by tanks and long-range guns.”
- “The Russians and Iranians viewed the strike as a symbolic gesture by Trump to assuage his conscience after watching the horrific pictures of Syrian children suffocating from the gas attack and to show the country that he kept his word. In reality, and based on media reports from the region, his and America’s prestige in the Arab world is now lower than it was before the strike.”
- “Dealing with Assad is not rocket science: unless he is deposed, no meaningful negotiations about the future of Syria will ever take place, and the country will not get any better. President Barack Obama should have acted back in 2012 when he declared that Assad ‘should step aside.’ Unfortunately for the Syria people, he didn’t—and that’s why we are where are today.”