Congressional leaders said they supported President Donald Trump’s authorization of a missile strike against Syria on Thursday in response to a deadly chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians.
Trump authorized the launch of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base suspected of being the takeoff point for the planes that carried out the attack. The chemical attack in southern Idlib, Syria was reportedly carried out by Bashar al-Assad’s regime and involved the use of sarin gas, a deadly chemical nerve agent considered to be a weapon of mass destruction. The stockpiling and production of sarin was outlawed in 1997 by the Chemical Weapons Convention.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the strikes were necessary, citing the Russian government’s failure to successfully supervise the surrender of chemical weapons from the Syrian regime pursuant to a 2013 United Nations Security Council resolution which both the Russian and Syrian governments accepted.
“Clearly, Russia has failed in its responsibility to deliver on that commitment from 2013,” Tillerson said. “So either Russia has been complicit, or Russia has been simply incompetent in its ability to deliver on its end of that agreement.”
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), who is also a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that he fundamentally believed that the United States could not accept the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime on innocent civilians to become the norm.
“While the U.S. would prefer a political rather than a military solution to this conflict, the fact remains that you cannot negotiate with tyrants,” McCaul said.
U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John McCain (R-AZ), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released a joint statement in support of the action, stating that the United States must develop a new, comprehensive strategy in coordination with our allies and partners to bring the Syrian conflict to an end.
“The first measure in such a strategy must be to take Assad’s air force—which is responsible not just for the latest chemical weapons attack, but countless atrocities against the Syrian people—completely out of the fight,” the statement said.
The decision also received support from U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who said that he hoped the action would help deter future atrocities by the Assad regime.