Trump’s critics are certainly tempted to pursue a similar line of thinking about the strike he directed against Syria in retaliation for the odious chemical attack on civilians by President Bashar al-Assad’s government. After all, Republicans paid no price when they questioned Clinton’s motives, and Trump would sorely love to divert the public from the disastrous opening weeks of his administration.
In particular, he has been happy to level false charges — first against former president Barack Obama and then against Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser — to shift the focus away from inquiries into whether his presidential campaign colluded with Russia’s subversion of the 2016 election . The fact-checkers regularly remind us that Trump meets the Coats standard of being a politician about whom we can reasonably “doubt everything he does and everything he says.”
But the Clinton experience should teach a different lesson. Albright was right to suggest that the threat posed by bin Laden should have been taken more seriously than our inward-looking political system allowed in 1998, and Syria presents humanitarian and foreign policy problems that must be debated on their own merits.
On the strike itself, many Democrats (including the Senate and House Democratic leaders, Charles E. Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, respectively) had called for proportionate action against Assad back when he used chemical weapons in 2013.
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