Obamas Syria strike plan was much bigger than Trumps

[Cattledog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/04/09/obamas-syria-strike-plan-was-much-bigger-than-trumps/?utm_term=.c941bee6dfba

By Josh Rogin

The Trump administration’s strike on one of Bashar al-Assad’s air bases was similar in style and objectives to the strike plan that President Barack Obama prepared in 2013 — except that Obama’s attacks were to be several times bigger than President Trump’s. At the time, leading Republicans mocked the Obama administration for what it called “pinprick” strikes, calling them ineffective. Today they praise Trump’s smaller strikes as perfectly calculated.

“What we had in mind in 2013 had many more targets and was much more expansive,” a senior Obama administration official involved in those discussions told me.

On Thursday, Trump ordered the launch of 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Shayrat air base, the origin of Tuesday’s chemical weapons attack that killed scores of Syrian civilians in Idlib. Trump explained in a letter to Congress Saturday that his strike was meant “to degrade the Syrian military’s ability to conduct further chemical weapons attacks” and dissuade Assad from using chemicals again.

Like Trump, the Obama team was not trying to topple the Assad regime and was not intending to address Assad’s use of conventional weapons to kill civilians. But the Obama plan was designed to be substantial enough to have an impact on Assad’s calculus. There were also plans to follow up with strikes on even more targets if Assad continued to use chemical weapons.

“The military planners thought that the attack we had planned in 2013 was significant enough to have a real deterrent effect,” the official said. “We had a strike plan that included additional targets that would not have been struck in the initial go around.”

[David__77]

1. And thankfully Obama didn't execute that plan.

...

[bigtree]

2. so it was even more ill-concieved

...with even more potential for widening the conflict and inextricably inserting our military and defensive forces into the middle of a multi-fronted civil war.