YSU experts say Syria bombing simply punishment, warning

YOUNGSTOWN

The United States sent a strong message that it won’t tolerate the use of poison gas when it launched Tomahawk missiles from Navy ships in the Mediterranean Sea to strike a Syrian airfield, Youngstown State University politics and international relations professors said Friday.

“I think the goal was to let [Syrian President] Bashar Assad know that there was going to be a cost if he was going to use chemical weapons against his own people, so the hope is to dissuade him from taking these kinds of actions in the future,” said Paul Sracic, professor and chairman of that department.

“The goal was not regime change,” Sracic said Friday. “Clearly, this is way too limited of a strike if that’s the goal.

By using missiles, instead of planes, the strike avoided putting American pilots at risk, he added.

“The Tomahawk cruise missiles have some real punch to them, but not really enough to take out a hardened runway. There was obviously some damage to airplanes and some damage to the storage facility, but I assume that the Syrians can get the base back up and running in relatively short order,” said David Porter, professor of politics and international relations.

“This is primarily a diplomatic and political message that, if you do this [use poison gas] again, you can expect another response, and, one would assume, a more lethal response, perhaps an airstrike that would be using 1,000-pound bombs, rather than a few hundred pounds of explosives,” he added.

A Canfield High School senior participating in the Model United Nations exercise at YSU on Friday, however, said the matter of poison-gas use in Syria should be handled internationally, not by the United States alone.

“There is a response that is necessary for chemical weapons, but the United States took the law into its own hands,” said Carson Markley, who called the U.S. missile strike “a vigilante situation.”

“It’s an international law [that bans poison-gas warfare], not a United States law,” he said, adding, “I think what we did last night escalated tensions further.”

Read more of their remarks in Saturday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.