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U.S. missile strike was punishment, professor says
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.
“We don’t want to see them [chemical weapons] used anywhere in the world. And, so, when that happens, there has to be a response. There has to be a punishment, and that makes the whole world safer,” Sracic said.
“The goal was not regime change,” Sracic said Friday. “Clearly, this is way too limited of a strike if that’s the goal.
“It was essentially a punishment. The goal was probably to disable some of his aircraft, to disable the airfield, making it more difficult for him to operate. Syria does not have a huge air force, so they can’t absorb that many losses.
“This does affect their ability to go after the rebels, at least in the short term.”
By launching the missiles from international waters, the U.S. avoided the risk to one of its allies that would have accompanied a land-launched attack from an allied country, Sracic said.
By using missiles, instead of planes, the strike avoided putting American pilots at risk, he added.
“Maybe this sort of enhances diplomacy in the region, in that the U.S. has to be taken as a serious actor,” Sracic said of the missile strike.
“Does this send a message to North Korea, for example, that the U.S. is willing to act?” he asked. “I think there may be something to that.”
“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.
“I think the primary impact here is going to be diplomatic. At least, that’s what the intent was,” he said of the missile strike.
The idea of Assad remaining in power “is off the table now,” Porter said.
“Whatever the next government of Syria is going to be, Assad’s not going to be a member of it,” he added.
Aside from being an apparent weapon of the Syrian government, the poisonous sarin gas can be used by terrorists, who employed it March 20, 1995, in the Tokyo subway system, he noted.
That coordinated series of five rush-hour attacks killed 12 people, seriously injured 50 and caused temporary vision difficulties for almost 5,000 others.
“Anything the United States can do to suppress the use of lethal gas and chemical weapons in general, I think, is probably a step in the right direction,” Porter said.
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, so the international community needs to deal with the situation, not the United States by itself,” he added.
Markley, who plans to major in economics and political science at YSU, said: “I think what we did last night escalated tensions further.”
The annual exercise draws high school students to YSU from throughout Northeast Ohio.