Days after President Donald Trump's s warm embrace of Egyptian tyrant
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the US administration declared it had no
interest in ousting Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader is
accused of gassing his own people – again.
Assad, who last year
described Trump as his "natural ally," could have reasonably assumed, as
much of the world did, that in staging Monday's White House love-in
with el-Sisi, Trump was signalling to all that human rights were no
longer a Washington priority.
In the same vein, US UN ambassador
Nikki Haley's declaration that "our priority is no longer to sit there
and focus on getting Assad out" and Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson's earlier declared that it was up to the
war-ravaged people of Syria to decide Assad's fate.
A man breathes through an oxygen mask, after what rescue
workers described as a suspected gas attack in the town of Khan
Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib, Syria April 4, 2017.
In 2013, a poison gas attack
that killed an estimated 1400 and wounded thousands more in the
Damascus suburbs was the crossing of a "red line" that former President
Barack Obama had warned would trigger a military response had
been crossed.
But Obama didn't bomb Assad's bunker.
Instead
Moscow, Washington and Damascus struck a deal under which Assad
would surrender his chemical weapons arsenal to the international
community.
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