Trudeau backs Trump's cruise missile strike on Syria

Trudeau backs Trump's cruise missile strike on Syria

Postby Oscar » Sun Apr 09, 2017 9:22 am

Trudeau backs Trump's cruise missile strike on Syria

[ http://canadians.org/blog/trudeau-backs ... rike-syria ]

April 7, 2017 - 12:46 pm

(PHOTO: US Navy photo of the USS Porter in the Mediterranean Sea launching a cruise missile on Syria.)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has expressed his full support of US President Donald Trump's order to launch 59 cruise missiles against an air force base in Syria.

CBC reports, "Canada was briefed in advance of the US missile strikes against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapon capabilities, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday. The prime minister said he spoke with US President Donald Trump Friday morning and voiced his support for the air strikes directly."

In the House of Commons, Trudeau stated, “This morning, I spoke with the President directly and emphasized that Canada agrees that [the Syrian president's] repeated use of chemical weapons must not continue. In the face of such heinous war crimes, all civilized peoples must speak with one voice. That is why Canada fully supports the United States’ limited, focused actions to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to launch such attacks.”

The Globe and Mail notes, "The United States launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian government airbase Thursday night, days after a chemical weapons attack by government forces in Idlib province killed dozens of civilians. A spokesperson for National Defence in Ottawa said early today that Canadian Forces personnel were not involved in the missile strike. The statement added that Canadian operations in the region remain unchanged."

The Telegraph now reports, "Four children are reported to be among nine civilians killed in the 'targeted assault' on the air base. Six servicemen - none of them Russian - are believed to have also been killed. Mr Trump was reacting to the attack on Tuesday that killed at least 72 people, including 20 children."

This morning, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says, "Mindful of the risk of escalation, I appeal for restraint to avoid any acts that could deepen the suffering of the Syrian people."

This is a real concern given Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who backs the al-Assad regime, has stated the US cruise missile strike was illegal and "one step away from military clashes with Russia."

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has commented, "The US missile attack on a Syrian government air base risks escalating the war in Syria still further. Tuesday’s horrific chemical attack was a war crime which requires urgent independent UN investigation and those responsible must be held to account. But unilateral military action without legal authorisation or independent verification risks intensifying a multi-sided conflict that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people."

And writer-activist Noam Chomsky says, "[If the United States had a better relationship with Russia], it could lead to some kind of accommodation in which a negotiated diplomatic settlement would be implemented, which would by no means be lovely, but it would at least cut down the level of violence, which is critical, because the country is simply being destroyed. It’s descending to suicide."

The war in Syria, which as a population of about 17 million people, has claimed almost half a million lives, wounded close to 2 million people, caused 4.8 million refugees and has displaced 7 million people within Syria.

The bombardment by the Syrian and Russian air forces of rebel held areas in Syria has also left about 1.75 million people without running water.

In October 2014, Blue Planet Project founder Maude Barlow said the al-Assad government's denial of clean water is consistent with its history of using water to punish its enemies and reward its friends. She has noted that in 2000 the Syrian regime gave vast quantities of land and water its wealthy allies, which severely diminished the water table and drove more than one million small farmers and herders off the land, many of them to Aleppo. Climate scientists argue that global warming then very likely exacerbated the historic drought that began in Syria in 2006 further displacing rural people to cities and sparking the initial unrest that led to the start of the uprising in 2011.

The United Nations is expected to convene today to discuss the situation in Syria.

Brent Patterson's blog
Political Director of the Council of Canadians
[ http://canadians.org/blogs/brent-patterson ]
Oscar
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