Fear: Trump in the White House(50)

“Let’s fucking kill him!” the president said. “Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.”

The military had the capability to launch a covert top secret leadership air strike in Syria.

Trump sounded personally attacked. Syria had promised not to use chemical weapons—an apparent reference to Syrian president Assad’s agreement to destroy all his chemical weapons.

Yes, Mattis said. He would get right on it.

He hung up the phone.

“We’re not going to do any of that,” he told a senior aide. “We’re going to be much more measured.”

They would develop small, medium and large options for a conventional air strike, the standard three tiers.

Mattis saw that the administration had been presented with a rare golden opportunity to do something without doing too much, but certainly more than Obama.

In 2012, Obama had announced that chemical weapons use by Assad would be a red line. The next year, Assad killed 1,400 civilians with chemical weapons. Obama had the military prepare a strike plan, but he equivocated. He wanted to avoid another armed conflict and quagmire.

It was Vladimir Putin, of all people, who came to Obama’s rescue. The Russian leader brokered an agreement under which Assad would agree to destroy all his chemical weapons. An astonishing 1,300 tons of chemical weapons were removed from Syria.

Obama basked in the success. In 2014 he said, “We mark an important achievement in our ongoing effort to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction by eliminating Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile.” Secretary of State John Kerry went further. “We got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.”

Classified intelligence reports dispute this. In 2016, DNI Clapper said publicly, “Syria has not declared all the elements of its chemical weapons program.”

As the Syrian civil war ground on, Obama was tagged with a strategic failure. The war had left more than 400,000 killed and millions of refugees.

After the chemical attack, McMaster and his NSC Mideast chief Derek Harvey went into action at the White House to develop options.

Bannon got word of what was in progress. It was impossible to miss. When Trump was on fire, everyone in his orbit could feel the heat. Bannon confronted Harvey in a West Wing hallway.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

“Developing options for the president,” Harvey replied. “He asked for options, and this is how the process works.”

The process was precisely what Bannon hated. He saw it as tilted toward military action, toughness, with a momentum and concept of its own: America as the world’s policeman. Do something, became the mantra; fix it. They hadn’t even answered Trump’s question about exactly what the United States was doing with its large presence in the Middle East.

Bannon saw Ivanka’s hand at work. She knew how to work her father better than anyone. She took pictures of the suffering or dead babies to him in the residence. The gas attack was a true horror, Bannon understood, but a military response was exactly what Trump should not want.

In sharp contrast, Derek Harvey was tired of being involved in managing national security policy to inconclusive results. Syria was a classic case study of words and half measures almost designed not to solve the problem. This was a chance to maximize a military response.

The middle option called for a strike of about 60 Tomahawks at one airfield.

“We have an opportunity here to do more,” Harvey argued to McMaster, “and we have to think in terms of hitting multiple airfields.” They could strike with real impact. “Take out their air power because that’s a force multiplier for the regime. We’re trying to shape the endgame and put more pressure on the regime to engage politically.”

Harvey said they should “take out his air force—not 15 or 20 percent, let’s take out 80 percent of it.” That would mean using 200 Tomahawks, more than triple the 60 from the middle option.

“Derek, I know,” McMaster said, “but we’ve got to deal with the reality of Mattis” who “is berating me for the direction we are heading here.”

Mattis wanted to be careful. Action in any form was risky. Russians were working at the Syrian airfields; kill Russians, and they would have a whole new ball game, a confrontation or a catastrophe.

A National Security Council meeting was scheduled to discuss options. Bannon availed himself of his walk-in privileges and went to see Trump alone in the Oval Office. He told the president that part of avoiding unnecessary wars and overseas commitments was not responding with missiles the way his advisers were proposing.

Jump in and make sure you are vocal, Trump said.

In a public statement on April 4, Trump attacked both Assad and Obama. “These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a ‘red line’ against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing.”

At the NSC meeting, the three options were presented: hot, medium and cold. The largest option was a 200-missile attack on all the major Syrian airfields; the medium option was 60 missiles; and the smallest was almost none, or none at all.

The potential target list was large. In 2013 when Obama had threatened a missile attack, he had approved a target list including a government compound housing the chemical weapons program. It didn’t make the current target list because Mattis and the Pentagon wanted to keep the attack as narrow as possible.