We Denounce Trump’s Attack on Syria
Statement by Meredith Aby-Keirstead representing the Anti-War Committee at the MN Peace Action Coalition press conference
April 14, 2018
We are here today to speak out against last night’s US military attacks on Syria. We denounce Trump’s fake moral outrage and call this attack what it is – a pretext for more war. Trump claims to be defending civilian lives in Syria while banning Syrian refugees from entering the US with his racist Muslim Ban and ordering missile strikes on the most heavily populated part of the country.
We say more war and not a “new war” because the US has been militarily intervening in Syria since the Obama administration. The US has at least 2,000 troops on the ground and has been conducting almost daily air and drone attacks in Syria. US and US-backed coalition air and artillery strikes have likely killed around 6,000 Syrian civilians since August 2014. Last night Trump literally killed Syrians to say that killing Syrians is wrong which is hypocritical foreign policy especially when you look at the daily actions of the US in Syria.
Trump is using the chemical weapons attack as a pretext because on April 7th, Secretary of Defense Mattis admitted that the Pentagon was still assessing the claims. Yesterday the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons tried to start their investigation into who was responsible for the attack, but due to US bombing it is likely that any evidence has been destroyed. If the real goal of the attack was retribution for the use of chemical weapons then the Trump administration would have actually allowed an investigation to take place.
It is reprehensible that yesterday the US launched 112 tomahawk missiles at Syria at a cost of $1.4 million each, the same week that he bashed spending money on food stamps. We demand money for human needs like repairing Flint’s water pipes, rebuilding American schools, rebuilding Puerto Rico, and making sure that children don’t go hungry at night instead of for war.
We are concerned that last night is just the start of a major escalation of the US war on Syria. Trump has been assembling a War Cabinet with John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Gina Haspel, who are all known for repeatedly choosing war over diplomacy and torture over respect for human rights. The war hawks in the Trump administration are risking exploding the Syrian conflict into a regional war involving Russia, Iran and Syria against the US, its European allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
We call on our fellow Minnesotans to face the snow on Sunday and join us in Uptown to denounce the US war on Syria and other endless US wars and war threats across the globe!