Trump’s Road to Damascus and a Chance for Conversion – Charles Glass

Trump’s Road to Damascus and a Chance for Conversion – Charles Glass: The last U.S. ambassador to serve in Damascus, Robert Ford, testified to Congress earlier this year that the 'U.S. military and civilian costs in Syria over the past four years are at least $12 billion.' It is a high price for failure — failure to depose President Bashar al Assad, to break his alliance with Iran, to prevent Salafist jihadism from taking root in Syria for the first time, to maintain the friendship of U.S.-NATO ally Turkey, to save an estimated half-million Syrians from death and to stem the exodus of nearly half the Syrian population from their homes. Most of the dozen or so former officials of the Barack Obama administration to whom I have spoken in Washington over the past three weeks regret what transpired on their watch, but it's too late for them to do anything about it.
President Donald Trump's administration inherited the Syria mess when it entered the White House on Jan. 20, 2017. Its policy was anyone's guess, reminding me of an old joke about an Irish farmer telling a tourist who asked for directions to Dublin, 'Well, I wouldn't be going there from here.' It is unclear how far Trump and his new foreign policy team, national security adviser John Bolton an