Syria's Assad picked the wrong time to launch a chemical attack on civilians As the U.S. debated Syria pullout, the sensible action for Assad would have been to lay low. He didn't and now the next move is up to Donald Trump.

James S. Robbins | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump: Syria chemical attack 'heinous' President Donald Trump has condemned the "heinous" suspected poison gas attack in Syria and said he'll make a decision on the U.S. response within 24 to 48 hours. (April 9)

Newly appointed National Security Advisor John Bolton will have an interesting first week on the job, thanks to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his chemical weapons.

The saying goes that political leaders in the Mideast never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Case in point Syria. Just days ago, the American press was filled with reports about alleged disarray in the Trump administration over Syria policy. The story went that President Trump was pushing for pulling out the U.S. troops that had substantially dismantled the ISIS terrorist caliphate, while senior advisors were cautioning him to stay the course. The story fit neatly into the larger media narrative of White House chaos, which is how routine policy debates are reported these days.

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If you are the embattled Assad, the sensible course of action would be to lay low at this point and let the supposed White House drama play out. Instead, Assad chose this moment to launch a horrific chemical weapons attack on civilians in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma. So headlines about White House disarray were swept aside and replaced with the president tweeting about the “Animal Assad” and the heavy price he and his allies will pay.

Chemical weapons are of dubious military value, and mostly used for their terror effects. Since they are almost entirely banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Syria is a signatory, any regime that uses them will face intense political fallout, which may include foreign military responses. Former president Obama famously drew a red line around chemical weapons, threatening armed U.S. intervention if they were used. But when Syria called Obama’s bluff with a chemical attack in 2013, he chose a diplomatic route to remove Syria’s weapons, which failed to eliminate the entire arsenal and did nothing to inhibit new production.

A year ago, the Assad regime conducted a sarin gas attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing dozens and wounding close to 400 people. Trump ordered a cruise missile attack on the Syrian air base from which the attack was launched. Later that fall, after a United Nations commission of inquiry laid blame with the Syrian regime, a Syrian chemical weapons plant was destroyed, allegedly by Israel. Yet as we have seen these measures have not deterred Assad from conducting new attacks.

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Perhaps Assad felt that given Trump’s reported desire to leave Syria, the regime could conduct illegal chemical attacks without cost. If so, this was a grave error in judgment. The pullout debate and the chemical weapons issue are not related. The former deals with the administration’s conduct of the war on terrorism, which is focused on defeating ISIS. It relates to Syria because that is where the Islamic State was. Now ISIS has been largely driven out, so it is reasonable to begin discussions of what to do next. Trump has long been a critic of the endless military deployments related to the war on terrorism, and it makes sense that he would want to reduce the U.S. troop presence expeditiously, with the caveat that it not be done in a way that allows ISIS to reconstitute itself. This was the error the Obama administration made in 2011 by allowing the status of forces agreement in Iraq to lapse, which gave ISIS the opportunity to flourish in the first place.

The chemical attack was part of Syria’s wider civil war in which U.S. ground troops have only indirectly been involved. Yet the United States has important interests in the outcome of that conflict, particularly with respect to the expanding influence of Syria’s ally Iran and its proxies. The Trump administration has shown no interest in “nation-building” in Syria, but to the extent the Damascus regime further delegitimizes itself on the world stage it makes it easier to call for Assad to be ousted as part of a post-conflict resolution agreement. No country will publicly back Syria conducting chemical weapons attacks on civilians. Assad would have been well advised not to give Trump an opportunity to enforce international standards. And whatever the American response to the chemical attack will be, it will likely make more of an impact than previous attempts to make Assad see reason.

James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Robbins.