With Syria strike, Macron and May order first major military operations
For both the French and the British leaders, last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrians crossed a ‘red line’
PARIS (AFP) — Shortly after coming to power last year, Emmanuel Macron mused to a friend about the role of president. “You go through stages,” he said. “Innocence is not allowed.”
On Friday night, like British leader Theresa May, he ordered his first major military intervention.
Overnight, French and British aircraft took part in a wave of strikes against Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime in response to alleged chemical weapons attacks.
Though already active in a US-led coalition combating the Islamic State group in the region, the strikes against Assad represented a major escalation for French and British forces.
Macron, who faces a battle with trade unions at home over rail reforms, was widely seen as facing the sternest test yet of his foreign policy and commander-in-chief mettle.
“We cannot tolerate the normalization of the use of chemical weapons,” he said in a statement on Saturday morning, adding that “the facts and the responsibility of the Syrian regime are not in doubt.”
Around the same time as he was musing about power to his friend Philippe Besson after his election victory last May, Macron also laid out a clear policy on using military force in Syria.
In the same month, with Russian leader Vladimir Putin at his side, Macron said that further use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “red line” that would trigger a response.
Having said on Thursday that he had “proof” that Assad was responsible — which is denied by the regime — analysts saw Macron as having no choice but to go ahead with strikes.
“When you fix red lines, if you don’t know how to make sure they are respected, you’re choosing to be weak,” Macron himself told The Guardian last June. “That’s not my choice.”
Many French officials still bristle as they recall how former US president Barack Obama had set a red line too over the use of chemical weapons, only to pull back at the last minute in 2013.
“The red line set by France in May 2017 has been crossed,” Macron said in his statement on Saturday morning.
He and his office published photos on Twitter showing him chairing a defense meeting at the presidential palace, as well as a video of Rafale fighter jets taking off.
No alternative
For British leader May, whose time in office has been consumed by the process of taking her country out of the European Union, the Syria crisis represented a new headache.
British involvement in military interventions abroad is controversial in a country still haunted by its role in the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Opposition politicians including the head of the Labour party Jeremy Corbyn and some Conservative colleagues of May called for a parliamentary vote before any British involvement.
British lawmakers voted down taking military action against Damascus in 2013, in what was widely viewed as an assertion of parliamentary sovereignty on the use of force.
But in her statement on Saturday morning, May said there was “no practicable alternative to the use of force to degrade and deter the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime.”
“This is not about intervening in a civil war. It is not about regime change,” she added.
“It is about a limited and targeted strike that does not further escalate tensions in the region and that does everything possible to prevent civilian casualties,” she said.
A YouGov poll in The Times conducted this week found that 43 percent of voters oppose strikes in Syria, with 34% unsure and only 22% supportive.
