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Pence also said. “It’s time for Russia to get the message President Trump delivered last night. You're known by the company you keep.” He also said the United State will mount a “sustained effort” against the regime if the attacks continue, echoing what U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said in an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Saturday. Pence also said leaders at the summit, which is focused on the collapse of democracy in Venezuela, saoid they support the missile strikes in Syria.

I was born during a war, though you wouldn’t have known it. There was clean water and electricity and nutrition enough to see an eight-pound baby girl into the world on a cold December night in Texas. It was the Gulf War . The devastation was somewhere over there, not here. Two more wars began before I went into middle school; one ended — formally, anyway — after I had gone to college, the other continues to this day. While I was in college, we took military action in Libya, too. Again, there was no rupture on the home front,...

US will strike Syria

An armada of 12 warships — the largest US strike force since the 2003 Iraq war – is steaming toward the Middle East as President Trump mulls an attack on Syria in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack on civilians, according to a report. The aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman set sail from Norfolk, Va., on Wednesday with five escort warships and they were expected to join four destroyers and two nuclear-powered subs believed to already be in or near the Mediterranean, the Times of London reported. Trump on Wednesday appeared to telegraph an attack on Syria by tweeting...

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., says he believes a majority of the public doubts the official U.S. government contention that Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical gas against the final rebel-held town near Damascus. “Anybody who has tried to explain to me why Assad would do this sounds like a conspiracy theorist,” said Massie, a libertarian Republican from Kentucky. “It requires really contorted thinking to think Assad did this. You have to come up with very complicated reasons.” “I cannot think of a reason he would,” Massie said.

US forces have deployed the “Doomsday Plane” amid fears of war with Russia as tensions look ready to snap over Syria. Just after US President Donald Trump told Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to “get ready” for a missile strike the feared aircraft took to the sky. US forces put a Boeing E-4B Nightwatch plane into the air from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Indiana. The Nightwatch – also known as the Doomsday Plane – is an airborne nuclear war command centre. It would allow the US to maintain a chain of command in the event of a major war and...

On Saturday I took my family to have a closer look at Syria. This was on the Golan Heights, from a roadside promontory overlooking the abandoned Syrian town of Quneitra. The border is very green at this time of year, a serene patchwork of orchards and grassland, and it was hard to impress on our kids that hell on earth was visible in the quiet distance. But I wanted them to see it — to know that Syria is a place, not an abstraction; that the agonies of its people are near, not far; that we should not look away....

Is Russia negotiating missile strikes as a method of appeasing Donald Trump? The Washington Post reports that Russia has shifted gears from confrontation to mitigation with the US after assisting Bashar al-Assad’s capture of the rebel stronghold Douma. At first, Moscow threatened a military conflict if Trump followed through on his threat to punish Assad for yet another use of chemical weapons that Russia had guaranteed were destroyed: Russian officials on Thursday sought to tamp down public fears of a looming conflict with the United States, even as Syrian government forces took control of the town where they are...

A Russian newspaper reports that President Donald Trump is planning to tip off Russia's military before launching any attacks. The US tries hard to avoid killing Russians in Syria, despite the president's recent hostile rhetoric toward Moscow. Russia is Syria's ally but does not approve of all of its behavior. Moscow seems willing to let the US hit some Syrian targets as punishment for suspected chemical weapons use.

U.S. President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday of imminent military action in Syria over a suspected poison gas attack, declaring that missiles “will be coming” and lambasting Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Trump was reacting to a warning from Russia that any U.S. missiles fired at Syria over the deadly assault on a rebel enclave near Damascus would be shot down and the launch sites targeted. His comments raised fears of direct conflict over Syria for the first time between the two world powers backing opposing sides in the seven-year-old civil war, which has aggravated instability...

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley slammed Russia over a deadly chemical attack on Syrian civilians, saying the country's hands are "covered in blood." "The Russian regime, whose hands are all covered in the blood of Syrian children, cannot be ashamed by pictures of its victims," Haley said during a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday. "We must not overlook Russia and Iran's roles in enabling the Assad regime's murderous destruction," she continued.

President Donald Trump Monday condemned the alleged chemical attack in Syria saying, “It was atrocious, it was horrible.” During a meeting with his Cabinet on Monday, the president said intelligence assessments are underway and his administration will be making "some major decisions" on Syria over the next 24-48 hours. He later said a decision could be made "later today." When asked about possible U.S. military action, Trump said: "Nothing's off the table." “This is about humanity and it can’t be allowed to happen,” he said. “If it’s the Russians, if it’s Syria, if it's Iran, if it’s all of them...

"The US state department said it is monitoring the "very disturbing" reports, and that Russia - which is fighting alongside the Syrian government - should be held responsible if deadly chemicals had been used."

The United States must attack the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria in response to the regime chemical gas strike on the Syrian town Douma that killed more than 70 people, Strategic Affairs and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said Sunday. Speaking on Army Radio, Erdan, who is Netanyahu’s number two in Likud, said he hoped US military action against the Assad regime would be taken again, as it was when the regime used chemical weapons against its people in the past. “The shocking attack shows the incredible international hypocrisy of the international community focusing on Israel confronting the terrorist...

President Trump reportedly asked the CIA why it waited until a terror target’s family left the building before launching a drone missile strike against him. “Why did you wait?” the president asked, according to the Washington Post, after being shown a video of an earlier strike in Syria by the ISIS-fighting spooks. The CIA’s head of drone operations told the commander-in-chief that the agency’s goal was to minimize civilian casualties, an explanation that left Trump “unimpressed,” the paper reported. On the campaign trail, then-candidate Trump once said that the US should kill not just terrorists, but their wives, children and...

It was inevitable. Russian “mercenaries” attacked a forward base in Syria where they knew American advisors were stationed. It was a test. And our military passed. Let’s hope the administration passes, too. The most important thing about this attack on our troops is that it couldn’t have happened without Vladimir Putin’s personal approval. Nye vozmozhno. The core of the attacking force came from the Wagner Group, Russia’s version of the American thugs who worked for the company formerly known as Blackwater. But while the media refers to the Russians as mercenaries, the Wagner Group functions as an auxiliary of the...

Hey, remember when Obama closed Gitmo? Remember how he couldn't stop telling us how great it was that he'd closed Gitmo? He actually listed "closing Gitmo" as one of his achievements. To him, making a promise was the same as keeping it. And if he didn't actually keep it, so what? All because on January 22, 2009, two days after being sworn in, Obama signed the first of his many executive orders: Before Obama even knew how to find all the bathrooms in the White House, he'd signed that executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. It was...

When they brought William “Ryan” Owens home, the Navy SEAL was carried from a C-17 military plane in a flag-draped casket, onto the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base, as President Donald Trump, his daughter, Ivanka, and Owens’ family paid their respects. ....“I’m sorry, I don’t want to see him,’’ Owens recalled telling the chaplain who informed him that Trump was on his way from Washington. “I told them I don’t want to meet the President.” It had been little more than 24 hours since six officers in dress uniform knocked on the door to Owens’ home in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.... ...Owens...

In the last half of last year, U.S. armed forces under President Donald Trump’s direction launched 2,000 air strikes against Taliban targets in Afghanistan. That constitutes more raids than in all of 2015 and 2016 combined, the last two years under President Barack Obama’s command. “The huge spike in airstrikes is the product of new rules of engagement, adopted as part of a strategy that President Trump announced in August,” reports the Washington Post. “U.S. forces can now strike Taliban targets at will, whereas under the Obama administration they were restricted to defending Afghan forces under imminent attack.” Like the...

Speaking at Stanford University after being introduced by former top diplomat Condoleezza Rice, Tillerson said the Trump administration was determined not to repeat President Barack Obama's "mistake" when he withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. Republicans for years have argued the withdrawal created the opening for IS' rapid expansion.... Securing a successful U.N. peace process, getting Syrian President Bashar Assad to leave power, ridding Syria of Iran's influence and eradicating all weapons of mass destruction in the country.