There is a simple reason Trump is placating Putin even as he has attacked Assad.
I have never witnessed children suffocate from a chemical weapons attack, so the worst thing I have ever seen as a reporter remains the dead women and children that were piled up as a protest in front of the American Embassy in Monrovia during the waning days of the Liberian civil war. It was 2003 and the United States had just invaded Iraq. I didn’t know what to do before the tangle of bodies before me so I decided to count them. Someone should know this number, I thought. They had died earlier in the day when a mortar hit a crowd of civilians who had sought refuge in an annex of the U.S. embassy, and as I counted the bodies, a crowd of angry Liberians gathered around me. I wrote the number “27” in my notebook. I felt completely numb. “Where is your army?” the men in the crowd started to yell. “Why won’t you invade us?”