Obama may have drawn a red line on the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons, but now he’s saying Syria is giving him grey hair.
“I’m pretty confident that a big chunk of my grey hair comes out of my Syria meetings,” the US president said on Thursday at the Pentagon, after meeting with members of the US National Security Council to talk about the US's fight against Daesh (ISIS).
Obama told reporters Thursday at the Pentagon that he’s been “wrestling” with the Syrian war and how to respond to it “for years.” Back in 2013, he famously threatened to intervene in the ongoing civil war if Assad used chemical weapons, but balked after the notorious East Ghouta chemical attack.
Obama also said the US’s options on Syria were “limited.”
“When you have a civil war like this, when you have a ruler who doesn’t care about this people, when you’ve got terrorist organizations that are brutal and would impose their own kind of dictatorship on people… that’s a very difficult situation to deal with,” he said.
President Obama: "I'm pretty confident that a big chunk of my gray hair comes out of my Syria meetings" https://t.co/nbEXLwWrjy
— CNN International (@cnni) August 4, 2016
@ABC I understand him. His intervention in Syria has been catastrophic
— Cartabon (@cartabon) August 4, 2016
Obama's critics have said that his unwillingness to play a bigger role in the Syrian conflict has given the Syrian regime carte blanche. Assad has used chemical weapons on a number of other occasions since the East Ghouta massacre of 2013. On Wednesday, rescue workers told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur news agency that regime fighter jets had dropped barrels of chlorine on a town in northwestern Syria.
-Hunter Stuart
