News - Middle East - Syria: International lawyer and political analyst Barry Grossman has said that US President Joe Biden’s comments justifying the latest US military operation in Syria are cartoon-like, without meaning and entirely sidestep the real issues involving the legality of US military operations in Syria and how those operations, according to the President, protect Americans.

On Thursday, Biden said that an American military raid in Syria on Wednesday night killed the leader of the Daesh terrorist group, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, and boasted that no Americans died in the operation. Local residents reported a number of Syrian women and children died in the strike.

“Last night at my direction, US military forces in northwest Syria successfully undertook a counterterrorism operation to protect the American people and our Allies, and make the world a safer place,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday.

“Thanks to the skill and bravery of our Armed Forces, we have taken off the battlefield Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi—the leader of ISIS (Daesh). All Americans have returned safely from the operation,” Biden added.

The Pentagon disclosed the raid by US special operations forces on Wednesday night, calling it "successful" because there were no American casualties.

“As has become so typical of US efforts to cover up their war crimes by presenting them as accomplishments to be celebrated, President Biden’s press conference pushes all the wrong buttons,” said Grossman.  

“He states the raid was carried out by US military forces based in Northwest Syria, to “protect the American people and [American] allies” but does not explain the legal basis for having hostile US military forces in Syria while the US has made no secret of its commitment to engineering “regime change” in Syria and to supporting Israel’s self-serving and illegal policy of waging war on Syria,” he stated.  

“Similarly, he makes no effort whatsoever to explain just how US bombing raids in Syria carried out in violation of international law serve to ‘protect the American people’ as he so absurdly claims,” he added.

“Instead, we are given a cartoon-styled load of third-rate propaganda by a President whose mental capacity is widely questioned and whose official approval rating is now just barely above 40%,” he stated.

“The simple fact is that the continuing US military and intelligence footprint in both Syria and Iraq is a violation of both those nation’s sovereignty and, at once, part of an ongoing commitment to using tactics to advance the US regional strategy of sowing chaos using tactics which on any informed view are war crimes,” he said.  

“Quite apart from that, there remains a very real questions over the extent to which the US sees the forces comprising Daesh as an enemy as opposed to US proxies in the war on Syria, Yemen and Iran,” he noted.

“All in all, if I was still a university lecturer as I was more than 30 years ago, I would give President Biden a colossal ‘fail’ for having the cheeks to sell this drivel to the American people and the world at large,” he concluded.
Source: Press TV