Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said officials can’t jump from doing nothing in Syria to sending in the Marines. U.S. officials must use a host of tools to bring about a political change there as well as deal with vast humanitarian suffering, which has left more than 9 million people in need of aid, she told NPR on Feb. 7. They can’t rush from no action to putting boots on the ground there, she said. “What President Obama has instructed all of us to do is just look under every stone, look at every tool that we…
Browsing: Syria
Top leaders of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit said they were preparing to put boots on the ground in Syria during their eight-month deployment, which wrapped up last month. Col. Matthew St. Clair, the MEU commander, and Navy Capt. Jim Cody, who led the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group, spoke to a group of reporters at the Potomac Institute in Virginia on Thursday. When President Obama discussed a military strike in September against the Bashar al-Assad regime following an apparent chemical weapons attack on civilians, St. Clair said Marines were preparing for a situation that would require them to make landfall, according to U.S. News…
The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit landed in Jordan recently, putting the bulk of its 2,400 personnel on land to participate in Exercise Eager Lion. It’s an annual event designed to improve security in the region and relationships between the two militaries. As MEUs frequently do, however, the unit has cast a long shadow across the region. Ongoing fighting in Syria between government forces and rebels has gripped the region, leading to some foreign media reports questioning whether the Marines have been stationed along the Syria-Jordan border for the sake of security. Take this one: A large American military force disembarked…
