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Originally Posted by PaulS
Hopefully took out the planes that dropped the gas. Generally in favor of these types of actions but worried about mission creep, putting our soldiers at risk, etc.
But also indicative of the zigging and zagging on policies.
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The other scary thing (which really makes these problems almost impossible to solve) is that as bad a guy as Assad is, he is also ruthlessly fighting ISIS, which helps us.
So while some of the people he is slaughtering are innocents who we all would like to help, others he is fighting are even worse than he is. As we learned in Iraq, if we just had him killed, there's a real chance that he could be replaced with someone a million times worse than he is. How do you deal with that? Beats me.
My hope is that Trump sent Assad a message by firing a shot across the bow, the message being "as long as you are killing ISIS jihadists, we will tolerate quite a bit from you, but not chemical attacks on civilians, so knock it off or I'll kill you and take my chances".
Politically, it also seems to reject the notion that Trump doesn't care about Syrian civilians, as well as the notion that Trump is working for Putin.