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I support President Trump in this, because what you see on the surface is just a small fraction of what is going on here.

1) This was done *during* a visit by Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. The message was crystal clear: either they take care of their North Korean fat boy or we will. While we haven’t acted in past, he gets ever more belligerent with nuclear weapons and long range ballistic missiles. Stop him, or we will. No more delays.

2) From World War I, the prohibition against the use of chemical weapons was an absolute. Brezhnev stockpiled a huge amount to use against NATO, and the US paid the Russians a fortune to destroy it. By ignoring chemical weapons use in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the beast was let out of the cage in the Middle East. Obama’s spinelessness when Assad used chemical weapons to kill 1,500 people has now *forced* President Trump to send a very precise message to the Syrian Air Force.

“You used these weapons, so we blew your air base to smithereens. So don’t do it ever again.”

3) The Russians now assume that they can bully the US out of the region by sending in a cruiser to watch over and maybe attack our destroyers if they do anything else. But what *isn’t* seen is far more important. Submarines in the area.

US subs, Russian subs, Iranian subs, Egyptian subs, Israeli subs, Italian subs. Maybe even some other “players”. The eastern Mediterranean is getting downright crowded.

4) The message has been sent. The US doesn’t need to do anything else, assuming nobody else does something stupid.