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This is perhaps only one of the first of many off-the-wall actions that will continue to confuse and confound those who are ambivalent about Donald Trump. Was I surprised? Darned RIGHT. But my surprise was as nothing compared to the Syrians and Russians, who somehow had come to believe that the past eight years proved they had little to fear from the US.

The objective is not to remove Assad, but to persuade him that some kinds of behavior are simply not tolerated. The Russians had assured us that all stocks of chemical weapons (inherited from Saddam Hussein just before the start of the Second Gulf war) had been accounted for and destroyed. It actually matters little if the stocks of the chemical weapons were used directly by the Syrian government forces, or if ISIS had run a “false flag”, releasing the poison gases stolen from Syrian national military depots. The fact is, they were supposed to have been long since removed and destroyed.