I may have done the same thing as Trump after a while, but I'd have damn sure waited for more proof that those aircraft actually dropped chemical weapons rather than taking Al Qaeda's word for it or at the very least, I'd have hit that Al Qaeda stronghold just as hard saying we couldn't be sure whether it was their weapons hit by an airstrike that caused the deaths or weapons dropped by the Syrians that caused the deaths.
Messaging by hurting the people fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda isn't smart no matter who the message was intended for.
JMHo
We have the radar tracks of aircraft. They could have dropped anything from watermelons to chemical weapons. So far, everyone who swears they dropped chemical weapons is either an Al Qaeda combatant or Al Qaeda support personnel, all in a city that has been an Al Qaeda stronghold for years.
I believe we have considerably more than radar tracks. Likely sources: electronic intercepts of communication, satellite/drone live images of impact site and casualties, human intel from the Israelis/ our own, maybe spectrum analysis of the agent from sensors aloft or in orbit.
Sources we do not wish to reveal for many good reasons.
I have seen pics from the airfield of chemical weapon containers. Are they legit? We cannot tell provenance over the Internet.
But we have far, far more intelligence than radar tracks. The question is, do we believe it?
Could it be a false flag?
A whole lot is “possible” but I doubt it. Kill off nearly a hundred of your own on the off chance that a third party will respond, when they have not for 7 years? Seems unlikely, especially since the reports are that this is simply a 10X larger example of events that have been more or less ongoing for the entire 7 years.
al Qaeda’s not the only people on the ground over there feeding us intel.
We had people on the ground over there even back in the 80s when we were looking for Higgins and Buckley who had been abducted in Lebanon by Syria and Iran’s pets, Hezbollah.