EDITORIAL: U.S. takes measured military action in Syria

America’s response Thursday to the Tuesday chemical attack on rebels by the Syrian government was a measured response to the inhumane assault by the Assad regime. It also creates the need for a cautious approach to avoid escalation on a number of fronts.

According to reports, U.S. warships launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Shayrat airfield in Syria, which U.S. officials say was the base from which Syrian planes attacked the town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing more than 80 people with chemical weapons.

In a statement Thursday night on the attack, President Trump said: “Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.

“Tonight I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons. There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council.”

Whether it was the right move may be debated, but it apparently would have been the U.S. response regardless of how last November’s election went. On Thursday, Hillary Clinton, speaking at a Women of the World summit at New York, said, “Assad has an air force, and that air force is the cause of most of these civilian deaths as we have seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days. And I really believe that we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.”

The former secretary of state also said, in a departure from the Obama administration’s position, that the U.S. should have enforced a no-fly zone in Syria and been more willing to “confront” Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The Obama administration in 2013 was poised to take a similar approach against Assad for crossing the so-called “red line,” but pulled back. As a result, negotiations with Syria and its ally Russia resulted in Assad admitting the use of chemical weapons and the destruction of much of his stockpile. Unfortunately, as evidenced Tuesday, it did not end the threat.

As would be expected, Syria is denying any chemical weapons were used at all, and its allies, Iran and Russia, are condemning the U.S. action. President Vladimir Putin is contending the missile strike was to divert attention from civil deaths from coalition airstrikes in Iraq, and that the action by Trump has strained U.S.-Russian relations.

The dangers are, of course, that the U.S. will be dragged into Syria’s civil war, or that U.S. forces could find themselves in a confrontation with Russian military at some point. Those are prospects we should avoid.

However, Assad now knows that he cannot conduct these deadly, inhumane slaughters without serious consequences. The question is whether he accepts the inevitable.