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Comment by nefitty | Hacker News Reader

I am generally anti-war, anti-Trump, anti-Republican... so you can imagine my surprise at the sense of relief this act has given me. Assad has been stomping on innocents in his little part of the world without substantive rebuke for far too long. What's the point of the US's ideals if we don't stand up to the bullies of the world? I know intervention leads to horrors, but refusal to act to stop war crimes is almost as morally reprehensible as committing them yourself. Anyone else thinking along the same lines right now?

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I agree that Assad is "stomping on innocents". But so are the rebels he is fighting, namely ISIS and Al Qaeda and similar groups in a smorgasbord of terror. Shall we bomb them too (and thereby strengthen Assad)? Mideast politics are horrendously complicated and need to be untangled carefully, as one would untangle the wiring in a bomb. Unintended consequences are the norm, unfortunately.

Absolutely right. We shouldn't use the same methods to fight terrorism, though. If one of your opponents plays the centralized-government military game, play by those rules, if another plays by the decentralized-guerilla warfare game, play that. At the end of the day I think it's the US's responsibility, as arguably the most powerful military force on earth, to defend humans caught in the crossfire of other military actors. My support of unilateral action against Assad does not preclude my support for fighting the smaller repressive regimes he claims to be chasing.

Just because an anti-Assad militia is Muslim doesn’t make it a terrorist organization. Approximately everybody in that whole region are Muslim. Of course the rebels are Muslim. A few of them have links to or are affiliated with terrorist organizations, but when you’re involved in a fight for survival you take help from anyone offering it. Fights like this are messy and dangerous and no good ever comes of them. But they still need to be fought. Trump is about to learn this.

This wasn't much of a rebuke. The message to Assad is that killing innocent people is fine--just don't do it with chemicals.

I find Trump's sudden reversal on this very suspicious. This seems to be mainly a politically motivated action that 1 - makes him look tougher than Obama on the 'red line' issue and 2 - deflects from the Russia investigation.

Things will get interesting (in a very bad way) if Assad calls the bluff.

Bearing in mind Assad has already previously used chemical weapons, and Trump's campaign vow not to intervene was well after that, one really has to wonder what his thinking is on this.

I'm not saying we shouldn't intervene, I don't see how the international community can let something like this stand, but how can he justify being against intervening after the previous chemical attacks when he was a candidate, but order intervention after chemical attacks as president? Russia and China are going to have a field day arguing this point in the Security Council. It seriously weakens the US position.

I'm thinking along those lines. I'm not American but very, very, anti-war/military. However, after all the shitty wars the world has been involved in throughout the last few decades it was bothering me that we would stand by and watch the horrors inflicted on innocent civilians AND support Assad. The problem of course is how does it all end when you have a brutal dictator vs. ISIS but to stand by and watch for the most part is immoral. I don't know what the course of action should be (arrest Assad, continue to bombard ISIS out of existence?) but something needs to be done. It's disheartening the Trump is the one to do it because that's a man I don't want running a war.

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