Trump/May/Macron action was justified

Well we didn't have to wait long. Overnight it has happened. The airstrikes and Tomahawk cruise missile attacks were pretty proportionate and very precisely targeted. I can see Jim Mattis's hand in the targeting list. No airbases, no aircraft, nowhere where there might be civilians nearby. Just three chemical weapons sights/facilities, presumably destroyed to rubble. So a big message to Assad and to Putin. It won't end the civil war and it won't bring down Assad but it will tell Assad and Putin that if they ever drop chemicals/nerve agents on anyone ever again they will get an even bigger response. Mattis said this was a one-shot but Trump made it clear that the US would be back for more strikes if Assad didn't stop filling munitions with chemicals. I agree with this tough message. I think it's right, justified and proper. I think Trump should be supported, not just by the UK and France but by the whole international community. This won't happen because that's the way the world is, but no one should be happy when one country on this planet is resorting to such weapons. No weapons are nice and every attack that kills civilians is wrong and illegal and terrible. But there is something about the use of chemical and biological weapons in a civil war which horrifies one more than ordinary bombs. Both kill but it's the idea of a leader of a country actually thinking it would be a good idea to make men women and children suffer with dangerous chemicals that puts what Assad has one into a different category of war. It still seems extraordinarily shameful that the West did nothing to punish Saddam Hussein when he used mustard gas and sarin nerve agent to kill 5,000 Kurds in the Kurdish city of Halabja on March 16 1988. But times have moved on and we are in a more dangerous world. Saddam got his comeuppance in 2003 - a long time to wait for his punishment - but the US, Britain and France thought, quite rightly, that if Assad was allowed to get away with resorting to chemical weapons attacks against civilians, this sort of horror would become the norm, not just in Syria but elsewhere in other war zones. Moscow has threatened that there will be consequences. But Putin has played one reckless card too many. He has supported Assad whatever the Syrian tyrant has done and now the world community needs to condemn the Russian leader and isolate him. The Russians are a great people but their leader is destroying the image of their motherland and if he decides to carry out some retaliatory strike against the US, Britain or France, he will be treated as a pariah on the world stage. Russia was supposed to be the guarantor of Syria's elimination of ALL of its chemical weapons stocks in 2016. Clearly not only did Russia fail as the framework nation to fulfill its promise to the world but Moscow has lied and lied again about Syria's continuing use of the chemical weapons that were secretly stored away for future use. Assad and Putin have now both got what they deserved.