Obama official: US Syria Strike Was Four Years Late

Military action “to reestablish the prohibition against gassing civilians” is “the right thing to do,” and President Trump “was right to do it quickly,” asserts Tom Malinowski at The Atlantic. Because, says Malinowski — the Obama-era assistant secretary of state for human rights — “when dealing with mass killing by unconventional or conventional means, deterrence is more effective than disarmament,” the path chosen by his former boss. After Bashar al-Assad’s 2013 sarin-gas attack on civilians, Washington should have launched “both punitive and preventive strikes against his military” to “eliminate as many as possible of the aircraft that could be used to deliver chemical weapons,” followed by “a threat to strike again should he use ground-based weapons to launch chemical strikes in the future.”