The 59 Tomahawks: not the kind of move one can make a blanket assessment about 12 hours later

What I find noteworthy this morning is the range of opinion on the Right about it. (Haven't seen anything from the Left yet; those folks may still be smarting from the spanking they got in the Senate over SCOTUS-nominee filibusters yesterday.)

Ralph Peters unequivocally thinks it was great:

As I write these lines, I’m unabashedly proud to be an American. Republican, Democrat or independent, you should be, too. Once again, we stood on the side of justice and humanity.

It’s been too damned long, but we’re back.

Ted Cruz qualifies his take with a caveat:

Senator Ted Cruz offered a carefully worded statement with an important takeaway: justify it.

Today, after eight years of Obama foreign policy failures, Syria is a humanitarian disaster. Bashar al-Assad is a monster, a puppet of Russia and Iran, and he has once again used chemical weapons against his own citizens, murdering innocent men, women, and children.

Our prayers are with Assad’s victims, and with the victims of the ISIS and al Qaeda terrorists ripping Syria apart. And, as always, our support and prayers are with the brave Americans in uniform who carried out the military strike tonight.

Any military action in Syria must be justified as protecting the vital national security interests of America – including decisive action to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of radical Islamic terrorists – and I look forward to our Commander-in-Chief making the case to Congress and the American people how we should do so in the days ahead.

That’s not a dissent, but it is careful.

A solidly conservative Facebook friend of mine - against Trump until the final days before the election, and still willing to call him out, but generally supportive of his appointments  - gives it the big thumbs down. Says that aside from oil wells, there's nothing in Syria worth the $50 million we spent on the missiles.

As LITD readers know, I'm pretty much of an unabashed absolutist. I have some core principles I rely on to guide me in all areas of life, and they form the basis of my views on whether something is good or bad. I rarely respond to anything by saying, "I blow hot and cold on this."

But on this matter, I say that there are several ways to look at it.

 There's the fact that the US finally made good on the red line of which the previous president spoke. It re-estabishes the US as the one country with the might, clout and moral capital to really and truly demonstrate that the world does not tolerate a certain level of atrocity.

You'll recall my post from yesterday about how Syria and North Korea having become front-burner issues makes considerations regarding Russia and China more acute. With that in mind, the timing of Xi's visit to Mar-a-Lago is rich in significance:

“China now likely views Trump’s threat to take unilateral action against North Korea as more credible,” said M. Taylor Fravel, an associate professor of political science in the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“China may be more willing to take actions, either by itself or with others, to slow the pace or even halt Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs,” Fravel added. “But North Korea is a much greater challenge militarily that cannot be solved with symbolic strikes.”

Any military strike on North Korea — especially against its leadership or nuclear sites — would likely be followed by a counterattack on Seoul that would devastate the South Korean capital, something Pyongyang has long threatened to carry out if it comes under attack.

Youngshik Daniel Bong, a research fellow at the Yonsei University Institute for North Korean Studies in South Korea said the strikes have “generated enormous impact.”

“The missile strikes must have been discussed and decided by the Trump administration when it was preparing for the summit meeting with President Xi.”

These discussions, he said, likely “included Secretary of State Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mattis. That means, it is not just President Trump acting bold. It means there is a very high level of internal unity among top officials of the administration and the president in favor of bold actions that will bring actual results, not the usual resorting to diplomacy and multilateral cooperation.”

But we are already getting a fairly clear indication of how Russia sees it:

"President [Vladimir] Putin regards the US attacks on Syria as an aggression against a sovereign state in violation of the norms of international law, and under a trumped-up pretext at that," Pesov told reporters.

And consider that Secretary of State Tillerson recently said that US policy is decisively back to being that Assad must go.

As an isolated viewpoint it's reasonable enough, but the record in recent years concerning what fills the vacuum after regime changes in Middle Eastern countries is not a good one. We should keep that in mind as we take in these endorsements of yesterday's action. When ISIS and al-Qaeda praise what you've done, it ought to make you step back and think about where it all is going.

It's done. It's in the record books now. A major move has been made on the chessboard. Let us hope that the scenarios for possible subsequent moves are being discussed exhaustively.