What message do Trump’s missiles really send?

Let me take this opportunity to join with our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in commending President Trump’s swift and decisive military action against the Syrian government as being ‘appropriate’ — one of my favourite words and one which I like to use every day, regardless of whether it is appropriate to do so.

The important thing was not of course the destruction of a few Syrian planes and, collaterally, a few Syrian children. The crucial point is that this moderate and judicious use of expensive missiles ‘sends out a message’ to President Assad. And the message is very simple. We will no longer tolerate Syrian children being killed by hugely unpleasant chemical weapons such as sarin or chlorine gas. We may think of the Syrians as pitiful specimens who do not amount to much, but in fact they are actually human beings. And as human beings, they have the right to be killed by nice clean high–ordnance, weaponry such as those fabulous Tomahawk cruise missiles that Mr Trump dispatched and which did, indeed, kill a few lucky children living near the airbase. Assad must learn that it is barbaric to kill children with nerve gas, but civilised and even kindly to kill them with high explosives.

Another message it sends out is that we shall in future act as referees, or perhaps line judges, in this interesting conflict — in order to spin it out for as long as is humanly possible, and thus maximise the number of people killed. If too many people are killed by one side in a very short space of time we will intervene. We want many, many more people to be killed over a much longer period of time — and this will be the effect of that raid on Assad’s nasty aeroplanes.