On Tuesday, April 4, 2017, at 7:00 a.m. , Syrian government aircraft began circling a city in Syria and began dropping sarin nerve gas on the civilian population.  There were local witnesses, international observers, and U.S. military surveillance that observed and confirmed the aircrafts’ departure point, operational maneuvers, and return to Shayrat air base.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I saw television news coverage of the chemical weapons attack in Syria on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.  The television news coverage showed many children being treated on the street, being carried away, and being treated in the hospital for severe chemical burns on their skin.

The journalists on assignment in Syria and the military experts that were interviewed on television news on Wednesday and Thursday, all said that due to the great number of local witnesses, international observers, and U.S. military surveillance, it was definitely Syrian government forces using Syrian government aircraft that carried out the chemical weapons attack.

I was confused as to why the president of Syria would be using chemical weapons to kill civilians in Syria.  There had been enormous international pressure for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to resign since 2013, when he used chemical weapons against civilians outside of Damascus.

I read a New York Times newspaper article on Thursday that explained that Bashar al-Assad uses chemical weapons against civilians that oppose him, in order to terrorize them and demoralize them.  Probably, he wants everyone in Syria to believe that if they oppose him, there is no one coming to help them, he can do anything he wants to do them, and no one will stop him.

Hitler, Stalin, Pol pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-un, and other dictators killed civilians to demonstrate their power, eliminate opposition, silence opposition, to incite fear, and to make people live under constant fear.  Bashar al-Assad is trying to do the same thing.

If we people here in the United States don’t like mass killings of innocent civilians, we should say so, oppose it, and do things to stop it.  The United States has made it clear to the world, the Russians, Syria, and Bashar al-Assad, since 2013, that we oppose the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.  Diplomatic, economic, and military pressure has been used by the United States against Bashar al-Assad for the past four years.

Because Bashar al-Assad has ignored the warnings and pressure from the United States to not use chemical weapons to commit mass killings of innocent civilians in Syria, and he went ahead and used sarin nerve gas to kill innocent civilians on Tuesday, I believe that president Donald Trump took the correct course of action when he ordered U.S. Navy vessels on Thursday night, to launch sixty cruise missiles to destroy the Shayrat air base in Syria where the chemical attack was launched.  This prevents this air base, and the aircraft located there, from ever being used to carry out another chemical attack on civilians.

It is good that president Donald Trump made the decision to order the launch of cruise missiles to destroy Shayrat air base.  This base no longer exists now, too late, there won’t be any more attacks launched from this base.  And, if Bashar al-Assad tries to initiate a similar attack from one of the five remaining air bases in Syria, we can destroy those bases too in about one hour.  This should give Bashar al-Assad a reason to not ever use chemical weapons against innocent civilians again.

On television news, I saw that there are some journalists and some elected representatives that are saying, hold on now, we could have or should have done, this, that, or the other, waited, discussed this, pondered this, tried to work this out.  This approach has been taken for the past four years, and it resulted in Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against innocent civilians, again.

What president Donald Trump did, should make all dictators around the world worry about what the United States will do if they murder civilians.

If you were to watch international news in the following days, you would probably see outrage in Great Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, essentially every country on Earth, that Donald Trump unilaterally decided to do this, without consulting them.  Let us face the fact, that if the United States had not acted, no other country on Earth would have taken any action, not one of them.

Each of those sixty cruise missiles probably cost $1 million each.  The U.S. military operation probably cost $100 million on Thursday night.  We should be proud that each and every one of us tax payers paid for that operation to keep civilians from being killed in Syria.  We should be receiving sincere thanks from the Syrians, and the British, Canadians, French, Italians, and Germans, etc., but we won’t receive any thanks, or acknowledgement that the United States is always having to go and save everyone else, with very little help from any other country.