The Case for Bombing Assad

Bombing Syria over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Douma last week—as President Donald Trump promises to do—is almost an absurdity. Nearly half a million people on all sides have been killed in Syria since the civil war erupted in 2011, barely 100 of them by the regime’s most recent sarin attack. Assad can mass murder civilians by the hundreds of thousands with exploding barrel bombs packed with shrapnel, but he can’t gas 0.01 percent as many with a nerve agent? It bare...