I think the answer is yes.

1. It’s always good for the president when there’s military action overseas, at least in the short run, because people rally around the flag.

And there’s no evidence here that Trump intends to get American soldiers stuck in a long ground war.

2. Had Trump done nothing, for weeks the MSM would have been showing us pictures of the poor children killed by the Sarin gas. Trump heads that off and makes the MSM shut up.

Also, it seems that Trump gave warning about the attack so that the airbase could be evacuated, heading off the negative publicity of pictures of dead victims of the attack.

3. Trump sends a message to North Korea and other countries up to no good that we mean business and we’re no longer the wishy-washy country previously led by Obama.

* * *

There are a lot of yahoos in the comments insisting the chemical attack was a “false flag attack.” Sounds like a dumb conspiracy theory to me. Even the Russians and the Syrians don’t say that, their story is that they accidentally blew up an Al-Nusra Front (aka Al-Qaeda in Syria) chemical weapons storehouse.

Trump has access to intelligence information that I don’t have. I’m not in the mood to believe that Trump was duped by his own intelligence agencies.

Even if he was duped, why does it matter? The world knew about the attack and blamed Assad, Trump had to do something. Even in the unlikely event that the “false flag” conspiracy theory is true, then we should thank the false-flag people for giving Trump the opportunity take advantage of it.