- Limited military action will no have impact on Assad's rule, much less Syria's murky future.
- More expansive military action without a diplomatic consensus amongst the opposition in Syria will embolden warring factions and sink the nation further into conflict
- It will leave the US in yet another quagmire, and after eventually withdrawing, will damage US foreign policy further as an Iraq 2.0
It's interesting that Trump's statement following the attacks focused
solely on chemical weapons, the same restricted objective that Sec Kerry envisioned a few years ago. By limiting the objective to something specific, and setting military action around it, you can act without committing to the conflict as a whole. It wasn't even an airfield, much less all of their airfields, but rather the same one these planes allegedly landed on. And even then, the Pentagon had to try avoid Russian military.