It
was hard not to feel some sense of emotional satisfaction, and justice
done, when American cruise missiles struck an airfield in Syria on
Thursday. The country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, needed to understand
that there would finally be a cost for his brutality, in this case the
use of chemical weapons with sarin, a banned nerve agent, that killed scores of civilians earlier this week in one of the worst atrocities of the Syrian civil war.
But it is also hard not to feel unsettled by the many questions raised by President
