To paraphrase Bon Jovi, our Syria strikes shot through “the heart” of Syria’s chemical weapons program. “We are,” Nikki Haley tells us, “confident that we have crippled Syria’s chemical weapons program.” But…

“I would say there’s still a residual element of the Syrian program that’s out there,” General McKenzie said. “I’m not going to say that they’re going to be unable to continue to conduct a chemical attack in the future. I suspect, however, they’ll think long and hard about it.”

Just a little FYI: the metaphor of shooting something through “the heart” means that you’ve killed it. Supernatural powers or magic aside, death is forever. So unless you’re invoking magic or the supernatural, it makes no fucking sense to say that you’ve killed something but you’re “not going to say” that it’s “going to be unable” to re-constitute itself. In that case, what you’re saying is that you’ve killed it, but it’s not dead. In which case you probably shouldn’t have claimed to have killed it.

General McKenzie “suspects” that the Syrians are going to think “long and hard about” using chemical weapons again. Really? Like as hard as they did when they decided to use chemical weapons despite the last time we bombed them? And how “long” does he think that’ll be? About as long as last time–like a year or so? If they do it again in a year, will we just repeat the same charade in a year’s time? And if they do it the year after that, will we do it that year, too? What if they start doing it every six months? Will we follow suit?

What the fuck is wrong with our military establishment? Are these people as fucking stupid as they sound? We don’t need to bomb Syria half as badly as we need to slap the living shit out of them. Or put it this way: I’m not going to say that we don’t need to do that.