By Charles M. Blow
Trump’s official statement claimed that the [U.S. missile] strikes were in response to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s monstrous chemical weapons attack against his own people.

But the statement also went further into the fiction of fear often touted to buttress humanitarian missions: “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.” This has echoes of the George W. Bush warning about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” a lie that led us into a near decade-long war.
Excerpted from an op/ed in the New York Times.