That was a war crime, the vile act of a regime that long ago parted ways with any minimally countenanced rules of engagement in a civil war that has already claimed at least 400,000, left a million homeless and triggered a refugee crisis that has slopped over into just about every corner of the planet.

Trump, to his own disgrace, hadn’t been moved by any of that, bringing down the hammer even harder with executive orders aimed at blocking the dispossessed from breaching America’s shores. Only a week ago, the Trump administration indicated that Washington could live just fine with Assad, who in December described Trump as a “natural ally” for Syria, if he held fast to his hard position on thwarting terrorism. Where president Barack Obama had made the removal of odious Assad — by stepping down, as if — a key component of American policy in the region, Trump seemed poised to reverse that posture.

So maybe it was the effect of those ghastly photos of baby corpses and parents kissing their dying children goodbye that lodged in Trump’s soul. Just as the world convulsed in horror at images of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, his small body washed up on shore after most of his Syrian family perished attempting to reach Europe across the sea in 2015.

The sincerity of Trump’s revulsion following the chemical attack on the northern town of Khan Skeikhoun seemed genuine enough to me. “Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children,” Trump told reporters Thursday night. “It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”

Yet we, the international community, have allowed it. Obama allowed it when government forces shelled a Damascus suburb with poison gas four years ago, killing at least 1,400 and maiming thousands. Rather than taking any military action beyond delivering some small arms to anti-government rebels, Obama limited his response to a demand that Syria turn over its chemical weapons stockpile for destruction. Assad’s claimed acquiescence always beggared belief and, in the bloody years since, Syria has shelled civilians with chlorine gas on several occasions before this week’s atrocity.

The airfield struck is believed to be where the planes which dropped the chemical bombs on Khan Sheikhoun launched, a base where Russian forces are also hunkered. Was Moscow complicit?

Some — on Trump’s Republican far right and the Democrat left — immediately condemned the missile strike. Hell, they fulminated, he promised to get the U.S. out of foreign wars. Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, an air force veteran, tweeted: “His actions in Syria, Iraq & Yemen show he is acting like a warmonger.”

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That’s how far some have wandered from due north on their moral compass.

But others, including impassioned Trump critics Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi supported the president’s strike authorization, describing it as “proportional” and “measured.” Mere hours before the Tomahawks blasted away from destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean, Hillary Clinton, in an interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, called for Trump to “take out” Assad’s airfields. “I really believe that we should have and still should take out his airfields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop Sarin gas on them.”

Any further military force against Syria clearly requires a debate and vote in Congress:

What next?

Everybody wants a diplomatic solution to the seven-year grotesquerie in Syria, complicated by colliding interests, regional tensions and death cult Daesh forces straddling the Syria-Iraq border and the pushback being waged against the ersatz Daesh caliphate in northern Iraq. But diplomacy has had no traction with Assad, emboldened as he has been with Russia as an ally.

A limited missile strike won’t put Assad on the run. But something has changed profoundly, an operational and geopolitical shift. Instead of cosying up to President Vladimir Putin — and the whole Russian meddling in the election is a separate issue that’s not going away — Trump should manoeuvre to induce the man he’s professed to admire into pressuring Damascus for a ceasefire, political settlement and negotiated transfer of power. Putin cannot have Assad’s back anymore. He’s got influence — use it.

Most immediately, and without any military escalation, no-fly zones should be established — as was done in Kurdish Iraq — to provide civilians safe refuge from bombing and so they don’t take desperately to the sea.

And Trump, after opening the Tomahawk tubes, should also open America’s borders to vagabond humanity.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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