Carpet bombing Syria? Yeah, not happening, even in all out war, except in remote areas, but the people we want to bomb are in cities. We don't carpet bomb cities anymore.
War with Russia is not the endgame here, I'm pretty sure of it - we have all kinds of things we could do to provoke that - and we haven't.
Nation building, but for whom? Us? The Syrian people will never accept the West, or a Western style democracy. The best we can hope for is a weak Sunni leader, who will work with us under orders of the Saud family.
Which is probably what the real end game is here. Toppling Assad, while ISIS is still a real and credible threat, is the dumbest thing we could do - it not only hands Syria over to Saud (and the Sunnis), but it basically means ISIS wins, because they're trying to topple Assad, too - for Sunni Islam.
ISIS isn't just going to go home if this happens, they'll move on to the next country to invade, start a fake civil war, and drag us into the conflict. The big juicy country in the region? Iran. They're the last Shiite stronghold.
None of this is to our benefit, unless a deal was brokered, behind the scenes. Like "If we help topple Assad...you won't interfere when we take Obama and Hillary down, and we'll tiptoe around any connections to you while we do it."
Nothing else really makes any sense. Trump is a deal maker. Attacking Assad, even symbolically like this, is not his style. He didn't do this to impress the Chinese. Something else is going on, that we'll never hear about. Something else that's making the Trump White House ignore the false flags surrounding all of this.
Unless it's some bizarre Gary Kasparov on acid 3423D chess move.