Permawar: The Pentagon declared its missile strike completely successful, taking out the “heart” of Syrian chemical warfare facilities. They said all 105 missiles fired by the US, Britain, and France reached their targets with no losses.

President Trump tweeted, “Mission Accomplished!”, recycling the claim of President George W. Bush after the Iraq invasion in 2003, which turned out to be the opening of a war that still isn’t over.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said, “We are confident that we have crippled Syria’s chemical weapons program. We are prepared to sustain this pressure, if the Syrian regime is foolish enough to test our will.”

At the same time, the Trump White House has no clear policy on Syria. President Trump said he’s pulling out US advisory troops while still hanging around to enforce international law against chemical weapons. And what’s the difference between gassing civilians and dropping barrel bombs on them?

Russia, which was supposed to ensure that Syria adhered to a 2013 agreement to get rid of all its chemical weapons, yesterday called for a condemnation of the missile attack in an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. It was rejected by an 8-3 vote with four abstentions.

Syria claimed to have shot down some of the incoming missiles, but Pentagon officers said they fired 40 anti-aircraft missiles after all the incoming ordinance had already hit.

Marine Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie said he could not ensure that all of Syria’s chemical capabilities were wiped out. “I would say there’s still a residual element of the Syrian program that’s out there,” 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.”

Trigger Men: Gun rights activists, some of them carrying rifles and handguns, converged yesterday on state capitals across the country. They collected in Boston; Montpelier, Vt.; Albany, N.Y.; Austin, Texas, Des Moines as well as other cities.

The demonstrators ranged from more moderate defenders of the Second Amendment to militia groups and “Three Percenters,” the ones who believe three percent of colonists rose up with their guns to fight the revolution.”

Some carried the Confederate flag and the Gadsden flag, the one with the coiled snake and slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Nation: A lawyer active in gay and transgender civil rights burned himself to death in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in a protest against global warming. David Buckel, 60, left a note saying he burned himself with fossil fuel to demonstrate that all of mankind is doing the same to itself.

Buckel was a lead lawyer in the 2000 lawsuit on behalf of transgender rape-murder victim Brandon Teena, winning damages from Nebraska law enforcement for neglect. It was the basis for the movie “Boys Don’t Cry.”

End Game: Adam Davidson writes in The New Yorker that the criminal investigation of President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen signals the end for the President. “This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency,” Davidson says. “This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth.” 

Davidson lists a string of questionable Trump deals with criminal elements from Azerbaijan to the Republic of Georgia and Indonesia. He writes, “Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it, too.” 

The Obit Page: Art Bell, the overnight radio host whose talk fodder was the paranormal, has died at age 72. From the studio he built and operated alone in the Nevada desert, Bell listened to sleepless Americans tell their stories about alien abductions, crop circles, and anthrax scares. He kept one special phone line for people to call about Area 51, the secret military base that has long been believed by conspiracy theorists to be the center of knowledge about UFOs, and the storage facility for the bodies of space aliens.

Bell once told The Washington Post, “There is a difference in what people are willing to consider, daytime versus nighttime.”

Expectorum Profitum!: Harry Potter can’t just wave his wand and make people buy tickets, but the Broadway producers of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” have bet their money — a lot of it — that people will show up in droves. They’ve spent a record $68 million to bring the show to the stage, including $33 million to build the set.

The Weasley brothers are never going to be able to afford tickets.

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