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I have to say, Americans do love a good bombing raid.

I remember news reports showing Americans watching the clips of the raids over Bagdad back in 2003, many of them cheering as they witnessed one explosion after another.

“Shock and awe” is how it was described, and Americans loved it. According to a Huffington Post poll on the Syrian action, we still do (51%).

Interestingly enough, though, a larger majority don’t believe the Syrian bombings will have any lasting value. Apparently they support this act of war on the basis of it being a “righteous retaliation.”

After all, the Syrian government used a chemical weapon on its own people last week. Only barbarians do such a thing, and the U.S. had to show our moral disapproval.

Except…except that 55% of those same Americans who support Trump’s “righteous retaliation” bombings supported his travel ban of Syrian refugees when he first announced it, and still do (Morning Consult/Politico poll).

So the majority of Americans were moved to tears to see Syrian citizens killed by sarin gas, but NOT moved enough to let them into our country as they seek refuge from such brutality.

I must say, I am unimpressed with that kind of moral conscience. Frankly, it looks more like hypocrisy than moral outrage to me.

Especially when Republicans in Congress who are now enthusiastically supporting Trump’s Syrian action refused when President Obama asked them for similar support in going after Assad when he used chemical weapons the first time.

How can these people sleep at night?

But let’s put the Syrian bombings in a larger context to see how it stands up under real moral scrutiny.

On the 28th of this month, if a US federal budget deadline goes unchecked, our nation will cut funding to a large array of UN humanitarian and peacekeeping operations. Millions of the world’s poorest people, including Syrian refugees, will be effected.

On top of that, conservatives have managed to get Trump to cut funding to the UN population fund. Why? Because it is the largest buyer of contraceptives in the world to distribute to third world nations and refugees to hold down population growth.

And then there are the deep cuts Trump has proposed to domestic social programs while throwing money down the rat hole we call “military spending” so we can build more ships and planes we don’t need and add thousands of tomahawk missiles to the thousands we already have.

It’s facts like these that made me almost gag when I heard Tom Friedman tell Charlie Rose that he was very proud his country was the one that dropped those bombs on Syrian installations.

Then I remembered that Friedman was also a strong and enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq, and look how that turned out.

Of course, the standard response to critics of the bombings like me is for someone to say, “Well, we can’t just do nothing.”

That seems to be the way so many Americans think. Either drop bombs or do nothing, as if there are no in-between alternatives. There are.

We elect leaders to find them. Acts of war should be the last thing they do, not the first. It’s their job to avoid war, not jump in at the first chance.

It always strikes me as ironic that the politicians who make the decision to send soldiers to war where they and civilians alike die never have to worry about their own safety. There is something morally repugnant about that.

So, Yes, there are alternatives in-between engaging in an act of war and doing nothing.

But a hard truth we all have to face is that when despotic leaders around the world do despotic acts, there is only so much other nations can do short of declaring all out war.

Every nation must do whatever it can to save the innocent. Morality demands it. Yet what can be done will always have its limits.

That is true even when we go to war. Responsible estimates say that thousands of Iraqi citizens have died since the U.S. invasion, including children. That should serve as a sobering reminder that war itself also leads to the death of innocents.

Perhaps the best we can do is to move with caution guided by a genuine desire to do what is right. We will never have clean hands morally whatever we do, but we can resist rushing to show off our military prowess and then justifying it as the best moral choice we could make.

That is how we end up putting our moral duplicity on display for the world to see, just as Trump did with his bombings.

How someone as responsible as Tom Friedman usually is could say it made him feel proud when we did it last week makes you realize how easy it is for any of us to be duped by political expediency posing as a moral good.