I will never forget the first time I saw the infamous Vietnam War protest poster, titled "Q: And babies? A: And Babies." As a young girl, I stared transfixed at the photo in the book I had found on my parents' shelf. In the graphic image of the My Lai Massacre, taken by Ronald L. Haeberle in 1968, a mass of contorted civilian bodies lay strewn across a dirt road. Those couldn't be real babies could they? Could they?
Now, with the horrific footage which emerged from Khan Sheikhoun of the Sarin gas attack which killed 72 civilians, 20 of them children, it seems Donald Trump has had his own "And babies?" moment. Last week, removing Bashar al-Assad was not a priority. This week, Trump has finally realised Assad is a very bad man.
In an unusually eloquent statement, Trump declared Assad's actions against "beautiful little babies" to be an "affront to humanity." When adjectives fail him, Trump usually turns to repetition. In this case, the Syrian attack provoked him into a rare triple: it was a "horrible, horrible, horrible thing. Unspeakable."
A US military campaign in Syria has now begun, with a cruise missile strike on an air base "directly linked to the horrific chemical weapons attack". While Trump's trigger finger has been itching since his days as a nominee - "If we have nuclear weapons, why can't we use them?" - his intervention will be a relief for the millions of us who have watched the slaughter of innocents in Syria for years, enraged at the lack of action from Obama and our own spineless Parliament.
Donald Trump is not a highly literate man. Reading is not his forté, he shouts out his tweets for staffers to type, and regularly decries newspapers as fake news. Trump prefers the visual medium of television to inform himself of global affairs, watching the news in his dressing gown.
If viewing footage of dead babies can convince Trump to finally take responsibility for Syria, might I suggest a movie night at Mar-a-Lago? Donald could take in An Inconvenient Truth followed by Exodus and Miss Representation. Watching a series of documentaries on Climate Change, Refugees and Feminism in his dressing gown may not give Trump enough cause to revoke some of his worst executive actions, but it might just plant a seed in his tiny mind.