Definitions:

1) Limited attack: Not unlimited, as in “We will not turn your country into a glassy slag heap from border to border.”

2) Tailored response: See definition #1.

That leaves a lot of room, doesn’t it? Given that 1.5% of Syrian casualties over the past two years were generated in around an hour (a good working definition of WMD), I expect the rhetoric of the day is playing down just how robust the response is going to be. The Syrians have about $1 billion worth of Mig 29s. They have several billion invested in their air defense systems.

Destroying them wouldn’t significantly change the war on the ground, but it would result in a tremendous amount of butthurt for the regime, costing them scads of money and making them much more vulnerable within the region. If you don’t think it can be done, you don’t know your history:

en.wikipedia.org