“Last night’s strikes were only the beginning,” Defense Department spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby told the Pentagon press corps. More strikes can be “expected.”

Well, let’s hope so: the $64,000 question has been whether Barack Obama would take this war seriously, and whether the military means would match the mission of degrading and “ultimately destroying” the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. As Kirby’s only-the-beginning comment implies, the strikes carried out last night were more pinpricks than shock-and-awe. Indeed, 1998’s Operation Desert Fox – the Clinton-era cruise-missile raid that introduced the term “pinprick” to military punditry – was many times larger than last night’s as-yet-unnamed operation.