The immediate reaction to President Bill Clinton’s decision to bomb suspected terrorist encampments in Afgahnistan and Sudan is one based on cynicism: He ordered the military strike to distract from his troubles with Kenneth Starr’s investigation. But hold your fire. There is too little information to draw those sorts of conclusions but ample reason to believe the counterattack was for the purposes stated.

Already, however, Republican Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana has expressed skepticism about the strike, saying, “The timing is certainly suspect.”

The president laid out a clear case for the U.S. military strikes against the terrorist facilities, which he said were linked to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire whom U.S. officials call a major sponsor of terrorism. First, he said the groups that were bombed had executed terrorist attacks against Americans in the past. Second, the United States had persuasive information that the groups were planning additional terrorist attacks against U.S citizens and others. Third, they were trying to acquire chemical weapons.

It is no surprise that the United States was following the activity of terrorists suspected in the recent embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, where more than 300 people, including 12 Americans, were killed; and certainly it was expected that the Pentagon would execute a swift, violent reprisal, although Defense Secretary William Cohen made it a point to say that the strike was not for any individual act but to stop a pattern of terrorist attacks.

In Secretary Cohen words: “There will be no sanctuary for terrorists, and no limit to our resolve to defend American citizens and our interests, our ideals of democracy and law against these cowardly attacks.”

Secretary Cohen’s high-profile involvement in the subsequent description of the attack mitigates against it being a mere political distraction. The former Republican senator from Maine is too skilled to become entangled in any of the sordid affairs that currently plague the White House.

As further explanations of the airstrike emerge in the coming days, pundits will examine the need for the strikes from every possible perspective. That is both fair and necessary. But given the tragedy at the U.S. embassies and the lack of evidence to the contrary, doubting the purpose of the counterattack at this stage is is a harmful step in a dangerous world.