Syria syrisouly?

There won't be a war between the US and Russia or the US and China. Neither side has anything to gain.As for bombing Syria, this is traditionally how the US has dealt with issues like this. Bill Clinton used to bomb Iraq every time it looked like Saddam might have been thinking about building chemical weapons. Reagan did much the same thing to Libya.So after all those Monica missiles, and finally regime change in Iraq, somebody else actually used chemical weapons on his own population. In the 1990s, this would not have triggered much of a debate as far as whether the US should respond.It appears that international norms have changed since then. Chemical weapons may be acceptable now. We'll have to see.Edited by gene90, : No reason given.

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The US needs to save face on this one by not appearing to be the only ignorant hawkish brutish country willing to kill in the name of non violence.

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Do you deny the logic of using violence to suppress violence? The police do that every day.

Well, there is no good option here. I tend to favor a small strike, aimed at Assad's palaces and the specific military units that appeared to launch the attack. But this would serve little purpose other than a personal, punitive action against Assad. I only advocate that to reinforce behavioral norms.But Assad seems fated to win. In additional to the many bystanders we will kill with our own missiles, we could easily do enough damage to the regime to prolong an awful war, in which nearly 1,000 people are dieing by conventional means in an average week. To punish an atrocity in which 1,400 were killed?If chemical weapons could end the war tomorrow with only a couple of tens of thousands killed, some might interpret chemical weapons as a moral imperative for Assad. I do not, but it could be argued.I agree with whoever it was that said that they don't envy Obama having to make this decision. Humanitarian concerns and political ones (reaffirming norms of behavior) are seriously at odds.The difference between the US and the police, of course, is that violence done by the police (kidnapping and incarcerating people is inherently violent) is legitimized by nations through various rituals (elections, jurisprudence, etc). The US does not have that universally recognized legitimacy outside it's own borders to punish bad behavior not directed at itself. The best we can do is try to scare up a coalition--as you said a bit differently--of enough countries to show something of an international consensus. That just isn't happening. We should not attack alone.I think that the international community should try to come up with stable expectations of how states should behave in their own borders. At one end, we might just declare state sovereignty to be absolute and be done with it. Or we could lay out a series of expectations and examples of punitive measures. But they must be consistent, so that even 'bad guys' that don't like it know exactly what they can get away with and what they can't. Most of our wars lately seem to come about by misunderstandings on that point, usually caused by sudden changes in the norms.

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And that Assad had UN inspectors not far away from the attack site making the gas attack an insane move by him i kind of doubt that he was the one who used the gas.

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I see no proof either way, but Occam's Razor would hold that the gas attacks were more likely carried out by the side that is known to have chemical weapons and the technical capacity to use them and was in fact attacking the same places with conventional weaponry at the time of the chemical attack, and not the side that is not known to have CW, or the ability to use CW, and which was on the receiving end of the attack.I don't think that the UN inspectors are or ever were of any concern to Assad. As long as the regime kept them away from the site they were of no use at all. After bombing the areas that were gassed for a few days, and after word got out that foreign intelligence agencies already had samples, he did let them in. Then somebody shot at them once or twice to keep them from getting too comfortable.We're having this discussion not because of the inspectors, but because Assad underestimated the propaganda value of the videos that immediately hit the internet, and probably had no idea how thoroughly Damascus is being worked by foreign intelligence agencies.Finally, we can't say that it was "insane" of Assad to carry out that attack. Most of the usual suspects have refused to intervene. The President has put it up to Congress. Even if the attack eventually happens, it will be "limited." We don't want to topple his government, and Assad himself will almost certainly survive his miscalculation.

Well, you left out from the analogy that it would not only be in one of our cities, but in a neighborhood occupied by the rebels that was under government attack by conventional weapons as well. And it would probably look to me like the government did it, depending on how sophisticated the weapon was. Were it something that got brewed up in a kitchen I'd have to reconsider.Could the rebels have looted some goodies? Or been given them by outsiders? That seems plausible, but for me it's quite a way from there to probable.People usually don't end up using the best weaponry they have against themselves. Also, even if Assad was winning, these rebel strongholds were in Damascus, very close to his seat of government, he would probably very much like them gone. And on occasions when WMDs have been used historically, they have not been used by a side that is losing.America had virtually won the war when we used nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The people in the towns that Saddam gassed were not a military threat to him, rather he made an example of them of what happens to people that don't subject to his rule.Both instances were demonstrations of power by a superior military force, and not acts of desperation by the losing side. Assad needs to demonstrate his own power these days, to force the war to an endgame stage. I hope he'll use more "civilized" meansI agree with you that the rebels are not trustworthy. They've committed some pretty awful low-tech atrocities themselves, and often we could use "terrorist" and "rebel" interchangeably with these guys. Odd to be in a position where I favor attacking the person that I want to win the war.

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A religious sect that lived on mount Fudji (a mix of Christianity, nostradamus and yoga LOL) in Japan got their hands on sarin and attacked the Tokyo subway. Killing 13 people and some 5000 had to go to the hospital.

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This is true, and they made their gas themselves. But the Damascus attack took place outdoors and killed hundreds of people that were sleeping indoors. I don't claim to be an expert in this sort of thing but it appears to me that the scale of this attack implies the weapons used were of professional design and construction. If this were an amateur grade attack, it would probably implicate the rebels, however strange it may seem for them to attack themselves (it could have been an accidental release while they were making weapons). If these are military-grade weapons, then Assad is implicated but not proven guilty, as the rebels could have stolen such things in their civil war or been given them by outsiders.The difference in available medical care in Tokyo vs. Damascus is a good point. The fact that many in Damascus were sleeping during the attack whereas those in Tokyo were able to react and flee probably also matters. But I'm not sure what it really means that 5,000 people were treated in Japan. Japan has a world-class health services and first responders, they probably treated or at least performed cursory physical examinations on everyone in the subway at the time of the attack, as a precaution. And certainly if we assume that all 5,000 of those were exposed but only 13 died, that is a less than 0.3% fatality rate which seems very, very low for a gas used in chemical warfare. So I don't think we have enough information to compare the two, not knowing how many people were actually exposed in Tokyo and not knowing the concentrations of the weapon used in Damascus.

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But if asad did use the gas he is mad he knew Obama was crying dont go over the red line and that something was gonna happen if he gets caught. Now dont get me wrong i dont like Assad either i just doubt he was stupid enough to use the gas.

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It was a risky move, probably stupid but I don't think it's necessarily a crazy one. It appears foolish now because it does not seem to have helped him conquer the rebels in those neighborhoods. But there may be no consequences at all. Well, we'll see if Obama will do anything. I agree with Obama's plan but I have to say it seems very unpopular here. Congress may do to Obama what Parliament did to Cameron. Understandably, the people are tired of war and are worried mostly about money and the economy these days.I do have hope that this talk and posturing maybe have been enough to deter Assad from using the gas again on civilians again, at least in large numbers.

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The thing is if the US attacks in syria are what they claim to be just air strikes on Assad military installations and in the end they do help the rebels win the war. What do you think will happen to the minorities that where protected under Assad, you know Christians, sunits and the like.

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If the rebels win, Christians and minor tribes will be slaughtered, as happened in Iraq. There are some more liberal factions in the rebel movement, but it's always the most ruthless that end up running a country when the war is over. Edited by gene90, : No reason given.Edited by gene90, : re-worded statement on number of casualties in subway attack