Let's assume for a moment that the nerve gas incident outside Damascus last week was the responsibility of the Syrian government.
Personally I find it slightly perplexing that for over two years the Assad regime should be terrorising its own people, killing tens of thousands in the process, accompanied only by the slippery sound of Western hand-wringing; yet when it kills five hundred with sarin this is felt to be going a bit far.
I am willing to believe that dying via nerve agent poisoning is spectacularly unpleasant, but not that it is much worse - morally or actually - than being blown to bits by high explosive or bleeding to death from gunshot wounds.
Superficially, waiting for the UN weapons inspectors to report makes sense; actually it makes none. Why does it matter how these people died?
For that matter, waiting month upon month for President Assad to wheel out his WMD made no sense either. It has been clear for years what was going on in Syria, and the case for intervention is no better now than it was at the beginning; actually in some respects it is worse, because now the fundamentalists, supported from Iran, have got their hooks in the country and it would have been easier to shoulder them out if the West had intervened earlier.
It seems to me the only question worth asking is, "Could we intervene militarily in any way which might result in less suffering than there would otherwise be?" Obviously I can't answer the military aspect of that question in any authoritative way, and any answer to the political aspect is speculative at best.
But - if we do nothing, the Assad government will probably survive, pro tem. At some point in the future however it will be toppled. What will happen then? Answer, there will be mass bloodshed.
In other words, the conflagration the hand-wringers fear will probably come to pass eventually even if we do nothing now. As Tony Blair pointed out, doing nothing is a kind of decision too, and one with consequences. As with Iraq, the opportunity exists to fast-forward Syrian history, to by-pass what would otherwise have remained of the Assad years, and start Syria on the messy road to democracy.
