Crime and Punishment

"It's clear the governments want some form of military operation, but if the Security Council doesn't recommend it, then the consensus is that it's plainly illegal under international law.
"The only legal way to go to war is in self-defence and that claim is difficult to make."
Charles Heyman, editor, The Armed Forces of the UK

Jamie Cosby/US Navy/The Associated Press

For such actions there must be reactions. An estimated 500 to 1000 Syrian civilians gruesomely killed in a chemical weapons attack, thousands more injured. Followed up by continued attacks by conventional weapons, courtesy of the Syrian military. Which acknowledges that while it very well may have carried out the conventional attacks following hard on the chemical ones, it had no part in poisoning Syrians through the use of lethal gas.

While they don't claim the devil did it, they do insist the terrorists, Islamist terrorists, did do just that. Momentum is building for a joint Western attack against Syria. The United States is busy assembling a quorum of like-minded states to present a general agreement that such an atrocity must not go unchallenged, for to permit that to happen is to invite further such and even more grotesque attacks against innocents.

France and England were agitating for response before the Americans committed, so they're on board, and likely Canada and Australia as well. Germany and Italy are far less enthusiastic. Entering a military conflict anywhere in the Middle East among Muslims is a formula for unpleasant surprises and long, revenue-draining stays, long past the time when the welcome was extended.

Parliament has been recalled for an emergency vote in Britain; the opposition there remains to be convinced. Odd that, since a similar response is likely to be anticipated in Canada, and should President Obama decide to bypass Congressional approval as he did with Libya, he will be hugely politically disadvantaged at home.

The compulsion and intention is to deliver punishment, not necessarily force regime change. There is a problem there; change to what and to whom, where is there any group or individual prepared and competent to lead the fractured country? Russia's foreign minister cautions the West need have no illusions that bombing Syrian military targets might serve to bring an end to the violence.

And that's quite the irony; the democratic West appearing as the war-mongering aggressor, even while responding to the dire need to rescue millions of Syrians from death, mutilation, homelessness, hunger and deprivation. The world's two great repressive authoritarian nations, Russia and China, themselves more than moderately powerful, urging restraint, refusing within the confines of the UN as voting members of the permanent Security Council to give assent and legality to the venture.

But nothing, at this belated juncture, will halt an attack by the West to punish President Assad. Naval traffic in the eastern Mediterranean, according to Defence Minister Fotis Fotiou of Cyprus is crowded: "all the major powers" have their war vessels ready to go, others preparing to evacuate their foreign nationals from the targeted country.

Potential targets to be hit by U.S. cruise missiles firing offshore? Air bases, suspected chemical sites and government facilities. Of course, Syria has already removed its military command bases, broken up its primary divisions, and prepared to defend itself as best it may from the assaults. It will also create a diversion by launching missiles toward Israel, if not Jordan as well, and Turkey.

What may be accomplished in the final analysis is anyone's guess; none of it particularly positive in the long run, given all the ponderables and imponderables that have presented themselves in that volatile geography and the spreading sectarian and tribal violence emanating out from Syria into neighbouring territories quaking at the prospect of endemic violence corrupting their societies as well.