Is there any other choice?
The Syrians have been making and stockpiling this nerve gas for years! For what purpose? The annihilation of Israel perhaps?
Cruise missiles can target large military resources. Airfields, Warplanes Ammo dumps/fuel stores?
The Americans/NATO could also deploy some drones, tasked with taking out tanks/air defense and other less visible military ordinance?
With that task done and dusted, and no end in sight?
Stage two ought to be some bunker busters aimed directly at the mass murdering Assad bothers!
If we don't stop this genocide, whose turn will be next?
If however, we give the world's remaining tyrants, something to think about, as their possible future, we could save/spare millions of lives in the future?
Rhrosty.

David G,
Well, whatever one may think about some of the Allies, they sure are not as screwed up as the middle eastern crowd. I mean if there were only one middle easterner left he'd still find a way of fighting with himself.

In 2003 Cheney and the PNAC crew demand aggression against a sovereign nation. The trumped-up pretext: Iraq has WMDs. Attack! Do something! Brush aside the pinko lefty latte-sipping wimps. Kill-Kill-Kill! But embarrassingly Saddam Hussein offers carte blanche for UN inspectors, despite knowing they would include spies looking for military targets. Hans Blix asks for time and resources for a thorough inspection that would cost less than a day of war. Shuddup we’re goin’ in, Cheney thunders, to cheers from Bliar and Howard.

2013 and they’re at it again, with Hague and Cameron and Hollande chosen to lead the lie campaign with Obama playing coy. Just a two-day strike to punish the secular Syrian regime for using poison gas. Never mind that they say they didn’t. Never mind that inspectors this time have gone in and will need time to complete their inspection that could say whether Hague, Hollande and the Pentagon’s non-Syrian “rebel” allies were the ones spreading the sarin gas. Never mind that gassing Syrians would massively disadvantage Assad. Already the Kill-Kill-Kill bellowers are adding Hurry-Hurry-Hurry as in 2003. They make their objective plain enough for anyone with more than two neurones to figure out: oust Assad, get it under way before the inspectors turn up the false flag.

Why? Look at any Middle East map: X to Syria to Iraq to Iran. Who is X? Which is the most blatant pariah state in the entire region, which invariably gets the Europeans, British and Americans dancing to its tune? Click this for a map that spells it out:
http://images.nationmaster.com/images/motw/middle_east_and_asia/settlementswb86.jpg
Each red dot is a new annexation along the road to empire.

In 2003 Rudd echoed Howard's treasonous lies. Now he's PM and singing the same tune. Same orchestrator?

Earlier US false-flag events:

Robert Stinnett, a WW II veteran and journalist researched his book upon discovering, in 1993, that the U.S. Naval Security Group Command had placed hundreds of thousands of Japanese military messages obtained by U.S. monitoring/spying stations prior to Pearl Harbor into the public domain. These records had not been seen by anyone since 1941.

What Stinnett found was the vast majority of Americans (eighty percent) was non-interventionist in 1940-1941. After Germany “made a strategic error” by signing a treaty with Japan, a U.S. Lieutenant Commander of Naval Intelligence saw an opportunity to counter the America First movement by provoking Japan into attacking the United States and getting the public behind war.

Stinnett found that President Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted an Office of Naval Intelligence plan to provoke Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor with an eight-point plan, the most important of which was keeping most of the U.S. fleet parked as sitting ducks at Pearl Harbor. When the commander of the U.S. fleet, Admiral James Richardson, objected to allowing his sailors to be slaughtered by the Japanese, FDR fired Richardson and replaced him with Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel.

FDR implemented the entire eight-point plan but kept Admiral Kimmel and General Walter Short, commander of U.S. Army troops in Hawaii, in the dark. Over 1,000 Japanese messages per day were intercepted by the U.S. Navy, which knew in advance everything the Japanese were doing in the Pacific on their way to Pearl Harbor. They knew in advance that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Kimmel and Short were even given direct orders by FDR himself, Stinnett found, to “remain in a defensive posture” because “the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.”

On October 30, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act that, among many other things, acknowledged that Kimmel and Short were denied crucial military intelligence about the Japanese fleet prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. Kimmel and Short were fired by FDR after the attack, but were exonerated fifty-nine years later.

Sound familiar?

Oh and more of the same...

Shortly before his assassination in November of 1963 President John F. Kennedy had begun recalling U.S. military “advisors” from Vietnam. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was hell bent on waging total war in Vietnam. Once again the American public had little interest in a civil war thousands of miles away in Asia, but were easily duped into acquiescing in one. Once again the ruse involved mysterious occurrences involving battle ships in the middle of nowhere, where the only accounts of the incidents came from the U.S government.

The U.S. government began “covertly” supplying gunboats to the South Vietnamese army which were used to attack the coast of North Vietnam. This was acknowledged in 1964 by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. In addition, American warships hovered around North Vietnamese ports. This included the USS Maddox. Placing the ships in harm’s way was Johnson’s FDR-type strategy to provoke an attack by the North Vietnamese, and it succeeded.

Johnson falsely claimed that there was a second attack on the USS Maddox, but that is acknowledged to be a hoax. Naval sonar picked up American propeller noise, and radar showed images caused by bad weather, not North Vietnamese gunboats. Johnson nevertheless made a radio speech describing a second “attack” and called for military retaliation. Soon thereafter he ordered air strikes. In a 2003 television documentary entitled “The Fog of War” Robert McNamara admitted that the second attack on the Maddox “never happened.”

It may seem trite, but it is nevertheless true that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are bound to repeat its mistakes. Americans are about to repeat the same mistake of squandering their blood and treasure on another military adventure (in Syria) that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending American freedom – or anyone else’s.

I won't even mention the two Gulf war's, 9/11 or Libya, the same old story works there too!

We are facing an incredibly dangerous situation in the Middle East, and our understanding is not helped by such superficial articles as the one under discussion.

I agree with the comments of Halduell, Geoff, David G and Julian, and would add some brief points.

The article ignores a large number of relevant factors. To cite just a few:
- the attacks by Israeli and the US on Syria have been going on for at least two years.
- Both the US and Israel have used chemical weapons in the region in recent years
- The new Iran-Iraq-Syria oil and gas pipeline threatens Israeli ambitions to supply Europe (partly at the expense of stolen Palestinian resources
- international law forbids the use of force to settle disputes except in two specific situations and neither of them apply here.
- The Americans are yet again supporting terrorist groups including but not limited to al Nusra and al Qaeda in pursuit of their geopolitical goals.
- the campaign against Syria was spelt out years ago in a document prepared for Netanyahu by US neocons and also in Hersh's article in the New Yorker in 2007.
- There has been the usual abysmal response by Rudd/Carr and when Bishop is Foreign Minister in a couple of weeks don't expect an improvement.