Anything you find in a book is either past tense or fiction. We are talking about now.
Let them slug it out. With Russia on Assad,s side. How would the slug out be an even match.

Syria is a religious war and beyond the means of minorities or majorities.

Get Abbott out of your mind and join the rest of the world.

//At the moment, Syrians are fighting a civil war, and that's the way it should remain.//

Until they start using chemical weapons. At which point they deserve a swift boot up the arse from the international community, which I'm pleased to see has been delivered.

There's a reason chemical weapons are banned: they are weapons of terror. They don't destroy strategic targets: if you bomb a munitions factory, you destroy the factory as well as the people inside it. When you employ chemical weapons, you only kill the people. And everybody downwind of the factory within a certain distance. In a horrific and barbaric fashion - children being the most likely to fall victim to a chemical attack.

It's interesting to note that the very same posters who often seek to caricature me as some sort of traitor to Western values because I don't hate all Muslims are exactly the same posters who think it's OK to just turn a blind eye to the use of chemical weapons if it's not happening to them. I don't know what sort of values those are, but they aren't the Christian or Australian values I was raised with.

If you're the sort of person that thinks the use of chemical weapons is ever acceptable, frankly I'm not sure you're the sort of person this country needs. Since you're obviously so opposed to mainstream Australian values, why don't you just piss off back to where you came from? We could do without your type.

"ONE STEP AWAY FROM WAR" says Russia.
Donald Trump pulled the trigger.
That's why Donald Trump is stupid.

Donald Trump has to be stupid talking to a journalist about his prowess with women, while a recorder was at hand and turned on.

During the US Trump election many people spoke of the danger of Trump holding the nuclear button.

With world war III looming lookout for collapse of food supply and consequent hunger and disease and death, especially in Australia where farm tractor and truck transport fuel now has to be imported.

To say nothing about consequences of radiation

ttbn writes: “Some of you people on OLO really need to start doing some serious reading instead of googling and taking notice of the media and self-interested politicians. Start thinking for yourselves.”

Ha! This coming from someone who rejects anything scholarly and peer-reviewed as “scientific blah”.

Thinking for oneself is one thing, but when you extend that to rejecting findings from credible research because it clashes with your worldview, you’ve lost the plot.

There’s nothing wrong with Googling either, so long as you know where to go for reliable information. There is nothing inherently more reliable about hard copies of literature. This is an old mindset, from the days when the internet was new and peer-reviewed literature hadn’t yet been digitised, that is now employed by some to dismiss links provided by others as unreliable - as if reliable data couldn’t POSSIBLY be so easy to access as clinking on a link (Surely?!). Aside from the occasional paywall, all peer-reviewed literature is accessible online, making “Googling” a more reliable means of accessing reliable, and particularly up-to-date, information.

But we’ve been through all this before, haven’t we ttbn?

--

JF Aus,

An important difference between Saddam Hussein and Assad is that Assad has one of the world’s most powerful countries backing him up.

Doog,

You are the one obsessed with Abbott. Just because I agree with some of the things he says, does not mean that I am in love with the man. He is just a politician, after all, and I am not particularly admiring of politicians.

As for “past tense and “fiction”, well you seem to be one of those people who hasn't learned from the past and is doomed to continue making the same mistakes. Fiction? Are you seriously suggesting that the internet, where anyone, qualified or not, can put up anything they feel like is not likely to be fictitious?

I suggest that it is you that needs to get with the real world before it is too late.

Toni Lavis,

I am glad that you are pleased by the U.S action. But, killing is killing, irrespective of the weapons used. Besides, there is no firm evidence that the people Trump has taken it on himself to 'punish' were the perpetrators of the chemical attack. When dealing with Islam and and Third World mentality, you have to have more to work on before making decisions than Trump did.

I find it hard to believe your sincerity when it comes to comparing 'good' weapons of war and 'bad' weapons of war. War is a horrible thing, no matter how it is waged. And, I really doubt your understanding of “mainstream Australian values”.

And, do tell, to where is it should I “ piss off back to where you came from”? I'm a third generation Australian,which I doubt, with your non-Anglo Saxon name, you are. And, what exactly is my “type”. I would enjoy a free analysis.

JF Aus,

Yes. I think that I am going to have to revise my initial enthusiasm for Donald Trump. Maybe he is just somebody who wanted to be president after all?

It's great to a non-idealogue and have the ability to change your mind, is it not? Still, he has 'gotten' (as the Yanks say) America off the moribund track it was on, and he can still do a lot of good – if he keeps his nose out of civil wars.

I just hope he doesn't get to fight a war, though, given his now obvious talent for picking the wrong side.