The outrage expressed by President Obama is both justified and overdue. As innocent civilians are killed and displaced by this war, the world appears helpless to do anything about it. The fact of the matter is that this war is being fought by outside forces for reasons that have very little to do with Syria; your classic war by proxy. This war is more of a showdown between Iran and Saudi Arabia (you know, the infamously mischaracterized Shiite vs. Sunni conflict). It is a battle for regional influence and political gain. As for the other parties involved (Turkey,
France, Russia, Iraq, Jordan, the U.S., Qatar, NATO, Israel, and Hezbollah), they have each either placed their bets on one dog or the other, or, as in Israel’s case, is happy with the current chaos.

In any case, let’s just pretend for a moment that the West is outraged by the “moral obscenity” of gassing Syrian women and children (killing them by conventional weapons is apparently kosher). The logical thing to do would be to bring all the parties (mentioned above) together and agree that enough Syrians have died and that they are at a stalemate. So pack your bags and move on to another country in distress, with the knowledge that you have set Syria so far back it will take them decades to recover, with or without Bashar.

But since the West (the U.S. really) seems hell-bent on bombing someone, how about bombing both the Syrian government and the rebel opposition. They are both equally evil and only pawns in a bigger battle at this point. By shelling and
diminishing both parties’ capacity to fight, they may finally be inclined to call it quits. Then they may both fear being weakened further and faster than the other. That in turn could force them to talk.

If we were an evolved species this matter would not have come this far. If there was a thread of shared humanity the outside players would stop funneling funds and weapons to the feuding parties. Eventually they will exhaust their resources and talk to each other. Some claim that too many people have died and the distrust is too great. Deprive
them of the means to fight andthe desire to do so soon follows.

For that to happen, all the outside parties would have to be onboard. However seeing how that seems highly unlikely, one “superpower” would have to make the unilateral decision to take military action with little to no domestic or international support….