I want to poll my readership on the divisive issue of Syria, and the appropriate international response to the use of chemical weapons against civilians in that country.
Of course, raw numbers and binary choices are not much use without the rationale behind them, so please take a minute to justify your opinion in the Comments section below.
Semi-Partisan Politics 
Without clear evidence, not only that the Assad regime was definitely responsible for the chemical attacks but also that military strikes will stop further attacks from taking place, I fail to see the point of strikes against Syria. This is partly because I am an eternal (and deliberate) optimist. Military strikes as a punitive measure are something I strongly disagree with; that is why we have an international criminal court. Unless it can be demonstrated that military strikes will prevent further harm to the people of Syria, there is no moral basis for supporting them. The resulting justifications seem to me to boil down to macho posturing on the international stage, on the one hand, or a half-hearted attempt at regime change, on the other – neither of which particularly impress me.
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I’m with you on this one. Certainly there needs to be conclusive proof before any action is taken. It is looking as though this threshold has nearly been achieved now, but there still remains the justifiable skepticism that any strikes would be effective in eliminating the chemical weapons – I don’t think that they would be. Like you, I don’t see any clear gain or net positive to be had from launching missiles at Syria – there will be collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties, and it will be the low-level conscripts in the Syrian armed forces that will be killed, while Assad, his government and his generals sail on, totally unaffected. Sadly, since Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner that he seems unwilling to back down from, I think all we can hope for is that the strikes are limited and brief.
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