An act of war is not always necessary and it is not always necessarily evil. I was born into a family that was torn apart and traumatized by the realities of WWII. My father an American occupier married a member of the vanquished, my mother, a German. When I learned, as a teenager, about the Holocaust I realized two things, one that humans were capable of unimaginable evil against one another and two that there really were people who would be willing to fight that evil in order that others may have the chance to live a life free of evil.
When I first saw the images of the dead children from Syria, that reports claim were killed by the use of chemical weapons, I was struck again by a thought that I have had many times in my life. This world, we humans, do not deserve our children, I pray that one day this will be the kind of world that our children think it is. A world that can be filled with ice cream, rainbows and teddy bears. Whether our children live in war zones or in a land of plenty they are subject to the whims and cruelties of adults. We do not deserve them.
I supported the war in Afghanistan because to me the Taliban were as evil as the Nazis of Germany. I supported the move by President G. H. W. Bush to rout the Iraqi's out of Kuwait. I did not support the war in Iraq and was shocked at the level of support it had from American civilians. And now, as many other Americans, I have given thought to how I feel about a military response to the reports that the Syrian government has been involved in using chemical weapons on innocent children. I never consider adults innocent. My greatest wish, and that is what it will remain barring a miracle, is for us to pluck Assad out of his country and plop him down in the Hague, under guard and bring him to trial for these murders. In fact there are a number of other leaders I would like this to happen to as well, namely that little slime of a man in North Korea.
I support President Obama on this one.
More people will be killed, this is a reality that every leader making such a decision is faced with, but gassing civilians to death cannot be allowed to happen, it is evil. The greatest predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Once a nation has crossed a certain line toward evil it has crossed the line of no return unless it is stopped by any means necessary.