I say fuck Occam's Razor as to the Why of this thing--"an attack on Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons"--for we should mightily tremble instead with the How of Murphy's Law, "the true worst case of a Syria attack":
The U.S. and its allies attack Damascus. Damascus retaliates against Israel, which vowed again this week to "defend itself." Israel and Syria break into open hostilities. Syria’s sponsor, Iran, steps up its attacks on Israel through its proxies and allies in the region. And Washington, despite its onetime goal of a "limited" intervention, finds itself in a living nightmare.
At that point, perhaps 50,000 or even 500,000 deaths later, it would do no good for the Toma-hawks to indignantly remind us that Assad started it. (Besides, by the administration's own admission, we don't even know that.) The additional dead would simply, and quite definitely, be dead; some gassed, maybe, and no doubt many blown to pieces by cluster bombs, some cut to pieces by .50 caliber machine guns, some burned beyond recognition by aerial firepower, most of them women and children--and all of them Dead by Rescue, in our battle against Moral Obscenities.
The above scenario is among the more unlikely scenarios. Yet the question remains: Are we actually willing to take that chance?