"It’s clear to me that the British parliament and the British people do not wish to see military action," said P.M. David Cameron after today's humiliating vote. "I get that, and I will act accordingly."
How insufferably democratic of him.
We suffer not from that problem here, however, what with our imperial presidency. "President Obama is prepared to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria," reports the NY Times, "even with a rejection of such action by Britain’s Parliament, an increasingly restive Congress, and lacking an endorsement from the United Nations Security Council." That would be the president who props what little doctrine he has--which is a good thing--on a foundation of multilateralism. But, make that past tense.
And then, once again, there's this, from the same NYT story:
[U.S.] intelligence does not tie Mr. Assad directly to the attack ... but the administration believes that it has enough evidence to carry out a limited strike that would deter the Syrian government from using these weapons again.
So we're about to pound Assad for a war crime to which we can't tie him, so that he won't repeat the crime he perhaps never committed.
You know what? The Iraq invasion is beginning to sound logical compared to this.