The most hawkish Western nation over Syria is France.
The reason is simple. Francois Hollande, the president, is a socialist and so is making a huge mess of running the country. This is making him deeply unpopular. A good war would distract the voters and maybe make him less unpopular. It worked for Margaret Thatcher with the Falklands and Gulf wars.
As for nerve gas. It is obvious that both sides have it, the rebels having captured it from bases they have over-run. So who has used it? Why would Assad when he can just drop oil drums full of explosives from helicopters onto Sunni crowds, such as bread queues? But the rebels have a very good reason to use it. They can pin the blame on Assad and so bring in the American intervention that they so desperately want and need.
At the moment we are being fed a lot of disinformation by Hague, France, the Russians, the biased BBC, all the Middle East Sunnis, all the Middle East Shias and anyone else with a vested interest. Cynicism is the only sensible position to adopt. Certainly with so many fundamentalist nutters on the rebel side we would very easily make things much worse by intervening.
In reality we are probably headed for a no fly zone in the north of Syria. Enforced by Turkey, UK, France and USA. Luckily Obama is an indecisive wimp who sits on his hands and the Turkish government is otherwise occupied.
The rationale behind the no fly zone will be to stem the huge flood of refugees, which in itself is massively destabilising. Also Lebanon is a powder keg which is about to explode and further conflate the problem.
Ho hum, interesting times.
Last edited by Eclectic; 5th Jun 2013 at 08:04.