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Bravo! to Parliament




I have to say "cheers," and "hear!hear!" and all that to the British Parliament, and perhaps especially to those Tory party members who defied party discipline to oppose the march toward war.

US Presidents are hesitant to launch such adventures without the mother country's support. I got some sense of this back when Tony Blair was acting as W's enabler.

Cameron stepped up to attempt to play the same role, but it appears at the moment that Parliament has led him to back down.

That is good for them and it may prove lucky for us.

I'm not sure I can call any possible result of all this "lucky" for the people of Syria. Their fate looks like a dim one on almost any conceivable time line for years to come. Yet I don't believe that US/UK intervention would have made it any better.

Ever since the Obama administration has been talking up a strike, I've been wondering this: when do we start calling a series of [separate?] conflicts a single really big conflict? After all, WW II didn't start all at once. In early stages, there was one conflict underway in China, another in Spain, another in Abyssinia, and people didn't readily link them and see it all as one global war with different fronts. It sees to have been Germany's invasion of Poland that led people to start talking about the war, rather than about various wars.

If the western powers move into Syria, will we have reached the tipping point where we do start referring to it all as one Global War? And does that change how it/they is/are waged?


  
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