TO GO IN, OR JUST GO ON

Just checking; Is Gotham City anywhere near the Middle East?

This is about Syria.

As I write, I still don't really know what I want the world to do.

To begin with, I'd have to say I'm not a big fan of war generally. I've never understood why people go to them. I wouldn't. I realise there have been times and places where the people in charge didn't give you much say in the matter, but I'm pretty sure I'd rather go to jail or even be killed myself than shoot at someone I don't know in the name of a cause I don't really understand.

Is this easy for me to say because I've never had my way of life directly threatened by a foreign power? Yes. Yes it is. It's still what I believe though.

I know it's naive, but surely if nobody ever fought on behalf of megalomaniac, despotic dictators, they'd just be left standing in the corner shouting at people with everyone laughing at them.

Sadly, it's not a perfect world.

For some reason, and I suppose it's the same reason action movie villains always seem to have an inexhaustible supply of evil henchmen, there are heaps of people prepared to do the bad guys' dirty work. You know the sort of thing; rigging elections, making opposition activists disappear, opening fire on peaceful protests, developing weapons and ultimately deploying them.

When those weapons are deployed in the direction of us or our allies, we go to war. That, sadly, is just the way of things. I may not like it, but I can understand it.

The curly question is, what to do when those weapons are deployed, but nowhere near us.

Apparently, rigged elections are okay from a distance. That whole oppressing the masses thing? Oh, we don't approve, but we're not sending in the troops to sort it out. Actual weapons though, that's where it gets tricky. Weapons of mass destruction are a no-no, especially the really bad ones.

Small point here; which are the bad ones exactly? I get you can't be gassing kids - very bad look. But a mortar shell landing on your head while you're walking to the dairy is a pretty bad look for you personally as well.

Curly, curly questions.

This is why people like Obama start going on about "red lines'. Unfortunately, the lines don't actually exist, they're only theoretical, just something politicians make up so potentially unpopular decisions can be more easily justified.

No idea why the line was drawn at chemical weapons, when al-Assad's been dropping other things on innocent people for years now, but as we've already established, I don't have an intimate understanding of how these things work.

In the real world, we don't break up the fights until we start seeing children foaming at the mouth on our 6 o'clock news. Talk about your ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. (And by ambulance, I mean tactical Tomahawk missile strike)

Pity we can't just round up the evil henchmen and drop them in a hole. Like Batman would.

Then al-Assad would be left standing in the corner shouting at people with everyone laughing at him. Just like every bully should be.

See? Even a weapon of MINIMAL destruction can still be bloody annoying