This guy, Hassad, this Syrian version of evil, seems not to own a spoonful of remorse. I've tried to look at this civil war objectively. Would we, as a nation, do something about an uprising - real or fanciful - that had the intent of overthrowing our head of state? Of course and there is the rub. That is why we don't rush into civil wars.
The question though is that line in the sand. A bullet kills just as surely as a lethal gas and an artillery shell/crowd is little different in effect. But there is something about gassing which we find morally disturbing; not so much for the agreements reached after WWI, but that gas seems to have some sort of mystical horror. Not to trivialize but when I think of gas attacks I think of killing insects under the kitchen cabinet and always feel that I'm killing everything randomly instead of the culprit cricket that is driving me nuts. More pointedly I think about Nazis, gas, Jews and my stomach turns.
I've put a map of Syria off to the right here. I suspect that after the first set of cruise missiles fall around Damascus, something this guy Hassad has about as much chance of defending against as stopping the sun from rising, we will be referring to it often.
The bad choices here are that I'm afraid that we will be looking at that map for a long time.