Should we bomb Syria?

THERE DOESN'T SEEM TO BE MUCH POINT IN TEACHING HISTORY ANY MORE

So it looks like we're going to war.  Again.  In the Middle East.  Again.  David Cameron tried to make his case for this action earlier today.  He even managed to cover all the relevant topics.  Although the actual answers he provided were few in number.  Credibility was lacking throughout.

Because, from both a humanitarian and a pragmatic viewpoint, only one thing really matters.  If we've learned nothing else from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya - and the Treat of Versailles almost a hundred years ago - mass killing of your opponents, and the inevitable slaughter of the innocents which comes as a part of such action, comes to nothing when your opponents are driven by a fanatical ideology, unless that ideology itself can be discredited.

So it doesn't matter what the military strategy is (although the lack of a credible ground force to secure territory does look like a huge gaff), if you haven't thought through the endgame fully then the chance are you're going to make things even worse than they were before.

There's one question that has to be answered in full, and that's what this action will do to benefit the most important people in the whole affair - the poor buggers who actually live in Syria.   Make genuine improvements to their lives, on their terms, not ours, and you might just have a war worth fighting.