We are in for a bumpy ride

When men wish to go to war their rhetoric works its self up to some of the finest or in others the most infamous, Churchillian or the bombast of Hitler. The case is made based on our ideals, our values,  our morals, for our credibility. The issues are bound up in words that imply a wider implication if we act or a potentially unforeseen destruction of the values we applaud, if we vote for inaction.
The game, it is often a game, of politics is played out by powerful men behind who sit, very powerful lobbies.
These men meet and stand around in groups, sometimes laughing at a private joke, shaking hands, hugging political rivals who normally they hold in deep repulsion, carrying on in way that suggests a farce, not a meeting of minds.
The mighty American military machine is pawing the ground. The search for words which have been crafted to wring the call to patriotism from the men and women of the nation, mixed in with this "bully pulpit" call to all nations of the strength of America, of the resolve of America, of an almost messianic mission to teach us all what is good, what is bad.  Unlike our modern repulsion to laying hands on anyone, always falling back on the authorities to handle all situations for us. But what happens when the Authorities seek vengeance when they want to use force to make their opponents yield and submit, what is our moral position when innocent lives will be lost in the next days and weeks. As the groundswell of hostility rises in the Middle East and other potentially dangerous nations rise to oppose what they will inevitably see as foreign interference, will the cost of lives lost through the gassing of people in Syria been seen in hindsight to have been an over reach.
Kerry the Vice President came across as less than satisfactory in his verbal grasp of the implication of what he proposes and one casts ones mind back to the Vice President Cheney in the Bush years and the mess that the invasion of Iraq brought. Kerry was flanked by the senior military man and both were far from clear about the limits that would be imposed or if mission creep was totally out of the question. We are in for a bumpy ride