Portside

The tale of the 1914 Christmas Truce survived through the letters and photos of soldiers who, along 600 miles of trenches, suspended war and shared Christmas - with their enemy. The war to end all wars did the opposite, sowing seeds of future ones. Industrial warfare - bombing cities; using chemical poisons; and a punitive peace treaty, with the winners dividing up the empires of the losers - all but guaranteed that future conflicts would be settled by military force.

There is nothing wrong with doing good where you realistically can. Trying to do good by military means where you cannot can be deadly to both you and the victims. Syria resembles Iraq in many respects. The pretext for the US war on Iraq was its alleged chemical and other weapons programs and stores, which did not exist and which UN inspectors such as Scott Ritter, a former Marine, explicitly said did not exist.