Incredibly, given the efforts that Western powers have made to disentangle themselves from military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and Britain are poised for yet another attack on a Muslim country. Syria is now in the cross hairs, threatening the ninth armed intervention in an Islamic state since the start of the new millennium.
The world has been assured that only targeted missile strikes are planned, and that the motive is neither to broaden the conflict nor to achieve regime change. Following the use of gas against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, the aim is allegedly to deter the future use of chemical weapons by both Syria's Bashar al-Assad regime and other dictatorial governments seeking to stifle popular resistance. Intervention is said to be justified both by a Geneva convention that banned the use of such weaponry and chapter seven of the United Nations charter, which outlaws "crimes against peace".
No right-minded person wants to see violations of the worldwide ban on weapons of mass destruction go unpunished – but, as in Egypt, Syria's civil war is no longer a simple case of black and white. Although the Assad government had the ruthlessness and, apparently, the arms stockpiles to carry out the Ghouta attack, there is no conclusive evidence that it was the perpetrator.
All that has been adduced is Syria's capacity to launch a gas attack, and intelligence intercepts by the Israelis, who typically use the internal crises of their Arab neighbours to advance their own national interests.
Indeed, given that the US has repeatedly warned that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a "red line", automatically triggering intervention, the increasingly hard-pressed rebels could be said to have a more compelling motive for an attack. That, at least, is what Russia and China contend.
Assad is no democrat, but it would be naive to romanticise the Syrian insurgents. Undoubtedly a popular uprising against a deeply authoritarian state when it started, the rebel cause has fractured into many sectarian factions as its star has waned, with jihadists more and more in the ascendant.
The Syrian member of the UN human rights commission has underlined strong suspicions that certain rebel fighters have already used nerve gas.
Even more important is the likely impact of a Western missile strike on a war-torn country in which 100 000 people have already died and millions of pitiful refugees have streamed into neighbouring states.
The Western allies have promised that only strategic targets will be hit, but "collateral damage" is inevitable. There is no certainty that military intervention will make either side behave better and there is a distinct risk that it will further raise temperatures and lead to "mission creep".
Earlier in the conflict, when US President Barack Obama was resisting siren calls to send in the marines, he himself referred to "difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment".
Would it be inhuman to say that the West should let the Syrians settle their own quarrel?
At the very least, there can be no defensible military intervention until UN weapons inspectors in Damascus have completed their work, and their conclusions have been debated by the UN Security Council.