Debating Intervention

'Ahmed said, 'People are smiling, people there [Damascus] are relieved," they're waiting for their nightmare to end, and looking forward to a military intervention." '

I haven't got to Robin Yassin-Kassab's contribution yet, only as far as someone who tells us that the opposition in Syria is all al-Qaida, because Robert Fisk said so in yesterday's Independent.
"Sadly, I don't think there's going to be a dramatic change in the balance on the ground after this coming intervention. If it's even coming - it's now looking a bit more doubtful than it did yesterday. If it does come I think it's going to be very limited and symbolic. The reason why America mainly thinks now that it has to act, is the mass attacks come a year to the day after Obama said that chemical weapons would be an absolute red line, and then he would actually do something."
"The régime has already used chemical weapons, several times, on a much smaller scale; testing the line, and seeing that it didn't really exist. And the reason why Bashar al-Assad did this big attack now was to show the Syrian people, the opposition, the vast majority of the Syrian people, that nobody's coming to help you. I've got Russia and Iran on my side, I've got Hezbollah, I've got sectarian Shia militias from Iraq directing my fightback; and you've got some inefficient, not very well sustained help from Saudi Arabia, not from anywhere else*, a little bit from Qatar."
*I.e. The West, which has provided diddly-squat to the Syrian rebels.
[Continuing as Bashar] "The equation isn't going to change, and if I want to gas you en masse, I can; nobody's going to do anything.
"So the West now thinks it has to show that Obama's words, that America's words, still mean something, and it has to show the world in general that you can't get away with use of weapons of mass destruction."
Mahmoud: "Of course my home is empty, my town is empty. Yesterday the régime shelled my town, about twenty people were sent to the field hospital, so my town is empty. Most of the people are next to the border, scared from death. So this is why I said we want to stop killing inside Syria. So I think the régime, when they receive the strike, they would not answer America, they would answer Israel. The same thing happens in Syria, when the FSA or the rebels attack the régime, they shelled the civilians. So they don't answer their enemy, they answer the civilians, the others."
Robin: "If this were an Israeli/American plot, they've had 2½ years in which they could have done a proper intervention and régime change, if they wanted. They could have armed the Free Army, but they didn't do any of this. Israel's quite happy with Bashar al-Assad, who locks up teenage girls for reading poems about Palestine, who has kept the border with the occupied Golan Heights silent since 1973. Whar started all this was the régime responding to peaceful demonstrations by gunning people down, raping people, and torturing them. That's what caused people eventually to take up arms. Al-Qaida in Syria was created by the régime's war, and the trauma it caused, and the fact that the West failed to support the moderate defectors of the Free Army a year ago, when it would have really made a difference."
"These conspiracy theories, any intelligent listener will know that they are wasting our time. Stories about thehe RAND corporation, I don't know what's next, the Illuminati, David Icke, lizards. It's too simplistic to say that al-Qaida is an American creation. America is a complex hypocritical state, like all states are hypocritical, like any state it has different wings, different interests, going on at once. It probably has aligned itself at times with al-Qaida type people, for example when they were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. At the moment, no. Al-Qaida got into Syria because of the trauma caused by Assad's war on what was at first an unarmed, peaceful, reform movement. If you can't admit that, any theory which cuts that out, treats the Syrian people as if they are innocent pawns in the hands of devilishly clever foreigners."