Strong voices call for war against Syria.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer argues we should remove Syria’s military advantage by bombing their six primary air bases. Samuel Totten, who has written admirably about the suffering in southern Sudan, argues passionately that Syria’s probable use of chemical weapons against civilians is a moral obscenity comparable to the Holocaust. He suggests military action but offers no specifics and no discussion of possible consequences.

All war is atrocious, but this war is not genocide and it’s not the Sudan.

One problem with all arguments for military action against the regime of Bashar al-Assad is it will cause more mayhem than it prevents. There is no indication Assad can be brought to the negotiating table without fi rst defeating his military forces, and bombing air fi elds won’t accomplish this. Anything short of a major invasion will only weaken Assad without defeating him, lengthen the war, and drag Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and Turkey further into it.

Another problem with military action is there is no reason to prefer the rebels over Assad. In fact, the murderous Assad is probably preferable to the murderous rebels because Assad is at least not a religious fanatic.

Because it would not be an act of self defense, a U.S. attack would violate international law - another reason to oppose it. Similarly, former UnitedNations Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the U.S.

attack on Iraq violated international law. President George W. Bush received congressional authorization for that attack, and President Barack Obama is right in seeking similar authorization.

Have we learned nothing from Iraq? America cannot solve the world’s problems, particularly not with military power. We’ve had enough quagmires that have ended badly. It would be disastrous to blunder into another war for mistaken reasons. It’s not entirely clear Assad launched the attack. The rebels are fully capable of gassing their own people to gain international support and thus defeat the infi dels.

The problems are war itself and fundamentalist religion. The daily toll of suicide bombings is a gruesome commentary on extreme religion. Sunnis blow themselves up to randomly kill scores of Shias, including even worshipers, while Shias prefer to line Sunnis up and execute them en mass. This happens in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Syria. This is a religious war between Sunni fundamentalists from throughout the Mideast and Shiite fundamentalistsfrom Syria, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

It’s a battle that started in the seventh century.

It’s bitter and deadly because fundamentalists have “faith.” They know, absolutely and regardless of the facts, they are right, and they know absolutely eternal salvation awaits true believers while eternal damnation awaits infi dels.

As Iraq demonstrates, bombing raids won’t end this suffering. It will only end when fundamentalists pull themselves out of their medieval superstitions.

Chemical weapons are even worse than most weapons because they arenot especially eff ective on the battlefield and so are primarily used to terrorize and kill civilians. They cause more excruciating deaths than explosive weapons. Their use is banned by international treaties that went into eff ect in 1925 and 1997. Although these treaties have been broken in the past, the world should continue to aft rm the ban on this particularly repulsive form of warfare.

So the problem of chemical weapons must not be ignored, but more violence, this time by the United States, is not the answer. What to do?

The problem appearsinsoluble because we’re looking at it only through the lens of war. We should instead look at it through a narrower and more precise lens: Gassing civilians is a war crime. Assad and others who launched this attack are war criminals. French-Arab journalist Nabila Ramdani of The Guardian makes a good case for this in an Aug. 31 op-ed article calling on the West to make international pariahs of the Assad regime by formally criminalizing them. The International Criminal Court should indict him and initiate a war tribunal. All western nations including Britain (which renounced participation in amilitary attack) will support it, along with many Middle Eastern nations and most of the rest of the world. Russia and China will resist, just as they resisted a military attack, but they might be hard pressed to actually veto such an indictment.

We have to start using police and courts to solve international problems instead of war. Assad is an international criminal. He and others involved in this war crime should be hunted down for the rest of their lives and brought to justice.

ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.

Opinion, Pages 13 on 09/08/2013