What's the big deal with
A good place to start is that Bashar al-Assad has been killing his how citizens since he responded to nonviolent protests with bullets more than two year ago.
The regime starting its bombing campaign on civilian towns held by rebels in July 2012, and a prime example of sheer brutality of this tactic is what happened in northern Syria this week:
Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway of BBC reported from the site where ten people died and dozens suffered "napalm-like" burns after a Syrian fighter jet dropped an incendiary bomb on a playground in the north of the country.
Here it is:
One Syrian man told BBC: "Dear United Nations ... Don't you see this? What do you need to see? We are just human beings. We just want to live, you know? Isn't it our life to live? "
For the last year it has seemed that Assad's warplanes would be unrestricted to bomb his people indefinitely - that is, until thousands of people were gassed in the middle of the night in the suburbs of the capital.
As President Obama told PBS Newshour:
"... we want the Assad regime to understand that by using chemical weapons on a large scale against your own people - against women, against infants, against children, that you are not only breaking international norms and standards of decency, but you're also creating a situation where U.S. national interests are affected, and that needs to stop."
That's where the reality check for most of the world, including Assad, comes in: Horrific acts have been committed by the regime on its own people for 29 months, but the West hasn't intervened in a direct* manner.
But as soon as poison gas was used on thousands of civilians while they slept, the West decided that it must act to uphold the minimal requirements for crimes against humanity.
In effect, the events of August 21 provided the West with a legitimate opportunity to curb Assad's systematic ruthlessness.
As one intelligence official told Foreign Policy: "We don't know exactly why it happened. We just know it was pretty f****g stupid."
*Indirect action by the West has included America, Britain, and France working with Saudi Arabia and Jordan to "set up and run an undisclosed joint operations center in Jordan to train vetted Syrian rebels in tactical warfare methods, intelligence, counterintelligence, and weapons application," as reported by Michael Weiss.
Furthermore, the CIA was funneling arms shipments to rebels since at least June 2o12 and are present on Syria's three largest borders.