Simon Jenkins nails it -

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/29/syria-more-courage-to-say-nothing-can-do
<snip>
The urge of Britain's political establishment to attack Syria is in retreat. The prime minister's eagerness to join an American bombing run on Damascus has hit parliamentary opposition. Though Thursday's Commons vote was ambivalent on intervention as such, it was clear that there must be some clearance through the United Nations.

As David Cameron virtually admitted, Downing Street is swerving and skidding to avoid the Iraq trap. It wisely published the intelligence report indicating the Assad regime used chemical weapons in a raid on a Damascus suburb, possibly in random retaliation for an attempt on his life. Such weapons are illegal under international law. While it is wrong to rush to judgment with inquiries still in train, there is justice in a desire to enforce the law. But enforcement must be meticulous in its legality. Otherwise what is dispensed is anarchy, not law.

The government claims it can attack Syria under the UN's "responsibility to protect" doctrine, where people in a foreign state are abused by their own government. We know from Iraq that politicians are adept at finding lawyers to say what they want, just as they can find a pilot to drop bombs. But facts are facts. The UN's resolution 1674 on responsibility to protect plainly states that such action must be "through the security council in accordance with the charter". That process is currently absent.

The use of chemical weapons is awful. But to treat their apparently random use to justify an urgent, extra-legal attack on a foreign state is wilful. It is precipitated by President Obama's unwise warning in the summer that such use would cross a "red line". This is odd from a leader whose own arsenal embraces phosphorous and depleted uranium shells and delayed-action cluster bombs, not to mention nuclear weapons. Why such dreadful anti-personnel weapons are not taboo, and chemical ones are, is a mystery.