The United States is on the brink of a military strike against the appalling Assad regime, and the US’s allies are now being pressured to support American action against Syria.

While it seems unlikely that New Zealand would join in any military action against Syria, there are growing calls for something to be done. Are we as a civilised nation prepared to stand by and do nothing while this madman gasses his own people?

No! Let’s blow some shit up.

I agree with those people cautioning us to be very wary about involving ourselves in another Middle-Eastern conflict. Unless we have a very clear objective, and good intelligence on the right targets to hit, we risk becoming involved in a bloody and intractable war.

On the other hand, we’ll all feel much better once we’ve blown some shit up. It simply isn’t possible to watch footage of a cruise missile slamming into a building and not be inspired and awed.

The Syrian conflict is an incredibly complex one. While it seems increasingly likely that Assad’s men were behind the chemical attack that left hundreds of men, women and children sick or dead, there have also been reports that some rebel groups have access to chemical weapons. We must be very careful about going to war on the strength of unreliable information. We saw how that went down in Iraq.

These factors make it difficult to know who is right and who is wrong. That’s why we need to start blowing shit up as quickly as possible. We will no longer doubt the justice of our cause once we’ve seen a few lovely fireballs.

We certainly cannot stay idle as Assad commits genocide. This could be Rwanda all over again. Are we really prepared to stand by and do nothing? No, something must be done!

So let’s blow some shit up.

We have to accept that some of our bombs and missiles will kill people other than the ones we targeted. When the military talks about a “surgical” strike, they don’t mean a careful and delicate operation designed to cut out the cancer while leaving the rest of the body unharmed. No, imagine a surgeon who has consumed half a bottle of whisky beforehand, and who closes his eyes as he goes in with the scalpel.

But don’t worry about all those dead children. They were probably all terrorists anyway.

Right now we don’t know where to target our bombs, and even if we can locate Assad’s chemical weapon sites it’s not clear whether we can eliminate them without potentially causing death and destruction on a massive scale. If we bomb the factories making this toxic stuff, don’t we run the risk of contaminating entire neighbourhoods? What if these factories are located close to heavily populated areas?

These are all complex questions. But we don’t have time for questions. There’s a bad man in charge of Syria. So let’s blow some shit up and see where it goes from there.