“President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people,” US Secretary of State John Kerry declared Aug.26. ''The president has asked the Defense Department for options … for all contingencies,''  Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Aug. 23. And the countdown begins.

As it usually does before launching such military operations, the United States is trying to put together an international coalition designed to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It will do this to show that the whole world is concerned about what happened in Syria, and not just the Americans, and that the international community at large is horrified by the war crimes occurring in that country.

It is quite reasonable to assume that some of the countries in the new coalition will have participated in the two campaigns against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. During the first Gulf War [1991], President George H.W. Bush put together a force of almost 1 million troops from 31 countries, including soldiers from Syria. Even if most of the troops were actually from the United States and Britain, there was a sense that the whole world had joined forces against the Iraqi dictator. During the second Gulf War [2003], in which Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled and he was captured and later executed, the US-led coalition consisted of troops from 30 countries, including Tonga Island and Moldova. Those latter two states may have sent just a few dozen troops each, but they put their name behind the international effort, and that was enough.

Both Bush the elder and President George W. Bush wanted to show that there was a unified global front prepared to fight against totalitarian dictatorships and in support of world peace. At least that’s how it looked back then. Only Israel, which was attacked by hundreds of Iraqi Scuds, was asked to stay out of the campaign. Both American presidents believed that the Israeli Defense Forces' participation in the war would cause their broad coalition to crumble. “We’ll get the job done. You can trust us,” promised the coalition's commander-in-chief Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the first campaign (which was aptly named “Desert Storm”). Then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was forced to bite his lip and follow the president’s orders by refusing to retaliate. The same scenario repeated itself during the second Gulf War (“Iraqi Freedom”).