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The 1999 airstrikes in Kosovo have been widely cited as a precedent for a possible Syria strike, but according to Rubin, who worked in the State Department at the time and is now an executive editor of Bloomberg News, the only similarity between the two countries is that, in both instances, Russia and China opposed the attacks. "Today, after more than a decade, Serbs and Kosovars are beginning to reconcile," Rubin writes. "Such an outcome in Syria is doubtful. The United States and Europe are at odds with Moscow, the Security Council is deadlocked, NATO has stayed on the sidelines, and the Arab League has been ineffectual. There is no strategy to achieve a stable endgame." Rubin recommended that the administration stick to the chemical WMD argument, and not base its argument on the fact that America has a moral duty to save lives.

"The case can be made that all subject areas are important, but students often lack the educational opportunities to put their learning from these subject areas to work in the real world. My students now take part in community research projects where I ask them to identify a problem or issue that they care about in our local community. Their topics have included the school dress code, teen drug use, bullying, rural road conditions, and suicide prevention. In this process, students undertake a variety of research efforts. They work with primary sources. They interview community members, fellow students, and school officials. They create online surveys, and they visit the library, the museum, and the courthouse. They seek out knowledge from experts (including other teachers) regarding statistics, technology, and hazardous chemical compounds. They even become experts on the ins and outs of state laws that are relevant to their causes. They learn to value evidence. Sometimes that causes students to change their minds too. But just gathering the information isn't enough. We have to do something with that information. We have to take action and argue for reasonable solutions to our community issues based on the best information available. The secret is harnessing the spirit each student holds for the issue they seek to solve and allowing that spirit to develop each student's ability to reason. If I can accomplish that, I find that my students care enough about their writing to revise, edit, spell, and punctuate just fine. A recent study also confirmed that students' mastery of conventions can improve as a by-product of writing arguments on topics they care about. But first I had to go bigger with my expectations and with the lessons I valued. I had to believe they could change the world around them if I gave them the opportunity."

The moral is that the brevity of an e-mail message, a blog post, a text message, even a tweet, is no obstacle to powerful information, a persuasive argument, a literary moment, a zinger, a joke.

"The question of humanitarian intervention has to be rethought thoroughly for our time. Today, it is nearly impossible to commit crimes against humanity in secret; efficient communication media will bring them to light immediately. We are more intimately engaged by them and with them than we were in the past. These acts that shock human conscience evoke the question of whether it is our responsibility to intervene, and what might be the moral justifications behind such intervention. "

A New York Times columnist responds to a series of criticisms and counterarguments to his support of a strike on Syria.

Read highlighted parts of sections Background, Local Context, and Religious Context for Wednesday.