It would seem a piece of wisdom picked up on the school playground not to start a fight that you don't know how to finish.
U.S. President Barack Obama may have missed this lesson during his primary school experience in Indonesia. But perhaps the U.S. Congress will spare him military folly with its vote next week on intervention in Syria.
France then might have to go to war alone against Syria or recruit a new coalition of its own. The last thing President Francois Hollande expected was for an American president to "go wobbly" about attacking another country (as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned President George H.W. Bush, when he seemed hesitant to intervene in Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990).