U.S. President Barack Obama does not want to bring down the regime of Bashar Assad in Damascus. He does not want to weigh in on either side in the civil war that has been raging in Syria for the past two years, has caused over a hundred thousand casualties, and led over a million to flee their homes. He just wants to send a message: Assad, don’t use chemical weapons!

In other words, you can continue to kill men, women, and children, as long as you do not use chemical weapons against them. Artillery shells, aerial bombs, and ballistic missiles are permissible, but not chemical weapons. It is hard to believe that this is really the message he would like to deliver, but he seems to be trapped in a commitment made almost casually some months ago, that the use of chemical weapons constitutes a “red line.”

Now he feels that he must make good on this commitment, no matter what. But there is little sense to this. And if Obama’s intention is to save lives, he is unlikely to achieve this. It might even have the opposite result.

The pictures seen around the world of the corpses of children gassed to death by Assad’s forces near Damascus are ghastly, and will stay in our minds for a long time. They remind us of the pictures of the five thousand men, women, and children, gassed to death by the Iraqi army in the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988.

Lest we forget, some Arab armies have used chemical weapons over the years: the Egyptian army in Yemen between 1963 and 1967, and the Iraqi army against the Iranians in the years 1980-88, both arousing little international protest. Maybe that was the time when the world could have stepped in and put an end to the use of such non-conventional weapons. But nobody seemed to care enough at the time.

The sad truth about the Syrian civil war is that both sides in the conflict are forces of darkness. Assad and his regime are butchers who have confirmed their credential over the years for inhumanity and heartlessness. They are part of the “axis of evil” with the terrorist organization Hezbollah, and their patron in Iran. Their opponents, the rebels, are associated and allied with Al-Qaida, Islamic fanatics who seek the destruction of Israel and the West, who already have proven their capability to carry out murderous attacks against the targets of their choice. The danger they would pose if they were to triumph in the civil war in Syria is easy to imagine. Who wants to see either of these forces win?

If only it were possible to put an end to the blood-letting without helping either side. But that would require the introduction of hundreds of thousands of troops, “boots on the ground,” who would fight and disarm both sides in the conflict. Few in the western world have the capability to do that and those, like the U.S. and Israel, who have that capability are not prepared to do it for obvious reasons.

And so the killing goes on, day by day. With the use of aerial bombs, artillery shells, rockets, snipers, and also chemical weapons, with equipment and weapons supplied by Iran and Russia, and by some of the Arab countries. The fighting is spilling over into Lebanon, and may yet reach Jordan. For the moment it seems to be unstoppable. Syria’s immediate neighbors, like Turkey and Israel, who have the military capability to protect themselves, are on alert to assure the safety of their borders and their citizens. The hope is that one day both sides will lay down their arms in exhaustion.

For the moment, in this seemingly hopeless situation where evil is fighting evil, it is best to stay out.