Today's Zaman, a large and respected English-language daily newspaper based in Turkey, made a big splash today with a story suggesting that that Turkish government had informed Western diplomats it was considering invading Syria to topple President Bashar al-Assad. "Report: Turkey tells West it might launch offensive against Syria," reads the headline. The article cites a Kuwaiti newspaper, As-Seyassah, which in turn cites an anonymous British diplomat.

It's the kind of story that's outrageous enough to attract suspicion, but still gets passed around both because it has aspects of plausibility and because it tells people something they want to hear.

Syria's awful violence against its citizens has no obvious Western solutions. Assad's regime is already heavily sanctioned, and Western governments have few diplomatic levers to influence his behavior. Regardless of whether a Libya-style intervention would be a good idea, the North African conflict has become so protracted and expensive that NATO is extremely unlikely to want to repeat in Syria. The idea that Turkey might simply take care of the Syria problem itself, however unlikely and however unwise, could tempt Western readers, even normally skeptical analysts and journalists, into letting themselves believe it.