Reuters

Sources familiar with U.S. planning for a strike on Syria have told CNN that "strikes on command bunkers, airfields or the artillery batteries and rocket launchers used to fire chemical projectiles are among the possibilities being considered."

In other words, acts of war.

War is the word for when one military gets powerful explosives, fires them at adversaries in another country, and destroys their military hardware and weapons. If any country on earth struck American bunkers, airfields, or artillery batteries, virtually every last American would understand that as an act of war.

Yet Secretary of State John Kerry has gone before Congress and said this:

When people are asked, do you want to go to war in Syria? Of course not. Everybody, 100 percent of Americans would say no. We say no. We don’t want to go to war in Syria either. That’s not what we’re here to ask. The president is not asking you to go to war, he’s not asking you to declare war, he’s not asking you to send one American troop to war. He is simply saying we need to take an action that can degrade the capacity of a man who’s been willing to kill his own people by breaking a nearly 100-year-old prohibition, and will we stand up and be counted to say we won’t do that. That’s not -- you know, I just don’t consider that going to war in the classic sense of coming to Congress and asking for a declaration of war and training troops and sending people abroad and putting young Americans in harm’s way. That’s not what the president is asking for here.

That's really something. One wonders who will select the targets in Syria and fire the explosives into its territory if not trained U.S. troops operating abroad.