Maguire quotes and my thoughts.

....We met with the Syrian Prime Minister and 7 other government ministers, and we were assured that the Government did not use sarin gas on its own people, and they invited the UN to send in inspectors to see what was happening....

Oooh she makes them sound like such nice reasonable people. Make me wonder who actually did all the killing of civilians with conventional weapons before this happened and chased a third of the population out of the country. It just couldn't have been them.

The Assad regime is expert at this crap, presenting an illusion of we-are-nice-people normality:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/assads-bizarre-ins...

She argues

Currently there is an International Commission of Inquiry on Chemical Weapons in Damascus staying at Four Seasons Hotel, which is less than ten minutes from the areas where the chemical weapons were allegedly used....

Nobody with any sense still thinks the use of chemical weapons in Damascus suburbs is something "alleged." The disagreement is about who may have used them and/or how their use happened.  She doesn't appear to have much knowledge about how the delivery of chemical weapons has been developed in Syria in order to target small areas--that's without blaming any party for their use.

The more I look at Maguire's part of this essay, the more whole thing starts to rile me as the sort of naive kumbaya stuff that has given being a peacenik a bad name. I am not impressed. Makes me wonder about the sense and quality of the humanitarian organizations and that conflict resolution organizations that she recommends. This, for example, is what has been happening to some of the Mussalaha group that she recommends:

http://australiansforreconciliationinsyria.wordpress.com/mussalaha-martyrs/

Making great progress at ending the violence, eh, are ya?

Also, along with the Obama Peace Prize, really makes me wonder about how far the quality of Nobel Committee members might have fallen.