In her new book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, tells the story of Tom, a high-school student from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who decides to spend his senior year in Wroclaw, Poland. Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the course of less than a decade, the country raised students’ test scores from significantly below average for the developed world to significantly above it; Polish kids now outscore American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Wroclaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

Sports, Ripley writes, were “the core culture of Gettysburg High.” In Wroclaw, by contrast, if kids wanted to play soccer or basketball after school they had to organize the games themselves. Teachers didn’t double as coaches and the principal certainly never came out to cheer. Thus, “there was no confusion about what school was for—or what mattered to the kids’ life chances.”

Americans have been somewhat surprised that our most eager ally in taking punitive military action against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is not the United Kingdom, our partner in the so-called “special relationship,” but the France of the Socialist François Hollande. Do you remember when we were mad enough at them to put Freedom Fries on the menu?

President Obama’s decision to delay action by turning to Congress caught the French off guard—they were reportedly ready to act immediately. Now Hollande finds himself in a somewhat awkward position—out in front of everyone else, with a debate in his own parliament. The respected satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné (the Chained Duck) described Hollande's position as like that “of a kid whose buddies have pushed him forward to join a fight and now that he’s there, do not follow him.”

In April, 1954, President Eisenhower was being pressured to take military action in Vietnam, where the French were losing a symbolically important battle at Dien Bien Phu and were about to be driven out of what was then their colony. At a press conference that month, Eisenhower acknowledged the “falling domino” principle—the idea that if one land were to fall to Communism others would follow. John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, declared that a Communist political system imposed on Southeast Asia by means of the Marxist and nationalist guerrilla forces fighting the French “would be a grave threat to the whole free community,” and Vice-President Richard Nixon, in a talk to newspaper editors that April, dropped hints about dispatching American troops. Eisenhower never used a phrase like “red line,” as President Obama did when he warned the Syrian regime that the use of chemical weapons would be punished, but he did say that the defense of the Southeast Asia region was of “transcendent importance.” He sounded determined to act.

Yet Eisenhower, much like Obama, sometimes appeared to be acting in ways that ran counter to his words. Historic parallels are risky, but the conflict in Korea had ended the previous summer, with an armistice that gave victory to no one. That divisive war, fought at a cost of nearly thirty thousand American lives and more than eighty thousand wounded, left Ike and most Americans with no appetite for a return engagement. The divisive Iraq war and its murderous aftermath still shadow every mention of involvement in the Middle East. When Eisenhower in 1954 said that his Administration would need to consult legislators, he was pretty sure that the 83rd Congress had no wish to endorse intervention, and it is not unreasonable to think that Obama, despite his strong words and his mini-summit with Senator John McCain, suspects that the 113th Congress may be no more inclined. Eisenhower stressed the importance of working with American allies, particularly Great Britain, and he sent a cable to Prime Minister Winston Churchill saying that a “new, ad hoc grouping or coalition of nations” was needed to help the French: “We face the hard situation of contemplating a disaster brought on by French weakness and the necessity of dealing with it before it develops.”

Listen to the podcast of “Crossing the Line,” Steve Coll’s Comment on how Obama should respond to Syria’s chemical weapons.

Read more of our coverage of the war in Syria.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Two of the big legal stories of the past few weeks seem, on the surface, to have almost nothing to do with one another. Attorney General Eric Holder gave a tentative acquiescence to the marijuana-legalization programs in the states of Colorado and Washington. A federal judge declared that the stop-and-frisk practices of the New York Police Department violated the Constitution.

In truth, the two decisions are closely related and suggest a welcome injection of sanity into contemporary American law enforcement.

One of the sadder things about the life of Chelsea, formerly Bradley, Manning is that she always seems to have been in the wrong place—at a time when there surely is a right place for her. As a kid, Manning was a gay, geeky, opinionated atheist growing up in a conservative Oklahoma town she once described as having “more pews than people.” She was all those things—and a foreigner, too—in the next place she lived, Haverfordwest, Wales, where Manning moved with her mother, an alcoholic who struggled with everything. She was all those things, plus cross-dressing and opposed to the war in Iraq, while she was deployed to Baghdad, working in computer intelligence to advance that very war. A profile of Manning that ran in the Times in 2010 described a brief period when she was hanging out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a boyfriend, a student at Brandeis who was a classical-music-loving, self-described drag queen, and the boyfriend’s circle. Reading about that interlude, it’s hard not to think this was where Manning belonged, with the kind of cyber-nerds and gender activists who feel most at home in the penumbra of a college campus. If only she’d been on a track to join that milieu, as opposed to, say, the Army, where she was stranded with people she saw as “a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger happy ignorant rednecks,” things would have turned out so much better—at least for Manning. Whether we would have ever found out some of the things Manning leaked that we deserve to know about the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is another matter.

[Update: On Thursday evening, Parliament rejected military action in Syria by a vote of 285 to 272.]

Not before time, the public and its elected officials have taken a stand against the rush to bomb Syria—an action that could embroil the United States in a bloody civil war and lead us down a path to goodness knows where. The public in question turned out to be the British, but no matter. All popular movements have to start someplace. Now it’s up to the American people and their representatives to demand a similar pause for reflection and political debate.

After yesterday’s dramatic developments in London, which culminated in Prime Minister David Cameron delaying a parliamentary vote to authorize British participation in an American-led attack, President Obama faces the choice of putting off the bombing or going ahead without the support of America’s closest European ally. Should he choose to hold off for a few days, which seems likely, it will give Congress time to consider the matter, and to schedule a vote approving military action. Until now, the White House has resisted such a vote, and the Republican leadership has stopped short of demanding one. But now that Britain has allowed the people’s representatives to have a say, and also given the U.N. inspectors in Syria some time to complete their investigation of last week’s awful gas attack, the political dynamic in Washington may change.

Update, Wednesday afternoon: Major Nidal Malik Hasan has been sentenced to death.

On Friday, military courts in Washington State and Texas rendered decisions that, with a bit of bad luck, will create a nasty dilemma for President Obama.

At Lewis-McChord, an Army Air Force base near Tacoma, a six-member jury sentenced Staff Sergeant Robert Bales—who, on March 11, 2012, murdered sixteen civilian villagers in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan—to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

At Fort Hood, a jury of thirteen Army officers found Major Nidal Malik Hasan—who, on November 5, 2009, killed thirteen of his fellow-soldiers and wounded dozens more, none of them armed—guilty of forty-five counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.

There was never the slightest doubt, reasonable or unreasonable, about the culpability of either man. There was nothing “alleged” about their crimes. Because of the certainty of a guilty verdict, Sergeant Bales pleaded guilty. For exactly the same reason, Major Hasan did the opposite.

So it looks like we’re going to bomb Assad.

Good.

Really? Why good?

Did you see the videos of those kids? I heard that ten thousand people were gassed. Hundreds of them died. This time, we have to do something.

Listen to the podcast of “A Test of Confidence,” Steve Coll’s Comment on Obama, Holder, and the press.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.