As governments around the world scramble to come up with an appropriate response to the apparent use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria’s civil war, France is using the “f-word”:  That is, to respond with “force”.

But in an interview with a Parisian TV show, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius expressly ruled out the idea of injecting western ground forces into Syria’s bloody civil war, now in its third year with more than 100,000 fatalities.

Right now, there is only video evidence that something terrible happened in the rebel-held Eastern suburbs of Damascus.  Dozens of people are seen sickened, distressed, and dead.  The Syrian opposition says as many as 1,400 people were killed in a chemical weapon attack.  The Syrian government denies this with the backing of its allies in Moscow.  If it’s true, it’s the worst chemical weapon attack since Saddam Hussein gassed his own people in Halabja, Iraq in 1988.

There is a United Nations chemical weapons inspection team in Syria right now that could determine what happened.  But the team’s mandate only extends to investigating three older allegations of chemical weapons attacks.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has dispatched his disarmament chief to Damascus to try and convince the Bashar al-Assad government to allow the team to go to the site of the latest alleged attack.