“Reality Check”: Assad’s Use Of Chemical Weapons Is Truly Depraved
“We categorically reject even the idea of using chemical weapons … against our own people,” Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad said this week. “This is crazy, morally this is absolutely unacceptable, and no Syrian … from the government will do it.”
Despite those comments, overwhelming evidence indicates the regime of Bashar al-Assad has deployed chemical weapons on the battlefield in Syria.
The most recent — and by far the most devastating — occurred on August 21, when thousands of people were gassed while they slept in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta.
To realize how depraved it is to use nerve agents on innocent civilians, consider that the attack was “third large-scale use of a chemical weapon in the Middle East and may have broken the longest period in history without such an attack.”
That fact is currently being lost as Congress begins debating whether to approve limited military action in response to the Syrian government’s actions.
Yet that’s the thrust of the Obama administration’s argument.
“Bashar al-Assad now joins the list of Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein [i.e., other rulers who] have used these weapons in time of war,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC on Sunday. “This is of great consequence to Israel, to Jordan, to Turkey, to the region, and to all of us who care about enforcing the international norm with respect to chemical weapons.”
The “threat” of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) — nuclear, biological, or chemical — is real, but one of the reasons people are hesitant to advocate a U.S. strike is because the threat of “WMDs” were used as a pretense to hasten the oust Hussein.
The Iraq war notwithstanding, history provides insight into the wickedness of chemical weapons use. That, in turn, informs why the international community has been proactive about neutralizing that threat.
In World War I poison gas was arguably the most feared of all weapons as several countries released more than 1.3 million tons of chemical agents — ranging from simple tear gas to mustard gas — and killed 90,000 men.
The gas, released in open air, spread with the speed and direction of the wind. The same thing happened outside of Damascus on August 21.
By World War II Nazi Germany had developed deadlier gasses and then took air out of the equation by releasing nerve agents in gas chambers. The effect was catastrophic — the largest chambers could kill 2,000 people at once — since the concentration of chemicals is highest in small spaces.
The horrors of the World Wars, as well as the more recent example of Iraq causing 60,000 chemical weapons casualties in their war with Iran in the ’80s, explain why the Obama administration would be aggressively proactive about their use in Syria.
Furthermore, there is the added danger of Syria’s chemical WMDs falling into the hands of extremists who would hesitate much less before wreaking chemical havoc on a part of the world.
That’s why there has been a persistent fear throughout the Syrian conflict that Assad would transfer chemical weapons to Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based terrorist group and Iranian proxy that has more than 60,000 rockets pointed at Israel.
Syria and it’s allies have insisted that Assad is not crazy enough to deploy WMDs on his people. On Friday Russian President Vladimir Putin said it would be “utter nonsense” for Syria’s government to provoke opponents with such attacks.
But overwhelming evidence indicates that he did just that. Now it’s just a matter of what the international community is going to do about it.
As Obama asked “every member of Congress and every member of the global community” on Saturday:
“What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?”
By: Michael Kelley, Business Insider, September 1, 2013
“A Progressive Perspective”: Congress Should Approve The President’s Request To Punish The Use Of Chemical Weapons
I began my work in politics and the Progressive Movement working for civil rights and the end of the Viet Nam War in the 1960’s. And I worked hard to end one of the greatest foreign policy outrages of my lifetime – the War in Iraq.
I believe that U.S. military and covert actions to support the status quo in Central and South America, Africa and Asia were utterly indefensible.
But I also believe that there are times when the use of military force is not only justified – but required.
Bashar al Assad cannot be allowed to use chemical weapons to kill 1,400 people – over 400 children – in the plain site of the entire world – with impunity. It’s that simple.
Since the end of World War I – almost a century ago – there has been a worldwide consensus that human society will not allow combatants in conflicts to use chemical or biological weapons. After World War II, nuclear weapons were added to the list.
These true weapons of mass destruction present a danger far beyond their effects on the immediate combatants – or even the innocent bystanders – of a particular conflict. If the world allows and thereby legitimates their use, it will unleash forces that could endanger huge swaths of human society – and even the existence of humanity itself.
While chemical weapons cannot do damage as extensive as nuclear or radiological weapons – they have the potential of killing and maiming tens of thousands of our fellow human beings within hours or minutes. And their horrific effects have been graphically demonstrated in real time on the television screens of the world documenting Assad’s attacks on innocent civilians.
Sometime in the last century, human society entered a gauntlet. As we pass through that gauntlet, a race is on to determine whether our values and political structures evolve fast enough to keep up with the geometric increases in our technology? If they do, technology could propel human beings into an awesome and unprecedented period of freedom, possibility and fulfillment. If not, we could destroy ourselves and turn into an evolutionary dead end – like our cousins the Neanderthals.
To survive that gauntlet, it is critically important that we do everything in our power to absolutely ban the use of weapons of mass destruction – and to make those who violate that ban into worldwide pariahs. We must make their use unthinkable.
In political and historic narratives – some moments take on an iconic, symbolic importance. Assad’s use of chemical weapons is now one of them. Will the world stand idly by while we watch – up close and personal – as a government uses chemical weapons with impunity? Or will someone take action to require that the perpetrators of this crime be made to pay a price?
Most people in the world wish that someone had stepped up to stop the horrific genocide in Rwanda. Most now believe President Clinton and NATO did the right thing to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
History will judge us harshly, if we stand by idly, and legitimate the use of chemical weapons – and weapons of mass destruction in general – by allowing their use in the view of the full world to go unpunished.
And let’s be clear. We’re not debating who has the right to possess these weapons – or to possess nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction here — a major topic of political debate in the world for the last decade. We are talking about their actual use.
If we agree that we cannot allow that actual use to occur with utter impunity, then the only question remaining is – who will act to impose a serious sanction?
Unfortunately the United Nations has not yet evolved into an institution that has the ability to escape gridlock if one of the world’s major powers stands in the way. It will not act. Russia and China will prevent it.
So as a practical matter, if the United States does not lead some sort of international action to do so, it will not happen.
Of course the legacy of the War in Iraq casts a giant shadow on this showdown over chemical weapons in Syria. Its legacy casts doubt on the accuracy of American intelligence, and causes everyday Americans to be very reluctant to support any use of force in the world.
But this is not Iraq. The President is not asking for authorization to go to war – or to become engaged in the Syrian Civil War. He is not proposing – as Bush proposed in Iraq – an American military invasion. He is not proposing a campaign of “regime change” or “nation building.” America’s decision will surely have implications for the Syrian Civil War, but this decision is not even mainly about the Syrian Civil War. It is mainly about the use of chemical weapons.
The President is proposing that the Congress authorize him to take action in this very narrow circumstance. He is proposing that the world community demonstrate that if someone uses chemical weapons, there will be a substantial cost to that action – that we do not allow such an act to occur with impunity. Because if the world sits by, the message will be crystal clear: that the use of chemical weapons has once again become an acceptable means of armed conflict. That would be a tragedy – and would endanger the future of all of the world’s children – who could one day find themselves writhing in pain and gasping for breath like the Syrian children we all watched on television.
Condemnation and “moral outrage” against the use of chemical weapons do not constitute a sanction. They are, in fact, no sanction at all. We would never allow the perpetrator of a rape or murder in the United States to be subjected to “moral outrage” and sent home to contemplate his deed. How much less can we allow that to the be case when a government has murdered 1,400 of its own people using weapons that have been universally condemned by the entire international community for almost 100 years. That defies common sense.
I would argue that the control – and ultimate elimination of weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear – is one of the most critical priorities for Progressives like myself, and for our entire society. To secure the future of our species, we must eliminate them – not only from the hands of tyrants like Assad, or unreliable nation states, or non-state actors – but from all of the world’s arsenals, including our own.
We have begun to make progress down that long and difficult road with the end of the Cold War, the chemical weapons treaty, nuclear weapons treaties – and most importantly, the developing worldwide consensus that their use is unthinkable.
The world cannot afford an iconic use of chemical weapons to go unpunished. And the United States of America alone in the world has the ability to lead an appropriate international response.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, September 1, 2013
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