Syria: a Defining Moment For Chemical Weapons? 454
Lasrick writes "Oliver Meier describes the long-term significance (even beyond the incredible human suffering) of Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons on August 21, and outlines six major steps for response. Quoting: 'The attack in August is a historic event with wider implications. Its impact on the role of chemical weapons in international security in general will depend primarily on the responses. Looking beyond the current crisis, failure to respond to the attacks could undermine the taboo against chemical weapons. ... First, a unified response by the international community is essential. The strength of international norms depends primarily on great-power support. So far, such a unified response is sorely lacking. Judgments about how to react to the use of chemical weapons appear to be tainted by preferences about the shape of a post-war Syria. This has already damaged the international chemical weapons legal regime.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:War should Suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I never understood the principle. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention, we don't seem to have any problem shedding the taboos against torture and killing first responders (Guantanamo and US drone double tap strikes).
Both are war crimes and both are carried out knowingly and intentionally. At this point it would make more sense for Russia to be the human rights watch dog of the world.
ASSAD USED THE SAME CHEMICAL WEAPONS (Score:4, Interesting)
That Colin Powell discovered that Saddam stored in Iraq.
The kind that exist in "intelligence assessments" that are long on pronouncement and void of evidence.
Re:I never understood the principle. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with white phosphorus is that it doesn't kill people, it maims them. The overall gist of the rules of war is that it's OK to kill people but not to leave them suffering. It's tantamount to torture or terrorism, using fear and pain rather than force to achieve your goals. Ostensibly killing soldiers is part of a just war (making them stop doing whatever it is that justifies your war), while simply scaring people isn't, even though it leaves them alive.
It took me a long time to write that in as neutral a fashion as I could. I'm sure that a great many people would find it a silly distinction. But it really is a key underlying principle for why we have rules of war at all. I personally find the concept kind of odd.
You mean AMERICA'S use of chemical weapons (Score:0, Interesting)
Let me take you yanks back a few years. The Iranian people finally readied to take back their nation, and throw out the US despot who had been ruling over them since the CIA had exterminated all democracy in Iran. During the revolution, the Iranians took some US spies/terrorists/torturers hostage, and unlike how the US behaves to its hostages, treated them quite well, and released them when Reagan was elected president. The filthy monsters that rule the USA wanted revenge, so shortly afterwards they instructed their puppet despot in Iraq, Saddam, to declare war on Iran.
The war went badly for the Americans, so the US military increasingly assisted Saddam. Ultimately, this resulted in the USA delivering MASSIVE amounts of chemical weapons to Saddam, together with military trainers and advisor to ensure they'd be deployed effectively. Then the US directly co-ordinated chemical weapons attacks against Iranian forces and civilians, using satellites like the one just launched, to provide real-time ground intelligence.
The Syrian terrorists, the vast majority of them from Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, Libya, Iraq and every other place the USA has influence, are extremist Muslim nutcases who want the secular regime of Syria to end, and in its place to install a Saudi Arabia flavoured Islamic state, with ZERO rights for women. These terrorists are recruited, trained, funded, and armed by the USA- but using a series of proxies. Saudi Arabia launders the US money, and thus 'appears' to be the source of the funding. British intelligence bases in Qatar (including Al Jazeera, the mock Muslim news-service created by the BBC's MI6 World Service department) oversee the logistics of the terror campaign. Training of the terror forces occurs at British controlled facilities in Jordan, where special forces from France, UK, Israel, and the USA attempt to give the idiot kids the skills they need to create maximum havoc in Syria.
The US government purchases weapons from every possible military market to arm the terrorists. Much of this is old Soviet tech left over when the USSR withdrew from all the old satellite states. Obama set two conditions for Croatia joining the EU, for instance. The first was the transport of unthinkable amounts of weaponry to Obama's terror forces.
Obama has provided chemical weapons to the terrorists he sends into Syria in as many varieties as possible. These range from the crudest imaginable to some that might have been state-of-the-art in the 60s, although the delivery and dispersal systems are much more modern. Just as with the Iran-Iraq war that America forced on the world, every aspect of the horror in Syria is a US creation. Obama's problem, given that Syria is largely attacked by very nasty, very disturbed, very enthusiastic young men with little military training or discipline, is how to get this sea of cannon fodder to effectively deploy the much more sophisticated mass murder technology that Obama wishes to see successfully deployed.
Remember, this isn't about Syria- this is about Iran. The monsters that rule you have been searching for a sheeple convincing excuse to exterminate Iran for many years now, and have made no real progress. If Obama can set the whole Middle East alight, those that pull his strings figure the USA can work a genocidal strike against Iran in amongst all the carnage.
Atrocity is Counter-Productive (Score:5, Interesting)
It matters little who started what. Dresden remains an example of moral and practical failure. The moral failure came in the form of the massive civilian casualties knowingly inflicted. (That military men are guilty of atrocities does not mean unarmed non-combatants deserve punishment for those atrocities.)
The practical failure is often ignored, however, and the British should have been well aware of it. The Germans bombed London for months, operating under the belief that attacking the city would break the civilian will to fight. It turned out that attacking civilian populations only increases their will to fight, increases enlistment of willing soldiers beyond anything conscription can do, and makes any suggestion of acquiescence a political impossibility for those attacked. If you defeat an enemy military in the field, civilian support for the war effort will wane. Yet you cannot easily secure a surrender once you've committed atrocities against civilians.
This is directly comparable to the treatment of POWs. Some Germans were told by their fathers who'd fought in WWI to fight bravely even to the death against Russians but surrender to the first Americans you find. They said this because American had a policy of treating POWs humanely in WWI. Thus, American units in the European front could sometimes welcome a reduction in the fighting strength of the Germans due to surrender--an option which is always preferable because those who surrender do not shoot back. Contrast this with Americans after the Bataan Death March or, better still, Soviet defectors early in the war. Many Ukranians welcomed the Nazis, thinking them liberators from the evils of Stalin. They soon learned that the racist bastards could be even worse than Stalin. Consequently, Soviet soldiers fought for the state more fervently and many would refuse to surrender, knowing that death in battle would be preferable to being a Slavic POW in Nazi hands.
Atrocity can seem to give the one who commits it a brief surge of power, partly because of the fear it inflicts. But in the long run, atrocity and the killing of civilians is always counter-productive to a war effort. For more information, see Section V of this monograph [amazon.com].
Re:failure to respond... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is from the Guardian newspaper's website:
One former colonel in the Syrian air force said yesterday that despite claims that limited US strikes would do little damage to the regime, in key areas, where regime forces have already been heavily degraded by two and a half years of war, even the strikes proposed could have a significant impact.
“The air force in particular is almost on its last legs. They have a limited number of crews available and are cannibalising aircraft to keep them flying. That is the one thing FSA does not have.”
He added that although the air force had once had a dispersal plan designed to protect its planes the geography of the conflict, with rebel forces controlling large areas of the countryside made this impossible.
“In addition there are no underground hangers. The ones above ground are reinforced but are no match for modern weapons.”
Describing the rationale behind why the regime had launched chemical weapons strikes leaving them vulnerable to US strikes, he said he had heard from several sources in the country claims that the attack on east Ghouta was the result of a falling out between President Bashar Assad and his influential brother Maher, who has been blamed in some quarters for launching the chemical weapons strike.
“I was told there was a meeting and an argument over the lack of progress in clearing the Damascus suburbs with both sides blaming each other. The story is that Maher stormed out and ordered the attack.”
Re:Get involved but on a limited scale. (Score:5, Interesting)
And what if the Syrian rebels were using those chemical weapons? The US government seems unwilling to investigate that option, even unwilling to let the UN investigate this. They have only one prefered outcome. Judging from Kerry's speech they don't even to bother to produce fake evidence like in Iraq.
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
No it's not, the US sees itself as the world police. Most other nations wished you didn't and minded your own buisiness.