I've been following the discussion of Syria all week and growing more and I've been growing more and more impatient with some of what I've been hearing. There are important arguments against any type of military intervention in Syria, but there are also plenty of words being wasted on points that fail to address the situation that President Obama is attempting to confront.
I cringe every time the opportunistic Bush Iraq incursion is evoked as if the situations are parallel in more than a superficial fashion. Syria is not spelled I-R-A-Q, nor is Obama spelled B-U-S-H. Reaper0Bot0 spells out the differences very well, so I don't need to say more on the topic.
I only shrug, though, when those opposed to a punitive response to Syria's use of chemical weapons ask why killing a few thousand folks with chemical weapons is worse than killing 100,000 with conventional weapons - the number of estimated deaths over the course of the ongoing Syrian civil war. It's a legitimate question. The short answer is that it isn't. Death is death. It's bad. But the real question is not about when murder is acceptable, but about our ability to maintain a widely accepted and, since 1993 legal convention that has since WWI taken at least one method of mass murder off the table. As far as I'm concerned that's good.
There are, of course, nuances that are ignored when President Obama insists that we must uphold this convention. It's true that American administrations have ignored past uses of chemical attacks in other parts of the world - it is even true that the Reagan administration permitted the sale to Iraq of components used to manufacture the chemical warfare agents the Iraquis were using against Iran. The Reagonites deemed it in the interests of the United States that Iraq prevail in the 1980-88 Iraq/Iran war and weren't squeamish about the means Iraq employed. But, just as Obama is not Bush, he isn't Reagan - or any other president whose administration has looked the other way when confronted by instances of chemical warfare. The misdeeds of the past need not dictate our current and future actions.
It is also probably true that nations that maintain a large nuclear repository as well as huge stockpiles of conventional weapons may fairly be accused of hypocrisy when they react with outrage at the use of chemical weapons. Of course, the argument for nuclear weapons stockpiles, defensible or not, is deterrence - insuring that they won't be used, and efforts to keep such weapons from proliferating also speaks to the perception that their use is unacceptable. Nor does the existence of stockpiles of conventional weapons make it more acceptable for other countries to violate an already established norm against another type of weapon. Just because you have a hoard of cyanide, it does not mean you're a jerk because you try to stop someone from putting strychnine in the water system.
If you agree that it is important to the world community to continue and uphold a prohibition against a particularly nasty and, arguably, potentially uncontrollable weapon, the question remains about how to best achieve that goal. Many of us would consider the obvious answer to be through the combined action of the international community. Unfortunately, it seems that international structures capable of effective action in this case don't exist.
One mechanism for international action, for example, would be punitive action taken by the United Nations - however, we all know that won't happen given the structure of the Security Council which ensures the ability of its members, in this case Russia and China, to stop cold any action perceived as inimical to their interests. Nor, as Joshua Keating observes in Slate, is the International Criminal Court in the Hague a potential venue for accountability:
Unfortunately, international law is once again protecting Assad’s violations of international law. Syria is not a state party to the ICC (neither, for what it’s worth, is the United States) and therefore its prosecutors don’t have jurisdiction over crimes committed there. For Assad to be charged by the ICC, he would have to be referred by the U.N. Security Council which, as with an authorization for military intervention, isn’t going to happen as long as Russia and China have seats. ...
As for an international military coalition outside the U.N., I'm afraid, as the British example shows, that the disastrous experience with American dishonesty leading up to Bush's Iraq war has muddied the water to the extent that it will be difficult to achieve. Perhaps time and diplomacy will prevail and other allies will be added to a roster that already includes France - Sweden was
unwilling to immediately commit to action against Assad, but has not ruled it out either.
What all this leaves us with are the questions of (1) whether it is important that we respond to violations of the convention against the use of chemical warfare, and (2) if we agree that it is important, what is the best way to achieve a deterrent goal. It seems to me that these are the questions that President Obama is attempting to answer. I know what his answer is to the first question and I agree with him and respect him for it; the real debate centers on the second question. We know the general outlines of the President's answer to that question and some of the objections to it. Unfortunately, the best answer may not be known until we have the benefit of hindsight - such arguments are always governed by unknowns and hypotheticals. We cannot, however, allow that fact to justify paralysis.
10:39 AM PT: UPDATE: Michael Tomasky presents an excellent and very concise argument enumerating what he sees as the risks if we do nothing about Assad's use of chemical weapons. Worth reading if only to test one's conviction that intervention in this issue is the wrong thing to do.