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| FILE - This August 21, 2013, citizen journalism file image provided by the Media Office Of Douma City which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian man mourning over one among many dead bodies after an alleged poisonous gas attack fired by regime forces, according to activists, in Douma town, Damascus, Syria. Many ghastly images from that day showing rows of the dead, many of them children, were unlike any other scene in Syria’s brutal civil war, where bombs and bullets have killed and maimed tens of thousands over the past 2½ years. It crossed what President Barack Obama calls a "red line" and, he says, demands a military response against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. |
The ghastly images
reveal rows of the dead, many of them children, wrapped in white burial
shrouds, and survivors gasping for air, their bodies twitching, foam
oozing from mouths.
This was unlike any other
scene in Syria's brutal civil war, where bombs and bullets have killed
and maimed tens of thousands over the past 2 1/2 years.
The
Aug. 21 attack on the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus was carried out,
the U.S. says, with chemical weapons. It crossed what President Barack
Obama calls a "red line" and, he says, demands a military response
against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
But
in a war where only a fraction of more than 100,000 Syrian deaths have
come from poison gas - the Obama administration says more than 1,400
died in the attack - what is it about chemical weapons that set them
apart in policy and perception?
Some experts
say chemical weapons belong in a special category. They point to the
moral and legal taboos that date to World War I, when the gassing of
thousands of soldiers led to a worldwide treaty banning the use of these
weapons. The experts also say these chemicals are not just repugnant
but pose national security risks.
"The use of
nerve gas or other types of deadly chemical agents clearly violates the
widely and long-established norms of the international community," said
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a
nonpartisan research group in Washington.
"Each
time these rules are broken and there's an inadequate response, the
risk that some of the world's most dangerous weapons will be used in
even further atrocities is going to increase - that's why here and why
now," he added.
Others contend there is no
distinction and that the U.S. should focus on protecting Syrian
civilians, not on preventing the use of a particular type of weapon
against them.
"The Syrian regime commits war
crimes and crimes against humanity every day," said Rami Abdel-Rahman of
the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. "A war crime is a war crime."
The Britain-based anti-regime monitor of the fighting says it has been
compiling a list of the names of the dead from the Aug. 21 attack and
that its toll has reached 502.
The exact
number of those killed is not known. The Obama administration reported
1,429 people died, including 426 children, citing intelligence reports.
Others have provided lower numbers. The Assad government blames rebels.
They came a year after Obama said the use of such lethal weapons in Syria would carry "enormous consequences."
"A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized," Obama said.
Last
week, Obama shifted the onus. "I didn't set a red line," he said. "The
world set a red line" with a treaty banning the use of chemical weapons.
The
president's call for a punitive strike has met with strong resistance
and skepticism, both on Capitol Hill, where he's seeking congressional
approval, and in a nation weary of a decade of war in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
At last week's Group of 20 economic
summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, Obama said he put the issue before
Congress "because I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by
Assad's use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and
children posed an imminent, direct threat to the United States."
Obama
plans to talk to the U.S. public about Syria on Tuesday night. He has
expressed confidence he can convince Americans that "limited and
proportional" military action is necessary,
The president's condemnation of chemical weapons reflects a nearly century-long history of opposition that spans the globe.
After
tens of thousands of soldiers, mostly Russians, were asphyxiated by
phosgene, chlorine and other deadly gases on the battlefield during
World War I, most nations banned these chemicals in the Geneva Protocol
of 1925, which Syria signed.
Many signatories,
however, reserved the right to respond if attacked first, said W.
Andrew Terrill, a research professor at the U.S. Army War College in
Pennsylvania.
In 1993, the Chemical Weapons
Convention outlawed the use, production and stockpiling of these agents.
Syria is one of the few nations not to have signed the agreement.
Terrill
said the "red line" that Obama has cited shouldn't be viewed as just an
emotional response to horrific acts but as "cold hard strategy. I think
it gives us the moral high ground and we're going to use the moral high
ground when we get an opportunity to do so while pursuing our
interests."
There also are distinct national security reasons for military action, he said.
If
Assad isn't stopped now, that could open the way for expanded use of
chemical weapons and embolden nations with suspected nuclear ambitions,
such as Iran, Terrill said. "It's better to nip it in the bud now," he
added. "It's better to make our disapproval known early because if we
don't, we could be coping with a much worse situation."
Robert
Kaplan, an analyst at Stratfor, a U.S-based global intelligence firm,
said America's strategic interests often collide with aspirations to be a
guardian of international norms.
In the
1980s, he said, the Reagan administration did not punish Iraq's Saddam
Hussein when he used chemical weapons during the war with Iran and
against his country's Kurdish minority. Those attacks killed several
thousand people, including an estimated 5,000 in the Iraqi village of
Halabja. Shocking pictures of those victims were transmitted around the
world.
At the time, the U.S. had other
priorities, such as the Cold War with the Soviet Union and attempts to
contain Iran, where an Islamic revolution in 1979 had ousted the shah, a
U.S. ally, said Kaplan and Richard Price, a professor at the University
of British Columbia. Punishing Saddam could have undermined those
objectives, they said.
Obama now faces another
dilemma, said Price, author of "The Chemical Weapons Taboo." If the
president enforces that "taboo" against poison gas attacks and strikes
Syria, he risks "violating another set of norms, about when it is
legitimate to resort to force under international law," Price said.
Some
Obama critics have said he must seek U.N. Security Council approval for
any strike, but a likely Russian veto there blocks that option.
Others
have said he should have intervened earlier in Syria, where numerous
acts of brutality have been reported that have involved conventional
weapons.
For example, five days after the gas
attack, an incendiary bomb, which contains substances that cause severe
burns, struck a building being used as a school in northwest Syria,
killing at least one man and wounding several others, according to the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Amateur
video posted online showed several teenage boys, stripped down to their
pants or underwear, their bodies ravaged by burns. Some were seen
writhing on the floor. One was shown holding out his arms, shaking and
dazed. Another moaned in agony and muttered "water, water."
The
New York-based group Human Rights Watch says it has documented multiple
attacks in Syria with incendiary bombs dropped from government planes
since November. The group released a report last week identifying 152
locations where government forces used at least 204 cluster munitions,
which explode in the air, releasing hundreds of tiny bomblets, over a
one-year period ending in June. These munitions pose a long-lasting
danger to civilians.
"It turns out that
conventional weapons are extremely effective at killing civilians and
they can be just as arbitrary," said Dominic Tierney, an associate
professor of political science at Swarthmore College and author of "How
We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War."
"We
should be focused much more on the overall plight of the civilians ...
and not be so fixated on whether one particular weapon system is used.
... It's almost like saying we're making strangling illegal, but other
kinds of murder are OK."
Tierney also said
Obama's imposing of a red line on Syria can have a "perverse effect"
because it implicitly tells Assad the U.S. won't intervene if he stays
away from using chemical agents to kill civilians.
"If
we went to war to try to deter Assad from using chemical weapons -
let's say we succeed and ... instead (he) goes back to using
conventional weapons," he said. "Is that supposed to be a victory?"
