"Against his own people." Dumbest argument ever???

[cthulu2016]

This is an oldie but goodie.

How can "against his own people" possibly make an action worse to the outside world?

As opposed to what? Against somebody else's people?

Why would it be better, from an international perspective, for someone to use chemical weapons against another country than against his own country?

It is a "facebook graphic" level argument. It sounds like an argument only as long as one doesn't think about it.


If we believe that "against his own people" is a legitimate aggravating circumstance then we would be less upset if Assad launched Sarin shells into Turkey or Jordan or Israel, since the "own people" argument suggests that attacking another country would at least be a step in the right direction.

Does anyone believe that a Syrian nerve gas attack on Turkey (let alone Israel) would be viewed as LESS serious???

This suggests that we do NOT believe it to be an aggravating circumstance, but assume that some moron somewhere does think so.


It really might be the dumbest. Argument. Ever.

So where did it come from? That's easy. Saint Ronnie had acquiesced to Saddam Hussein gassing Iranian people. Bush fils wanted to attack Iraq, but couldn't get too indignant about Iraq's history of using WMD to attack other people.

So the only Iraq WMD attack not tacitly sanctioned by the USA was internal, after the Iran-Iraq War, and thus "against his own people" had to become the ultimate cause for war because it was the only argument they had.


As to why Kerry or Obama would adopt The World's Dumbest Argument... Jesus, I really don't know.

From a humanitarian perspective using them against PEOPLE should be the trigger without getting into the citizenship status of the targets.

To put an uncomfortably fine point on this... if we should attack Syria, and if Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons "on his own people" does that mean we were right to attack Iraq? That question, which is troublesome and unhelpful, arises from the unforced error of the Obama administration parroting Iraq War talking points. There is no logical need for it, no international affection to be gained by it... it's just F'ing bizarre. Continuity in foreign policy is often desirable, but not when the continuity is with America's most outlandish foreign relations error.

[Robb]

1. Man shoots up 7-11 in small town, kills three strangers, no one asks why.

But when a man shoots his wife, two children, and the family dog .... Well. That guy's nuts.

[MNBrewer]

2. Good point

use of chemical weapons is equally bad regardless of who uses them upon whom.

And, perhaps, it wasn't the regime who used them.... we don't know. We can really only guess.

[arcane1]

3. It also somehow makes it OK for us to use conventional weapons on those very same people

The mind boggles

[frazzled]

10. We (along with 189 nations) are signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention

which bans the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Chemical_Weapons_Convention

Look, this civil war in Syria has been horrendous: 100,000 are dead. That's a huge number of people in two years. Yet we have not intervened, partly because the outcome seems so unpleasant and uncertain on both sides, and partly because we don't intervene in civil wars unless some kind of genocide is in progress. (Even then we don't do it sometimes.)

The reason this administration called the use of chemical weapons a red line is because we are part of an international treaty that bans their use. When we sit back and do nothing we risk condoning the use of weapons that every country in the world save a few have deemed unacceptable. Then there will be more.

I'm a little in shock reading this board today. People are comparing the death of more than 350 people and sickening of thousands more in an overnight attack to ... the use of tear gas to disperse crowds? Others have accused John Kerry of making it all up, as if the international bodies and Doctors without Borders are all lying. Others suggest we are about to embark on another Iraq instead of possibly limited strikes, as is being discussed.

I wouldn't be so shocked at the lack of compassion if we hadn't just been through a week where many of the same people here were thinking the world had ended because some guy got questioned for a few hours in an airport. I mean, people can go into vapors over that and fail to be concerned about the gassing of an entire village? We stood by in 1995 while Srebenica took 8000 lives, and we stood by in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide. I don't know if that was the right or wrong decision. Finally, we didn't stand by in Kosovo, and I think that turned out to be a fairly good decision with a relatively lasting outcome in the region.

I don't see any good answers here in this case for Syria, but the dismissal of the seriousness of the use of chemical weapons is disgusting to me. Get your priorities straight, people.

[MADem]

12. The people on this board who are making those uninformed arguments don't know the history of the

region and they have a mistaken belief--thanks to people like John McCain--that the policy of the US government is to "support the rebels" or something on those lines.

The actual policy of the US government is a Yemen scenario, where "the regime"--such as it is--remains nominally intact, al-Assad steps down, his VP takes over, and it continues along diplomatic lines from there. No one wants to talk about that here, and there are two possible reasons--the first is that they haven't a clue as to what a "Yemen scenario" is, what it entails, or the more likely, second one: not only do they not know about it, they are thinking in binary fashion, thinking that the ONLY choice is al-Assad OR the rebels, and using that uninformed construct, they seek to rage against what they believe is a One or The Other situation. If you don't like al-Assad, why, YOU MUST favor the rebels! Of course, that's not true--but one has to PAY ATTENTION to know that.

It's way too easy to play simplistic games, to get all nasty and angry, to waah-waah-waah about "Rummy" and "BushCo" and Colin Powell...like that is meaningful. It's harder to do a little homework.

All I can say is look to President Hollande of France--he's a socialist, tax-the-rich kinda guy. He wants al-Assad PUNISHED for the massacre of these people. He's in complete accord with USA on this issue, and he--like Kerry and Obama--are on the right side of history on this score.

[jberryhill]

4. It goes to the legitimacy of the government...

...and as you point out is not an aggravating circumstance per se.

It is essentially a way of arguing that the sovereignty of the government is at issue, if one considers legitimacy of a government to arise from maintaining an orderly society.

[cthulu2016]

7. I would agree that "against his own people" argues strongly for civil war...

and they do seem to have one of those.

My biggest problem isn't that it is irrational (nothing new there) but that it seems a gratuitous post legitimization of the Iraq War.

[jberryhill]

9. Everybody's knob seems to be only settable to 0 or 11

The no-fly zones in Iraq were working fine for years. I don't recall all the outrage over Clinton's "warmongering" for maintaining them throughout his presidency.

[Wait Wut]

5. It signifies a higher level of cruelty.

Someone that kills a stranger is a sick bastard. Someone that kills his own children is an evil sick bastard.

The people of Syria should be allowed to have some type of trust in their government. You don't have to trust someone else's. If Canada decided to declare war on the US and took out New York and Chicago, that would be a horrible thing. If Pres. Obama decided that New York and Chicago were a detriment to the rest of the country and had it nuked, well...

I understand your point from a humanitarian perspective, but you've left out the emotional perspective. We don't eat our own. That's the rules.

[malaise]

6. Well let's ask the government of the country that has used nukes against

a foreign country; used Agent Orange in Vietnam and used depleted uranium in Iraq.

[Orrex]

8. It's goofy, but maybe not as goofy as it seems

Broadly speaking, and based on your formulation of the concept, it seems that there are four general permutations:

Dictator X used chemical weapons against:

1. An enemy nation during war
2. An enemy nation not during war
3. An ally nation
4. Some other neutral nation
5. His own nation

Option 1 would likely result in condemnation, but it would be largely obscured by the "fog of war"
Option 2 would likewise result in condemnation, but it would depend on which natons are allied with the country that initiated the chemical attack. There would be talk of "justified action against a credible threat," for instance.
Options 3 & 4 would entail violations of national sovereignty and would be outright acts of war, so an armed military response by the international community would generally be considered reasonable
Option 5 would be an act of aggression within the boundaries of a sovereign state, so the act needs to be framed in a way that justifies intervention in the affairs of that sovereign state.

Although I can't bring myself to see it in quite the black-and-white way that you've framed it, I can't exactly dismiss your framing, either. If, however, the assertions are true as claimed, then it seems to me that some response is necessary, perhaps beyond international scolding and finger-waggling.

[HereSince1628]

11. See? This is where critical thinking takes US...it subverts our foreign policy.

How can we be a global hegemon AND critical thinkers? It's just impossible.