Is The Use of Chemical Weapons Sufficient or Necessary to Justify Force?

[natrlron]

President Obama’s plan to use military force against Syria’s government is a flawed policy decision. The only way in which force is justified now is because chemical weapons have been introduced, which is to say that the use of chemical weapons automatically justifies the use of force.

I disagree. In this particular instance, the Syrian government has for two years been waging a nasty war against both the rebels and the civilian population of the areas that support the rebels. According to a UN report noted in the NY Times this past June, 92,901 civilian deaths have been documented, with the actual number likely being considerably higher. Now about 100 have been killed in a chemical attack (apparently not the first one).

If the use of military force was not justified before, it is not justified now. Civil war is a nasty business no matter how you look at it. Had the Syrian government not committed enough atrocities against civilians prior to the introduction of chemical weapons? Haven’t countless other governments in civil wars committed atrocities against their people?

The question is where do you draw the line? How do you make a decision to strike militarily?

We cannot be the world’s policeman. We cannot strike militarily every time there is a civil war and the government uses brutal force against both the rebels and their civilian supporters. There is no moral imperative to intervene nor is it in our national interest.

However, we should draw the line where a government is conducting ethnic cleansing or genocide, regardless of the technology used. That does present a moral imperative. That was the case in Bosnia, where we intervened. That was the case in Rwanda, where we didn’t intervene. That was the case in Dafur where we also didn’t intervene. And we should have in each of those cases, with or without the support of the international community or close allies. That is not the case in Syria.

The White House talks about our credibility being at stake. Our credibility in the world is certainly a very important commodity. But if a policy we have is flawed and especially where it is not supported by the international community then to proceed in the face of such opposition is nothing but national ego. It has nothing to do with credibility.

We should have a clear policy on military intervention in cases of civil strife and stick to it. To my knowledge, we have no such policy.

For more on this and other issues, see my blog, http://PreservingAmericanGreatness.blogspot.com

[leveymg]

1. No. No. Particularly when both sides have used them in a civil war that threatens to become regional

Humanitarian intervention is about harm reduction. Outside military strikes will only escalate regional conflict at this point in Syria.

[natrlron]

10. Yes,

many in Syria, civilians on the rebel side, have said that military strikes will increase the chaos.

[frazzled]

2. We are not signatories to a treaty prohibiting conventional warfare

We are signatories to a prohibition on chemical warfare. So do our signatures mean nothing? Why have these weapons conventions if they are meaningless?

So while we do not intervene in a civil war unless genocide is occurring, the use of chemical weapons does pose a serious problem ... precisely because we--and 98% of the countries of the world--have officially signed our names to documents that say they are prohibited and a war crime.

Perhaps you should have listened to the president's explanation in his statement today. (Plus, "100" is not the number; it's 1,000.)

[natrlron]

11. Unfortunately, we don't

intervene when there is genocide ... look at Rwanda. And that's my point. It's not the presence of chemicals, it's the nature of the war.

[frazzled]

14. Yes, we didn't ... and it was probably a mistake

We probably should have intervened in the Balkans after Srebenica, but didn't, and some on the left (e.g., Susan Sontag) felt it was a mistake. We did intervene in Kosovo, which seems perhaps the most related to what Obama is trying to achieve here. It worked out relatively well (better than was thought at the time).

What I meant to suggest is that intervening in a civil war because of genocide is a LEGITIMATE reason to use force, according to international law. It's not always followed, however. In the case of Rwanda, it was perhaps not very possible to make an intervention that would have helped (though scrambling radio signals may well have been a huge help).

[ellenrr]

3. who is the US to criticize the use of chemical warfare?

"The country which has the worst record of mutagenic warfare (most notably dioxin in Vietnam and depleted uranium in Iraq) is telling the world that it has "an obligation to make sure that we maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons" by intervening in Syria.

I don't think the citizens of Fallujah - who have "the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied" - are necessarily oblivious to Mr Obama's hypocrisy. Why are we?"

from Reflections on a Revolution.

[jessie04]

4. Yes..or should we wait for biological and nuclear attacks ?

[mike_c]

5. sure-- when they're used against us....

Use of military force against a nation that is not a direct, imminent threat to us and without international consensus is a war crime, on the other hand.

[1-Old-Man]

7. Exactly right! You could not possibly have said it better.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

6. President Obama doesn't always disapprove of the use of chemicals against civilians.

[1-Old-Man]

8. +1000

[The Straight Story]

9. Funny that. I remember we were outrage over this. Not so much when people are dying

But then again, they were brown people being gassed and murdered.

Pepper spray someone and we want justice!

Kill them, meh, not my problem. Assad could dig a deep pit and exterminate most of the people in syria and I am guessing some folks would shrug and say "not my business, he ain't killing me".

I better understand how previous atrocities in history were allowed to happen now. People don't want to get involved.

[NuclearDem]

12. Yep, it's racism. You nailed it.

[TheKentuckian]

16. You gonna bite every time the war profiteers scream humanitarian crisis? Hint: They always do.

Especially, when the screamers insist on dancing on the head of a pin defending their and consequentially our common atrocities straining for justifications wholly standing on distinctions without real world difference.

"_____ isn't on the list" or "that is different we didn't "intentionally" target them" or "it isn't about the raw number of casualties but..." or "that substance is allowed under certain conditions so it is different when accidents happen and they are used against personnel or civilians as collateral and accidental damage".

I'm none too damn interested in a big concern you've expressed either about how not "punishing" the use will make it more likely in future wars in the region that our troops will be targeted with such weapons because we need to keep our ass out of future conflicts in the region, already planing the next misadventure against a country with such capabilities?

We have no standing to dictate this shit unilaterally, we refuse to control our fucking selves. You know it to be true. You can get up on the head of that pin and try to do a jig if you want but it is technocratic bullshit used to justify a desired action rather than any kind of morality at play. People that actually cared about this sort of thing wouldn't be using Agent Orange, or depleted uranium, or be using phosphorous as anti personnel weaponry, especially not people with an extreme technological advantage including dominating superiority by sea and air that would allow us to level to the dust most nations with purely conventional weaponry and munitions.

People that genuinely cared about civilians wouldn't redefine them as combatants based on nothing more than age, gender, and the bad fate to be on the wrong end of our weaponry or taking out first responders in double taps.
Hell, we wouldn't be destabilizing secular states and bombing them from modern country with universities and museums to half way back to the stone age in a nightmare of direct rule of sectarian warlords overlaid by a corrupt sham democracy operating in some middle ground between client state and ally of enemy elements and extraction scheme for international corporations.

Nope. The lame moralizing is whipped up bullshit excuse making rather than reason or we'd clean up our own house in line with principle rather than letter.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

17. Anyone sufficiently outraged to want military action should call 1-888-550-ARMY (2769).

Cyber-recruiters are standing by.


http://www.goarmy.com/talk-with-us/phone.html

[KittyWampus]

13. That is a photo of police (civilians) using pepper spray. What does that have to do with Obama?

[Snowfield]

15. Documents Show How White House and Democrats Worked to Protect the Banks Against Protests

Part of the brutal copper's arsenal of compliance and supression was mass use of chemical tear gas and pepper spray. Simile and satirical allegory speak truth to power.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/did-the-white-house-direct-the-police-crackdown-on-occupy/

Did the White House Direct the Police Crackdown on Occupy?

by DAVE LINDORFF


A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”


snip

[geek tragedy]

18. No American casualties, minimal cost to taxpayers,

and it must be in our national interest.

In Kosovo prevention was achievable. In Rwanda it wasn't and in Syria it won't be.

[leveymg]

20. Like Vietnam in 1963?

[treestar]

19. That is well argued

Much better analysis than we've bee seeing on this board. This makes a good case on when there should be intervention without snark.