Ryan_m_b said:
Further investigation to pin point exactly who used the weapons and authorised their use followed by legal apprehension of those individuals to put through a war crimes trial at the Hague would get my vote at the moment.
russ_watters said:
Legal apprehension? Please tell me you are joking, Ryan? How exactly would that be possible?
Ryan_m_b said:
No, not joking. You know how your country ran a mission in another without asking them and assassinated Bin Laden? Like that but with a UN mandate and a goal to capture and drag to The Hague rather than kill.
There's a difference between a nation (usually at the direction of its head of state or government) waging war either on its own people or another country and a non-state actor waging "war". I'm not sure how much I buy into the idea of prosecuting "terrorists" as criminals, but there is still a big difference in how you fight a group like bin Laden and a country. Your goal is to eliminate the enemy's ability to threaten you. Being there's a difference in the weapons available to each, the method of eliminating the threat is going to be different.
A couple of things.
1) What red line is there against chemical weapons?
International agreements since around 1900 "banned" their use, but everyone ignored them until WWI when widespread use made it obvious that they were a really bad idea. The only red line that's existed since then is "Don't use chemical weapons against someone that can use them on you."
Japan used chemical weapons against China in WWII. But they didn't use chemical weapons against allied forces even when they were clearly losing the war.
Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran in their war. There was no huge outcry. There's a good reason there wasn't. Iraq was facing invasion. Expecting a country to cease to exist before dishonoring themselves by using chemical weapons is an unrealistic standard.
But, Japan did refrain from using chemical weapons against allied forces even when facing defeat. It's possible Japan was more honorable. Or it's possible Japan didn't believe chemical weapons would turn the tide of the war, especially when allied forces could retaliate with chemical weapons of their own (or worse, as things turned out).
Iraq used chemical weapons against their own people. This didn't bring immediate retaliation, but it probably contributed at least a little to the severity of the post Gulf War I sanctions.
Or one could argue that Iraq was the first country punished for using chemical weapons against its own people, since we invaded them because of their suspected chemical weapons program - except we punished them 15 years after the fact.
2) While I don't buy the rhetoric, that doesn't mean that it's not a good idea to discourage the use of chemical weapons.
While the Bush administration claimed that Iraq still had an operational chemical weapons program, the reality was that the post-Gulf War sanctions actually did work. I have to admit that this was very surprising, since Iraq's chemical weapons capability played such a vital role in defending it from Iran. I'm sure they kept the plans and blueprints so they could resurrect their chemical weapons program in the future, but they had no operational program by time the US invaded.
That proves that there's realistic alternatives to military force in punishing the use of chemical weapons. Unfortunately, that doesn't prove that any of the alternative methods would work in Syria. They could if Assad survives his civil war, but I think there's a good chance he won't.
If we do decide bombing Syria is a good punishment, it also means that the bombing has to do more damage than the use of chemical weapons helped. It doesn't mean we have to bomb until the Assad regime falls. We only have to bomb until it's obvious that any sane person would wish they'd toughed things out against the insurgents.
3) The problem with the whole scenario is figuring out which side you want to see win.
Do you really want the punishment to be so severe that you assure the insurgents will win? Will they be any friendlier to the US than the Assad regime has been? Or are insurgents that are only just as unfriendly to the US acceptable as long as the insurgents are equally unfriendly to Iran? Or, if you're concerned about Syria, does the fall of Assad just mean the forces break up into new alliances for the post-Assad civil war?
To be honest, I'm very undecided about whether I think we should bomb Syria or not - mainly because there just aren't easy answers to the third question.