Politics

Bombing for Morality

Sep 2, 2013 Ian Buruma

A gift for words was always US President Barack Obama’s strongest asset. In Syria, it now looks as if his words – calling the use of chemical weapons a red line that Bashar al-Assad must not cross – have trapped him.

NEW YORK – A gift for words was always US President Barack Obama’s strongest asset. Now it looks as if his words have trapped him.

Having stated in March that the United States would “not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” and having spoken last year about a “red line” that could not be crossed, he will lose face if he fails to react forcefully to the murder, allegedly by the Syrian regime, of more than 1,000 civilians by sarin gas. Of course, the risk of losing face is not a good reason for attacking another country.

But why did Obama fence himself in with such rhetoric in the first place? Why this particular red line? Secretary of State John Kerry was right to call the use of gas “a moral obscenity.” But so is torturing children, which is how the civil war in Syria actually began more than two years ago. And is killing civilians with chemical agents morally more obscene than shelling, shooting, or starving them to death?

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 7 Comments on this article

Zsolt Hermann Sep 3, 2013

The writer is raising a lot of valid questions about the motifs and the logic of bombing Assad's Syria with a "short, surgically precise" attack.
The confusion, almost paralyzed helplessness of the international community is not surprising.
Our previous/present methods, tools simply do not fit the conditions we evolved into any longer.
Following previous/present logic there are two options, both futile.
One is to do nothing or seemingly continue with the political mud wrestling, or to perform the planned limited attack, or even a large scale military invasion, running into the same unsolvable disaster the allied forces run into in Iraq and Afghanistan for example.
And the US and the UK especially lost enough resources and credibility in recent years to become weary about making swift decisions to keep repeating the same futile mistakes.
The bottom line is the following:
we have evolved into a global, integral world, where there are no local, isolated problems any longer.
Any conflict, crisis humanity is facing requires a mutual, global solution.
We simply have to learn how to rise above inherent, historical differences, hatred, revenge and start communicating, planning and acting in a mutually responsible and complementing manner.
It looks unrealistic, impossibly hard and we have no precedents since we never acted this way.
On the other hand we have run out of ideas and our present paradigm does not work, moreover it has become self-destructive.
We have to start adapting to the global, integral reality.
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John Rhodes Sep 3, 2013

The great risk of any intervention is making the situation worse. In this case, that ia a more-than-likely scenario, as the overthrow of the regime would leave a dangerous vacuum, necessitating another lasting international occupation and nation building process that could well descend into similar sectarian violence like unto that seen in the aftermath of the Iraqui invasion and occupation a decade ago. The Syrian people will not benefit from more violence, and neither will the American people.

However, the defense contractors and extremists on all sides will benefit greatly, a fact that no one should dismiss while listening to the pro-intervention rhetoric!
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elham saeidinezhad Sep 3, 2013

Thanks Ian for this interesting article. I really enjoyed reading it. You are not playing with the words and being controversial. I think we are in a teaching moment in history and I learned from this article. There are lots of terrible things about this issue but the worst thing is that some totally has ignored public intelligence and think of people as a bunch of fool individuals.
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hari naidu Sep 3, 2013

Buruma's mind is as confused as The Pasha (Obama!) in WH.

The Pasha and his NSA team (led by Rice) are not only amateur's in defining the morality of war and peace or military intervention in Syrian civil war.

Recall the Red Line was (first) drawn by Bibi (Netanyahu) while giving his speech to UNGA.

The Pasha is fighting not only AIPAC and its lobbying machine on The Hill, on behalf of Israel, to intervene militarily and remove Assad; NYT was forced to remove its mention of AIPAC in a dispatch today from an unofficial WH adviser...

There is a lot of mist that's being spread right now about The Pasha's (political) motives for going to Congress for a vote, but the truth will eventually surface one way or another.
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m r Sep 3, 2013

Author's journalistic credentials would be more genuine, if instead of joining the disingenuous "RANT", that brandmarks Syrian President Assad as having broken tryst with his declared chemical weapons, meant quite rightly as a defence shield against Israeli designs, a description of "Red Lines", a new concept a la Prime minister Netanyahu be undertaken.
As with "Human Rights" as a policy tool created during President Carter's time; "Red Lines" is its current variant meant to create trouble, or more precisely as a defence for unleashing trouble, at will.
When a "Red Line" is created, it automatically encourages the interested parties to hover around it with a good hope to gain advantage; give an excuse for others to join the fray.
It is just pure vulture-ism holding as MORALITY, making sure American Defence industrial complex has at least a war area current and preparation of next ones ready, perpetually.
Rightly so, US is worried, it will collapse in its absence.
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Procyon Mukherjee Sep 3, 2013

The moral armature is wound around a weak reason, bringing War to the Peace process; the numbers that have died every time this intervention happened has been several times more than if the process would have been left to itself. Engineered solutions, with a weak connection to moral instincts, have more than the usual bout of gains and losses, where losses are mostly socialized, and gains are not.
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Eric Jackson Sep 3, 2013

A careful reading of the 1925 Geneva Protocol shows that it is a reciprocal agreement among nations that adhere to its provisions, most notably not to use toxic gas weapons. A country that uses such a weapon first by definition does not adhere to its provisions and thus there is no reciprocal duty not to use such weapons. That the Syrian rebels are not a state party also takes the matter out of that framework. Pretty clearly the rebels had been using chlorine gas weapons in Syria. We can argue customary law, but it would appear that Assad has not violated the 1925 agreement, which is in effect a "first use" ban.
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