Assad, by all appearances, is a brutal dictator more than happy to slaughter his countrymen to stay in power. It seems that the rest of the world is, by and large, content to allow that arrangement to continue as long as he uses artillery, tanks, machine guns, and barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately out of helicopters to do so. The couple of times it has appeared that he’s used chemical weapons, back in 2013 and again this week, the world gets up in arms about it, and at least talks tough about deposing him (who knows, maybe this time they / we really will). What is it about the nature of sarin gas attacks that make them so much more heinous than conventional weapons that it would / could / might motivate us to go to war with a Russian client state?
I think most nations subscribe to the Geneva Protocol and that’s generally why bio-chemical weapons are considered a red line.
Is it an arbitrary line? Sure.
Why not barrel bombs and lot’s of other ingenious ways that have since been developed to kill large numbers of people? I don’t know.
Chemical and biological weapons are weapons of terror and suffering; not war. Any dictator willing to use it against their own populace must be assumed to be willing to give it to the enemies of their enemies as well.
ETA: What I mean by that is basically ISIS with access to a weapon 10 assholes used to kill 12 people and hospitalize 5500. And which is far easier to carry, smuggle and deploy than a pocket nuke or an airliner.
You’re concerned that Assad is going to willingly give Sarin gas to ISIS?
If the US puts boots on the ground and Assad knows he’s already fucked? I figure a nice guy like that will let bygones be bygones and hand it out like candy to all comers.
He’s used it more than twice, btw. But, as others noted, use of chemical weapons is a higher level violation from an international law perspective than simply burning your citizens to death or blowing them apart with bombs and artillery. Why? Because of WWI and the horror those weapons still invoke would be my guess.
As for your final question, here is the Sarin Gas wiki.
The “suffering” argument is a poor argument and not persuasive at all. It turns into a contest of “Is it more painful to be be nerve-gassed than to be stabbed/shot/napalmed/land-mined/legs-blown-off?” and that’s simply not a winnable logic road to go down.
The “can of worms” argument is better; “Allowing use of VX would open the door much wider for subsequent use of WMDs so we still want to keep that door as tightly shut as we can.”
It really, seriously, does not make sense for Assad regime to use chemical weapons right now. Assad is winning. Chemical weapons are, due to the obvious reaction to their use, a weapon of last resort. Assad is not at the “last resort” stage, he is about to win. Why did he use those weapons? It’s completely irrational.
Is part of it the POTUS looking for something to draw attention away from what is happening at home? “There is nothing to see here, look at the bad guy over there.”
Or, as the USA did last week, bomb 200 civilians into small pieces, including pregnant women and children. But that was a mistake of course, like the several hundred that have preceded it.
Yep. It’s almost as if there is a larger context.
Al Qaeda gassing innocent civilians, when they are loosing, in order to blame Assad and get the U.S. involved, would be more rational.
And it seems to be working.
Or people inventing silly conspiracy theories rather than attention to the facts of the regime Assad having the sarin gas and the delivery mechanism - the warplanes - and the Al Qaeda having neither of them, and the satellite photos showing the impact craters not on a building where there would be storage.
Rather than the invention of conspiracy theories about Al Qaeda gassing it is better to understand the actual history of the regime Assad which has long used these kinds of tactics - the recent words of the American president likely fooled the Assads into thinking they can act again in impunity as part of their terror campaign.
So, AQ acquired sarin gas, and instead of using it for something else they decided to set up an elaborate Dr. Evil type plan where-by they wait until there is a Syria air attack against civilians, cleverly get the gas to where the attack is (tricking eye witnesses who saw the gas bombs dropping from Syrian jets) and release the gas so that it appears Syria was at fault (probably bribed Syrian pilots to go back and attack the clinic survivors were taken to in order to cover their tracks)…all to get a US president who was on record as thinking that Obama shouldn’t attack Syria (who specifically SAID it would be a stupid and wasteful use of force for no gain) over the first gas attacks and who has maintained throughout his campaign and early presidency that he’d do nothing about Assad because…they just knew he’d change his mind? :dubious:
Seriously, how does this make sense to anyone who isn’t drinking the Putin kool-aid?
Does nobody consider that all of it was a stupid mistake ? And not some mastermind plan, although masterminds can be at work after the fact to use and spin the gas attack?
The largest terror attack involving the Dutch happened in 2014, the shooting of a commercial passengers aeroplane flight M17, in the stratosphere high, high over an Russian/Ukrainian war zone.
The only way for the Dutch government to do be seen to do anything about it, was to find out what the hell actually happened, and why. They left no stone unturned. Their conclusion? In the chaos of war, insurgents had stolen a missile. They had enough military training to fire a stolen missile but not enough training, intelligence to check if they were attacking the proper target. Lines of command that might have offered protocols and a strategic overview weren’t in place. Just a bunch of para military men, in a murky group, in a field, high on war and adrenaline, and keen to shoot the big honking missile they lugged around. Also what would you do with a big awesome rocket like that but shoot it? So they shot at Flight M17, by mistake.
Mistake. All 283 passengers and 15 crew on board were killed.
In the chaos that is now Syria, I would not be at all surprised if such a tragedy had occurred for the same murky, chaotic, stupid reason.
I could be wrong here, but I thought sarin gas was a binary agent. So, it’s not like the gas bombs would have just been sitting around and someone accidentally put them on the planes for the attack. There is quite a bit of preparation to get them ready to go. It’s not stuff you want to be mucking around with unless you are prepared to handle it. So…not seeing how this could be just a fog of war mistake or decision by some junior officer types without authorization and acting on their own. Not for this type of attack.
I wouldn’t rule it out, but I think it’s a stretch that the Syrians (and the Russians and probably the Iranians) didn’t know what was going on.
Yes I think the soviet weapons are binary as it is an unstable chemical.
I think it is possible the Assad regime by itself got adventerous after concluding the Trump government would do nothing, and might not have told the Russians and the Iranians.
It is not as if the regime Assad has ever shown in its history great sophistication in its approach to brutalism, as the history of the levelling of Homs by artillery shows.
Because they are banned. I am all for grounding his conventional forces and seeing him dead LIKE Gaddafi, but I’m ahead of everyone.
Well, lets think about this a little more. Did the world actually get up in arms? The only things I remember happening, was that first Obama, and now Trump, got upset. Obama threatened action, but didn’t act (and Trump at the time supported no action), and now Trump sent a strike of missiles.
Where is the rest of this “world” you are talking about?
Just because the media are going wild about the events, doesn’t mean that the “world” is all that involved. No word of the leaders of any other major nations speaking out against Russian support for Assad, no rush to assist the US, no protests at the UN, no calls for sanctions against either country.
Well, I’ve seen a lot of world leaders who have come out in support of the US attack. In fact, most of the world leaders (who aren’t Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea and China) have had positive things to say. Many have expressed their desire to see the US take a more active role, in fact, in getting Assad out of there.
As to your other point (i.e. why didn’t they do something?), think about it for a second. What do you expect other countries could do? It looked so easy when the US did what it did, but what could, oh, say the UK have done? Or France? Germany? Even Turkey? Most of them COULD have done similar things, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as easy or quick, and they would have been at considerable risk because of Russia’s involvement and deployments. They would have also needed to either risk their own pilots a lot more or would have taken quite a bite out of their stockpiles of things like cruise missiles. The biggest thing, though, is that risk…no one would want to tangle with Russia, risk killing Russian personnel or go up against the air defense system Russia has put in, especially not if they didn’t know that the US had their back. It wouldn’t be worth the risk or the cost to most countries.
Thousands of his own people are trying to murder him on a daily basis.
The United States could put a Hellfire missile through any window he dares look out of. Special Forces also have a variety of options for ruining his day. And the United States can and will fire dozens of missiles into his country because they feel like it.
This is not what I would call winning.