Geoffrey Norman: What Next? After The Syrian Strike – Caledonian Record

What Next? After the strike in Syria

The missile attack against Syria was in retaliation for well, just what, exactly? The straight up answer is simple enough. The Syrian government had indulged in gas warfare against its own citizens. The Syrian government has, of course, been killing Syrians for a long time now. The father of the countrys current dictator once leveled an entire city with artillery in a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. He then ordered the rubble bulldozed and the bodies entombed in the concrete of the village square.

The number of people killed in the recent gas attack is a fraction of the body count from that action. And the gas killed nowhere nearly so many people as the routine dropping of barrel bombs on civilian targets by the regimes helicopters. The barrels bombs are ordinary 55 gallon fuel drums, filled with explosives and scrap metal. They are anti-personnel weapons in the the truest sense. And no less indiscriminate than gas.

But the world is uniquely appalled by the use of poison gas in war. It was a routine part of the horrors of World War One, which the United States entered one hundred years ago this month. The fighting had been going on for almost three years by then. Stalemate, futility, and butchery characterized the fighting. The goggled eyed, gas masked soldier was its inhuman face.

So when the war ended, at last, the world outlawed the use of poison gas. But what the world could legislate, it was incapable of enforcing. Italy, under the rule of Benito Mussolinis fascists, attempted to re-establish a Roman empire of sorts and went to war in northern Africa. When its Ethiopian campaign stalled, it dropped mustard gas from the air, killing both soldiers and civilians. The world was both appalled and impotent.

As World War Two began, it was widely assumed that the use of gas would be a routine feature of the fighting. The British government expected gas attacks from the air. Citizens of London carried gas masks as they went about their business.

There were no gas attacks on London. Or on soldiers in the field. The Nazis confined their use of gas to the camps where they did the industrialized killing of their political enemies and those they considered their racial inferiors. Especially the Jews.

The Japanese did some tentative work with gas and even with germ warfare. But its use never became what you would call widespread. During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States accumulated huge stockpiles of gas and trained their troops in its use and in how to defend themselves against it.

And, now, there is the mid-East where the Saddam Hussein attacked his own citizens and his Iranian enemies with gas and where the United States went to war to eliminate the threat posed by his weapons on mass destruction. These included, especially, gas, of which none was found or used, though invading American troops were trained and equipped to deal with the gas attacks anticipated by their commanders.

In 2012, President Barack Obama warned that if the Syrian dictator, Assad, were to use weapons of mass destruction against his enemies, it would constitute the crossing of a red line. This, of course, threatened some sort of retaliation. There were gas attacks but no retaliation. A deal was made, in which the Soviet Union, Assads ally, would get the stockpiled gas out of Syria and see to its destruction.

The recent attacks prove, of course, that this didnt happen.

So President Trump has now made good on President Obamas threat. And the question is what next?

If the American action is strictly about gas warfare and enforcing the ban against it, then perhaps it will be successful. Assad may look at the destruction inflicted by American Tomahawk missiles and decide that further gas attacks are not worth such a heavy price. So he will stick to barrel bombs. The killing will go on. No great geopolitical changes will have come about as a result of the American strikes.

But perhaps these strikes are about more than gas. One would hope so, anyway. Perhaps these strikes are a meant to show our enemies to include Russia and Iran that we are serious and that we will use force when it is called for.

Well, when some vital national interest or, even, our survival is at stake. Those are the reasons for going to war and they had best be clear cut. Going to war to make others fight like gentlemen is as foolish as going to war to make the world safe for democracy.

Which is what we did 100 years ago.

And we know how well that worked out.

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Geoffrey Norman: What Next? After The Syrian Strike - Caledonian Record