David Bromwich again on Obama and the Syrian crisis

David Bromwich is a close scholarly observer of Obama and pays attention to his words and habits. He seems to have a dislike of the man that seeps into his writing and makes me wonder if he may not be trying a bit too hard to give a harsh reading to Obama's words and actions.

In Putin to the Rescue London Review of Books 35:18 (09/26/2013 issue; accessed 0918/2013), he discusses Obama's actions in the recent Syrian crisis. If the track to resolving the Syrian chemical weapons issue without war continues, the following will quickly drop into the memory hole. But the Obama Administration's case for what happened in the sarin gas attack of August 21 of this year was "dodgy," to recall a notorious word from the Iraq War buildup:

The unclassified four-page intelligence summary he released to the public – according to Congressman Alan Grayson, the 12-page classified document is no different in this respect – speaks from the position of 'We [the US government]'. The reason for the unusual grammar is that the document does not come from the American intelligence community. The Inter Press Service journalist Gareth Porter, piecing together the vague and generic evidence, the omissions and the grammar delivered by Kerry, reported on 9 September that the absence of the signature of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, from the Kerry document was a significant detail. Clapper evidently had refused to sign off because the data had been cherry-picked (as Colin Powell’s had been for his UN presentation in February 2003). Kerry gave 1429 as a sure figure for the number of deaths in the August attack, but the figure is unexplained and at variance with first-hand reports: French intelligence estimated 281 deaths and Médecins Sans Frontières 355. The Kerry document was effectively discredited in less than a week, but only below the radar of the mainstream press and policy establishment. On the basis of a tissue of far-fetched inferences and assumptions, in which the most solid datum is a single radio intercept – a recording of a disturbed commander of Syrian forces given to the US by Israeli intelligence – Obama declared his intention to order an attack, and then asked Congress to authorise the use of force under wide discretion: he would be empowered to act in any way he deemed necessary to ‘respond to’, 'deter' and 'degrade' the military and defensive capabilities of the Syrian government. These are all words without a settled meaning, and they were chosen for that reason. To an amazing degree Obama's request for authorisation of September 2013 resembles Bush's request of October 2002. [my emphasis]

Bromwich notices that what Obama had proposed to do would have been a clear violation of international law:

The talk of 'punishing' Assad affected a stance of parental discipline and avoided the language of international law. This was not an accident. An attack on a sovereign state by another state that has not been attacked is a violation of international law. As for punishment, it is something a country may legally enforce on its own citizens, but it does not express a possible relation of one country to another.

He also notices what Charlie Pierce caught in Today in the March to Semi-War Esquire Politics Blog 09/06/2013, that Obama was saying we needed to attack Syria to prevent the erosion of international norms. Pierce: "Apparently, 'Norms' -- even ones about which the United States has been considerably blithe in the past -- are the latest dominoes over which to theorize."

The new Norm-ino Theory. Bromwich:

Early in the crisis, he tried to work around the law by a rhetorical stratagem: the United States and its allies, in punishing a gas attack on Syrians which had surely been ordered by Assad, would be ‘enforcing international norms’. ‘International norms’ is a phrase we are hearing a lot. A world without norms (the implication seems to be) is a world in chaos. Given the refusal of Russia to shelve its veto at the UN and take on trust French, British and American assurances that Assad ordered the attack, who will enforce such norms? Who if not the United States?

Cheney and Bush made a similar argument to invade Iraq without UN authorization, saying that we were enforcing the UN's own resolutions that the UN itself wasn't willing to enforce.

Bromwich also believes the British Parliamentary vote against war was an especially important moment in Obama's trajectory toward war: "It was only when the House of Commons voted against war that American war policy was made to hesitate. The president and his team were deeply discouraged by that vote."

And Bromwich also notes that the Administration offered very different notions to the public of what kind of military action he would be undertaking:

Even so, in the first week of September, Obama and Kerry appeared to stand behind both the ambitious and the minimal versions of their meditated attack. A decisive and damaging strike lasting many days: that was the version apparently offered by the president to Graham and McCain. On the other hand, the strike envisaged by Kerry, in remarks to the British press on 9 September, would encompass 'a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort ... That is exactly what we are talking about doing – unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.' The confusion didn't rest there; as recently as his speech to the nation on 10 September, Obama contradicted Kerry and said the attack would not be only a pinprick, adding gravely: 'The United States military doesn't do pinpricks.' (emphasis in original)

He does not mention the Syria war resolution that cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which authorized a more expansive kind of action that what most people would think of as "a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort."

Tags: david bromwich, chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Finally, somebody says why the August 21 sarin gas attack in Syria is a war crime

For the first time since President Obama started threatening to bomb Syria over chemical weapons attacks, this is the first thing I've seen that actually says why Syria using chemical weapons inside Syria is a crime under international law (not every bad act is).

From UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's statement yesterday: "The Secretary-General condemns in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons and believes that this act is a war crime and grave violation of the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare and other relevant rules of customary international law."

In all the articles I've read about the Syria crisis, this is the first time I've seen that actually spelled out. Syria was not a signatory at the time of the August 21 attack to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the 1990s agreement of which all but a few countries are part. Egypt is also not a signatory. Israel signed the convention but has never ratified it.

The seven non-member states listed as of this writing at the website of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international body that administers the CWC, also include Angola, Myanmar/Burma (signed but not ratified), North Korea, South Sudan and Syria. Syria is currently in the process of joining the CWC as part of the diplomatic deal with the Russians that defused the war crisis for the moment.

Robert Fisk writes in There is something deeply cynical about this chemical weapons ‘timetable’ The Independent 09/15/2013:

The world, I suspect, is not totally convinced that the regime was responsible for using chemical weapons in Ghouta on 21 August – though I bet the Russians know who did. Now we've got rebels chopping off prisoners' heads, I'm not sure what scruples they'd have about using sarin. But it was interesting to see the Syrian government agreeing to put their chemical weapons in international hands – I couldn't help noticing that they didn't demand the same of the insurgents... (ellipsis in original)

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Before the latest Syria crisis heads to the memory hole ... (Updated)

The Syria crisis that was resolved for the moment by the US agreeing to the diplomatic track proposed by Russia was quite a ride. It was like a condensed version of the run-up to the Iraq War, only this time with a happier ending, as of now. Ray McGovern describes it this way in How War on Syria Lost Its Way Consortium News 09/14/2013:

The just announced U.S.-Russia agreement in Geneva on a “joint determination to ensure the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons (CW) program in the soonest and safest manner” sounds the death knell to an attempt by Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to get the U.S. into the war in Syria.

Equally important, it greatly increases the prospect of further U.S.-Russia cooperation to tamp down escalating violence in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. That the two sides were able to hammer out in three days a detailed agreement on such highly delicate, complicated issues is little short of a miracle. I cannot remember seeing the likes of it in 50 years in Washington. [my emphasis]

Before our mainstream media move on to other bright and shiny objects like the latest Miley Cyrus publicity stunt, I want to mention some key points that I would hate to see get lost about this incident.

One is the significance of Britain refusing to go along, with the Parliament rejecting the participation with the US that Prime Minister David Cameron had proposed, and Cameron deciding to follow Parliament's wishes. It's an interesting development in European politics, as well, because the UK has previously been willing to follow the US in even such a disastrous adventure as the Iraq War even when many of its European partners were opposed. British support has been especially helpful to the US in the past, not least because British leaders are good at and very experience in about presenting a case for military action to the American public. Britain in generally perceived by Americans as a long-standing ally. Support from France or Germany doesn't have quite the same cachet.

I suspect we'll find out eventually that this was a major factor in Obama's decision making in that Syrian crisis.

Another is the fact that the United States has been actively supporting Syrian rebels for some time. America's involvement in Syria is not only about chemical weapons.

Obama acknowledged in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on This Week of 09/15/2013:

... there are radical elements in the opposition – including folks who are affiliated with al-Qaeda, who, if they got their hands on chemical weapons, would have no compunction using them in Syria or outside of Syria.

And part of the reason why we've been so concerned about this chemical weapons– issue is because we don't want – those folks gettin' chemical weapons, anymore than we want Assad to have chemical weapons. ...

What this is about is how do we make sure that we don’t have the worst weapons in the hands, either of a murderous regime, or– in the alternative, some elements of– the opposition– that– are as opposed to the United States– as they are to Assad.

But backing rebel forces isn't a speculative future program. It's already happening, although in theory we're vetting those receiving assistance to make sure they aren't "al-Qaeda." Jim White discusses the aid in the dramatically titled US: "Never Mind That Guy Eating a Heart, We Have Handwritten Receipts For the Guns" Emptywheel 09/13/2013.

Third is the vagueness with which issues of international law were discussed by politicians and the media, so far as I observed. There seems to be a near-complete consensus that the use of poison gas by the Syrian government against its own citizens would be a crime in international law. Obama repeated it again in his Stephanopoulos interview. (Do I even need to say that Stephanopoulos didn't press him on the point?) But not every heinous action is a violation of international law. The discussion largely focused on the political feasibility and practical problems of the proposed action, which are obviously hugely important questions. The fact that for the United States or any other country to attack a country which had not attacked it is illegal, unless the country being attacked presented an imminent threat or the UN had authorized the intervention, was scarcely discussed at all. (I'm genuinely uncertain on the question of whether use of poison gas by a non-signatory state to the Chemical Weapons Convention, as Syria was at the time of the August 21 attack, is on its face a violation of international law. Presumably targeting non-combatants would be a crime of murder under Syrian law.)

{Update 09/17/2013: From UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's statement yesterday: "The Secretary-General condemns in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons and believes that this act is a war crime and grave violation of the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare and other relevant rules of customary international law."}

Fourth is the war resolution itself that was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It authorized the President to do far more than just make a couple of limited bombing strikes. It authorized up to three months of warmaking on Syria, essentially at the President's discretion. It banned the use of US troops in Syria - "boots on the ground" in the current jargon - only "for the purpose of combat operations", which leaves a lot of leeway for US troops in Syria to do "training." It established as a policy goal of establishing "a democratic government in Syria," though it did specify getting there through "a negotiated settlement." It also specified several groups of the Syrian opposition that it would be the policy of the US to support, even with "all forms of assistance," whatever that hair-raising phrase might mean. Some better reporting and wider public discussion on the meaning of that resolution would have been more than appropriate.

We should learn more from the UN report that should be coming out soon about the incident itself. Based on what I've heard, it seems plausible and even likely that the Assad regime was behind the attack. The UN investigators are not tasked with determining who gave the orders, only with reporting on the facts of the attack itself. Gareth Porter made an interesting catch in his report, Obama's Case for Syria Didn’t Reflect Intel Consensus Inter Press Service 09/09/2013.

And we'll probably hear more on the "isolationism" meme. Jim Lobe does a reality-check in U.S. Public-Elite Disconnect Emerges Over Syria Inter Press Service 09/14/2013. It's clear that the Obama Administration has some real credibility problems on foreign policy that were displayed by the Syria crisis, and not just with people who think he's the Islamic Antichrist. Ray McGovern discussed some of those in Time to Reveal US Intel on Syria Consortium News 09/09/25013.

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

The Syria situation after Obama's Tuesday speech

There are lots of questions that I have about the whole Syrian situation.

First, there is the sentence at the start of President Obama's Address to the Nation on Syria yesterday. "In that time, America has worked with allies to provide humanitarian support, to help the moderate opposition, and to shape a political settlement." (my emphasis)

In other words, we're taking sides in the Syrian civil war. There has been some reporting in the mainstream press providing glimpses of this. But this should really be a core part of the discussion, whether the subject is Dead Babies propaganda or chemical weapons negotiations.

Yes, propaganda can be true, and in fact the best propaganda is based on reality. But if we want to understand wars, we also have to understand how the propaganda functions.

Anti-German Dead Baby propaganda postcard from the First World War

Most people now look at the First World War as a gigantic, mindless slaughter. But millions of English and French soldiers were sent to the front fired up with anti-German war atrocity propaganda. There is little doubt that if the political elites on all sides in 1914 had showed a minimum of good sense and decent human judgment, they could have avoided having the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand turn into a world disaster that set the stage for an even bigger round of carnage two decades later. Avoiding these things means that people have to use their heads.

Another question is, doesn't securing Syria's chemical weapons require a sustained ceasefire in the civil war, a ceasefire that would presumably not be advantageous to the hopes of our friends "the moderate opposition." As Karen Weise explains in Risky Business of Destroying Chemical Weapons Bloomberg Businessweek 09/11/2013, you don't just flush these things down the kitchen sink.

Jim White writes (Journalists Grope Blindly Around Syria CW Destruction Without Discovering Need for Ceasefire Emptywheel 09/11/2013):

In my post yesterday morning on the French move to submit a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for Syria to surrender its chemical weapons to an international group for their safe destruction, I noted that this process naturally would require an immediate ceasefire. My underlying assumption was that the need for a ceasefire would be obvious to anyone giving the situation any thought. Personnel will need to move freely about the country to find and log the materials that will need to be destroyed. These materials will need to be moved to central locations for incineration or chemical processing to render them safe. If the personnel and the dangerous materials they will be transporting are attacked indiscriminately, the risk of releasing huge quantities of very dangerous agents looms large and the very process of trying to prevent civilian deaths could instead to lead to widespread lethal exposure. ...

Yes, there are many different factions on the "rebel" side in this conflict, but even brief investigation shows that many of them are actually proxies for several of the foreign powers that claim to have “interests” in Syria. A UN resolution that has at its heart a ceasefire would be a huge step toward showing that all of the various countries supporting militias in Syria intend to provide the opportunity for safe destruction of what could be the third largest repository of chemical weapons in the world. Although a truly international force of armed peacekeepers likely will be needed, sending them in without a ceasefire already negotiated would make the whole process of rounding up and destroying the chemical weapons a recipe for a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.

Of course, a true optimist would note that a ceasefire would open the door to discussions to defuse political tensions within Syria while the process of destroying the chemical weapons is carried out. That would of course thwart those whose real objective is regime change in Syria through violent means but would perhaps create the opportunity for peaceful regime change. Is the world finally ready to give peace a chance after twelve years of unfocused rage? [my emphasis]

In President Obama’s Doubtful Grounds for Military Action against Syria Informed Comment 09/11/20132, Juan Cole has the following international-law observations:

I don’t disagree that units of the Syrian military deployed chemical weapons against rebellious populations in the outskirts of Damascus, and that this serious breach of international law deserves condign punishment. However, leaked intelligence has raised questions about from how high in the government the command came, and it is possible that a local rogue commander exceeded his orders out of panic at a rebel advance. If Syria really could be referred to the International Criminal Court for this incident, it is not clear to me that prosecutors could get a conviction of President Bashar al-Assad. (Syria cannot be so referred at least so far, because the ICC only has jurisdiction if a country has signed the Rome Statute that created the court. The only way to get around this restriction is for the UN Security Council to forward a case to the ICC, which can be done even for non-signatories, as with Gaddafi’s Libya. Russia and China so far, however, have kept Syria from being so forwarded at the UNSC).

I would like to think that deploying poison gas against one's own population in a civil war would be illegal. But as I mentioned in a previous post, it's not clear to me, horrible as it is, that the action is actually illegal for Syria in the situation in question.

He warns that the Arab Awakening has reshaped the political game board for American actions in the Middle East: "Public opinion now matters in a way it did not used to, and getting making a whole generation anti-American is a definite risk."

In my understanding, the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not war crimes in 1945. But the points he makes here are important:

The third idea, that the US is 'exceptional’ and bears a special responsibility to intervene in Syria after the chemical weapons use seems to me not only incorrect but extremely dangerous. The US is a country like any other, and certainly no more virtuous than most others. It blithely polished off 200,000 Japanese women, children and noncombatant men at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some were made into shadows on the wall as their bodies carbonized. Thousands suffered from lingering cancer afterwards. No US official was ever so much as reprimanded for this war crime, which was carried out at a time when Japanese had been dehumanized and demonized with the worst sort of racism. The atomic bombs did not hasten the end of the war; the Russian advance into Manchuria did that. One could go on with US infractions against international law and shameless killing of innocents, from the Philippines to Nicaragua to Vietnam.

The US helped craft the UN Charter in hopes of deterring ‘exceptional’ naked aggression, making it illegal to attack another country except in self-defense or with UN Security Council authorization. I am not unsympathetic to the idea that the UNSC is broken, and that partisan uses of the veto by the five permanent members warp and deform it, rendering it useless in cases such as Syria. Some have argued that a set of multilateral organizations could legitimately do an end run around the UNSC in such cases of paralysis, where the fate of thousands or hundreds of thousands weighed in the balance.

But in the instance of Syria, the US has no multilateral support for military action, not the Arab League, not the European Union, not NATO. Nada. [my emphasis]

I would say that it would be more realistic to say that the combination of the atomic bombs and the Russian invasion brought about the surrender. But the Russian invasion was effectively airbrushed out of Cold War remembrances of the end of the Pacific War in the US.

Peter Beinart caught something in Obama's speech that struck me as well, a problem presented by the level of threat inflation in which he and his Administration have indulged over Syria (Obama Fails to Make the Sale on Syria Bloomberg Businessweek 09/10/2013):

In his speech Tuesday night on Syria, President Obama — as is his tendency — tried to have it both ways. And it didn’t work. On one hand, he tried to argue that Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons could endanger Americans. If unpunished, he claimed, Assad’s actions might create a world in which "our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield" or Iran would be more emboldened to build a nuke that could threaten the United States. If we "stop children from being gassed to death" in Syria, he argued, we "make our own children safer over the long run."

But Obama's national security argument sounded like a Rube Goldberg-machine. Would Syria’s use of chemical weapons against defenseless civilians really increase the likelihood of an enemy using chemical weapons against American troops, who could respond with massive force? After all, Obama himself admitted that "the Assad regime" — chemical weapons and all — "does not have the ability to seriously threaten our military." Likewise, in a half-sentence, Obama claimed that permitting Assad's chemical weapons attack would embolden Iran to build a bomb, but he never bothered to explain why. [my emphasis]

But Stephen Walt came up with my favorite comment so far on the current situation (Flying Down to Rio Foreign Policy 09/10/2013):

As for Syria, one should not be churlish and cavil about the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough that gets Obama and Kerry out of the corner they painted themselves into. The path by which we got here wasn't pretty, but as Lefty Gomez said, "I'd rather be lucky than good." Or as Bismarck famously noted, there's a special providence that "looks after drunkards, fools, and the United States of America." We've some ways to go before the chemical weapons issue is resolved, of course, and this is at best a first step toward ending the grinding civil war in Syria, but realists take what we can get in this imperfect world. Right now, this deal looks better than bombing Syria to no good purpose or having Congress in visible revolt against Obama's handling of the whole matter.

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression

Postponing an attack on Syria: what does the moment mean?

I would rather be posting about other stuff than a possible US intervention in Syria.

But wars are important. And this time we can celebrate not having one, at least for the moment.

Joan Walsh puts in this way in Diplomacy wins — for now Salon 09/11/2013:

Eerily, on the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, people who argued about the Syria nightmare in good faith can all declare victory, for now. Those of us who insisted that the U.S. should exhaust all diplomatic possibilities before military action were right – and now we’re going to have a chance to see where diplomacy can go. Conventional wisdom said the U.N. Security Council was a dead end given Russia’s veto power — but now both the Security Council and Russia are engaged.

On a strictly realist basis, she's probably also right about this:

Certainly U.S. and global opposition to military intervention in Syria helped get us here, but I can’t say Obama's promise to use force didn't play a role as well. In the last few days Syria has not only admitted to possessing weapons for the first time, but Assad is promising to join the international Chemical Weapons Convention. I don't have any reason to believe either thing would have happened, this week, without the threat of force.

As I said yesterday, if taking credit for being a macho, macho man gives Obama a way to back off from an unnecessary and highly risky war, also an illegal one, that's fine with me.

Beltway Village foreign policy, short course:

But also in the realist spirit, we should add there that it was the stunning failure of the Obama Administration to generate support in Congress, in the international community or among the American public that created an opening for this peace initiative to have a chance.

Joan also observes:

Personally I think one of the most important factors in the surprising events of the last few days was the president going to Congress. Since antiwar public opinion forced the president to do that, I give a lot of credit to antiwar public opinion. And since it was the president who decided to go to Congress, when he believes he didn't have to, I give him credit, too. I guess it's clear I think the search for credit and blame is useless right now, as well as divisive.

I believe Obama's going to Congress must be a main thing Gene Lyons has in mind when he writes in Obama Gives Democracy A Chance In Syrian Crisis National Memo 09/11/2013 (which he says on Facebook that he completed before Obama's speech): "It's not necessary to think that President Obama has performed brilliantly throughout this debacle to suspect that next time around it's going to be much harder for an action-hero president to stampede the country into war."

And he continues, "As a corollary, hawkish politicians will find it more difficult to intimidate skeptics by questioning their patriotism."

He also notes what a difference a decade or so can make:

Ten years ago, fools were pouring Bordeaux wine into gutters and ordering "freedom fries" because the French urged the Bush administration to let U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq do their work. Ten years ago, American agents were kidnapping suspected terrorists and delivering them into Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's dungeons to be tortured. Ten years ago, "diplomacy" was a dirty word, a synonym for cowardice.

Ten years ago, President Bush, having promised to put his case against Saddam Hussein to a vote in the UN Security Council, reneged on that vow, ordered weapons inspectors busily finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to clear out, and commenced his "shock and awe" bombing campaign. The "embedded" American news media treated the subsequent invasion like the world’s largest Boy Scout Jamboree.

These days, diplomacy gets more respect. Most Americans hope for the success of a French-sponsored Security Council resolution transferring custody of Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons to international monitors. The numbers in a recent New York Times poll reflect a massive change in public opinion. Six out of ten Americans oppose bombing Syria. Sixty-two percent say the United States should avoid taking the lead role in solving foreign conflicts.
[my emphasis]

I see Joan Walsh has also noticed how illegal it would be for the United States to begin a war with Syria when that country has not attacked the United States:

The pause in the charge to war is welcome, even if the charge to diplomacy has its own problems. The Russians are reportedly blocking a Security Council resolution proposed by the French; post-speech cable news analysis made a lot of this, as though a military strike would be a cakewalk, in the words of GOP hawks in 2003. Of course there are plenty of obstacles to a negotiated settlement – including the Syrian rebels. Let’s remember they were the ones who rejected talks with Assad proposed by Kerry and his Russian counterpart in July. This is a mess.

But at least for now, diplomacy won, and whatever it took, it’s a surprising and welcome development. Though Obama still insists the U.S. will stand up to Syria to enforce international sanctions against chemical weapons, a unilateral strike against Syria would itself violate international law. With the ongoing unexpected engagement of Russia, we have a chance at assembling an international coalition to enforce international law. It’s a sobering place to be on another Sept. 11. [my emphasis]

I should mention here that I've been assuming that the international law governing the use of chemical weapons applies to Syria, even though Syria has not yet ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that defines it. And it does look to me like that would be the case with use of chemical weapons by Syria against another country.

There's a cynical European saying, "Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography." They are also a way of teaching us something about international law. I remember learning for the first time during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s when international attention focused on the Serbian "rape camps" in Bosnia-Herzogovia, that soldiers raping civilians was not a war crime. Not every horrible or immoral thing is illegal, and that's more true of international law than national.

We've been hearing the stories for days now, including in Obama's speech last night, about children being horribly killed by poison gas in Syria.

But our lazy press doesn't seem much interested in fishing out whether using poison gas in an internal civil war is illegal in international law. The non-UN Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPVW) is the international agency charged with enforcing the CWC. Just after the August gas attack in Syria, they issued a statement in their director's name that was obviously carefully worded (08/23/2013):

The OPCW Director General, Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü, is gravely concerned about the latest allegations of use of chemical weapons in suburban Damascus reportedly resulting in tragic loss of innocent civilian lives. Any use of chemical weapons is abhorrent and stands fully condemned by the international community as embodied in the Chemical Weapons Convention and underlined in its near universal acceptance. [my emphasis]

To my non-specialist eye, CWC Article 1's prohibition of the use of chemical weapons does seem to mean they would be banned for internal use, not just in international warfare. But 1.5 also says, "Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare." How big a loophole is that? I genuinely don't know.

And Syria has not yet ratified the CWC. Even if the Convention does ban their use internally to a country, would that apply to a non-signatory power like Syria was in August? I don't know.

To close, I don't claim to see the Owl of Minerva. (From Hegel's "Preface" to the Philosophy of Right: "When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in.")

But I am struck by how the warmongering from the White House that was being faithfully and superficially transmitted by the compliant mainstream press fell flat in its actual effects this time as far as swaying public opinion. I would like to think this is a sign that despite non-stop fear mongering from our vastly bloated national security establishment that we may have finally reached the post-"post 9/11" era when it comes to foreign wars and public opinion.

Tags: chemical weapons, preventive war, syria, syrian civil war, war crimes, war of aggression