Smoke rises after an
artillery attack in Daraa, Syria.
CREDIT:
AP Photo/Ugarit News
We’re nearing the end of
the run-up: American officials are now telling the press that Syria strikes are
inevitable “within days.” What’s
confusing most people about the decision is why: what’s the point of strikes
that US officials are describing as “just muscular enough not to get
mocked” but not significant enough to actually change the balance of
power between the Assad regime and the rebels?
The common answer to this
conundrum is that the strikes are “symbolic,” punishment for the Assad regime’s
use of chemical weapons. That’s true, but in a key sense misleading. The truth
is that strikes are a kind of humanitarian intervention, albeit one with such a
specific and narrow aim as to be essentially unprecedented in the history of
humanitarian war.
Administration officials,
as The Washington Post’s Max Fisher suggests, have left
zero room for doubt that this intervention is about chemical weapons. Fisher
argues that, instead of thinking of the strikes as an attempt to restore
American “credibility” after Assad crossed the chemical weapons red line, the
point of the strikes is to defend the international norm against chemical
weapons use. We’re attacking Syria to make sure that chemical weapons are never
used, particularly against civilians, again.
There’s two intended
audiences for this message: other states with chemical weapons stockpiles, like North Korea,
and the Assad dictatorship itself. The message being sent to the latter is much
more interesting because the United States has explicitly ruled out regime change. We’re telling the Syrians that we’re staying out
unless you return to en-masse gassing, in which case we’ll get involved with
(by implication) escalating levels of force.
This is a form of
humanitarian intervention, albeit a very specific one. The idea behind a
humanitarian intervention is to end ongoing violence or prevent it from
escalating; the idea behind the norm against chemical weapons is that chemical
weapons are uniquely hideous and
well-suited for the mass murder of civilians. Intervening in Syria
to deter Assad from using chemical weapons is intervening to prevent a very
particular subset of the horrible violence going on in Syria from getting
worse.
Intervening against a
particular tactic that could be used to kill civilians, rather than the
campaign of murdering civilians in general, is unprecedented. It would be as if
the United States had intervened in Rwanda to stop Hutus from killing Tutsis
with machetes, but not the systematic extermination of Tutsis writ large. A
careful read of the history of humanitarian intervention shows that
intervention was always conducted on behalf of a population,
like the Tutsis, and that the goal was to protect that population from
organized killing or, in the case of peacekeeping missions, the vicissitudes of
war in general. The American campaign against Syrian chemical weapons use would
mark the first intervention against a tactic in human history.
There’s nothing inherently
wrong or unjustifiable about this. So long as the intervention satisfies the
other basic moral criteria for a just war — it’s conducted as a last resort for a just cause, with the right
political authority and using force proportional to the expected humanitarian
gain — then there’s no moral problem with having a more limited conception of
what a humanitarian intervention is supposed to achieve. Whether Obama’s Syria
strikes check all of those boxes, including the need for them to actually deter
Assad from escalating, is a totally separate question.
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