Stakeholders with substantial investments in the military industrial complex were no doubt cheering after Syria crossed the so-called “red line” following an alleged chemical attack against civilians that prompted a retaliatory collaborative strategic missile strike by the U.S., the U.K. and France.
“These are the sites themselves that permitted the massacre of Syrian women and children in defiance of all the norms of law, in defiance of all norms of humanity,” said Florence Parly, France’s defence minister — as reported by a Washington Post correspondent in Paris — in reference to three Syrian government buildings targeted in response to the recent suspected gas attack.
Other emotionally charged buzzwords thrown about by Western leaders included “red line” and “horrific suffering” in the wake of the few dozen deaths that were claimed to be indicative of exposure to gas, including chlorine.
So, there we are.
The “red line” is drawn well after deploying against civilians weapons such as tanks, artillery, mortars, grenades, missiles, bombs, tanks, and conventional firearms, but before the use of gas.
Since the start of Syria’s civil war some seven years ago, hundreds of thousands of people have perished in this catastrophic quagmire with a seemingly endless human cost.
One could only imagine the terribly frightening demise they met — from limbs mortally ripped apart by a deadly burst of lethal shrapnel in a sudden explosion of ordinance, to slowly bleeding out from a sniper’s bullet to the gut, or perhaps crushed underneath the rubble of a bombed building that collapsed.
But apparently using gas is one step over the “red line.”
Yeah sure, all of that other stuff is pretty horrible too.
Just not horrible enough to end up before the “red line” and warrant intervention.
Seems rather like getting caught up in hairsplitting semantics when one gets all self-righteous about the need to stop a government that allegedly used chemical weapons, despite having for years essentially turned a blind eye to that regime’s more “traditional” methods of brutal suppression.
The U.S., U.K. and France have all claimed with certainty that the Syrian regime was behind the attack. Supposedly there’s even evidence, although those details must apparently remain classified.
Even Canada, at least according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, stands supportively — in spirit, I guess, because other than political platitudes our government had nothing to offer the mission — behind the decision to launch more than 100 missiles at Syrian government facilities suspected of producing or otherwise being involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons.
Meanwhile, independent international investigators had not even arrived in Syria to visit the site of the alleged attack before Allied missiles started to rain down. To be fair to Western military planners, there were no reports of civilian casualties, unlike the Syrian government’s indiscriminate bombing of its own people — gas or no gas — over the past seven years.
Naturally, the Syrian and Russian governments vehemently, and predictably, deny everything; even going so far as to label the alleged chemical attack a false flag to justify interventionist aggression.
Now generally speaking, I would retain an extremely high level of skepticism when it comes to claims made by either of those states, which are not exactly known to be shining beacons of basic human rights and transparency.
But while I certainly would not put the use of gas by the Assad regime outside the realm of possibility, I also cannot help but wonder precisely what the dictator would hope to achieve by doing so.
After so many years of strife that saw Assad’s regime seemingly teetering on the brink of collapse, the pendulum has for some time been finally swinging back in his government’s favour.
At this point in the conflict, with so-called Islamic State almost yesterday’s headline and Russia’s unwaveringly steadfast support, the Syrian regime has absolutely nothing to gain by deploying gas in what amounts to a slogging mop up of remnant rebel forces.
Assad might be a despot, but he’s not likely that dense.
By allowing the use of chemical weapons, he would gain nothing but the ire and contempt of Western governments.
Surely Assad is not so blind as to have somehow missed the last few years of history, and he is not likely to be in a rush to follow in the footsteps of Saddam and Gaddafi.
Granted, the Syrian president has a much greater ally in Putin than either of the former leaders of Iraq and Libya ever had. Even so, the use of chemical weapons would, politically speaking, be tantamount to suicide at worst or grievously shooting himself in the foot at best. Neither outcome sounds desirable.
So where would this sudden urge to use chemical weapons even come from?
None of this is to downplay or defend Assad and his government, which are quite probably responsible for committing all kinds of atrocities.
This is merely to point out the double standard in selectively deciding that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians did not warrant decisive intervention until a few dozen people were killed by chemical weapons.
The “red line” should be drawn whenever civilians are indiscriminately killed by an oppressive government — regardless of the military methods used — or not be drawn at all.
— Ducatel is the editor of the Sundre Round Up, a Great West newspaper
