Syria's sarin gas and Obama's red line
BY JOSH GREENMAN
Over at Time, Michael Crowley asks the necessary question about Syria, which becomes even more pointed as NBC News reports that government forces are loading sarin gas precursor chemicals onto bombs: Why has the White House and the international community insisted that use of chemical weapons is the red line over which Bashar Assad must not cross?
For more than 18 months, Assad's forces have inflicted death and pain on thousands of Syrian civilians. They've done this with handheld firearms, tanks, aircraft and plenty of other lethal instruments. According to international reports, they've used non-lethal instruments as well, at times to torture children.
All of that has resulted in diplomatic and economic pressure but no real action. "A brutal blast of adverbs" is how Jeffrey Goldberg, in May, characterized the administration's response.
After all this, now comes an unequivocal statement that the United States will leap into action if Assad takes what is the supposedly unthinkable step of deploying chemical weapons. As Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy magazine puts it, "Obama: If you kill 40,000 people with one type of chemical — gunpowder — no problem. But use a different chemical, and that's a problem."
And however arbitrary the line, the fact that it's been drawn so specifically puts the United States in a fix. What are the consequences should it become clear that Assad is ostentatiously sauntering right across it? The White House has been very fuzzy on this point. I'm not gung-ho about the use of American power. In Iraq, Afghanistan and even Libya, it proved riskier than many suggested at the time. Given the Al Qaeda links of some Syrian rebels, the U.S. must be exceedingly careful about stepping even ankle-deep into the muck of Syria.
But for all those concerned about preserving America's global clout, it should be clear that a U.S. President who details a specific tripwire, suggesting severe consequences if it's breached, had damn well better have some idea of what happens next.
"Stop... or I'll write your name down" is unlikely to deter other brutal dictators.
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"Stop... or I'll write your name down" is unlikely to deter other brutal dictators.
What do you think?
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