Civilians >> chemical weapons

The “Salon” I did with Stanford’s Lina Khatib yesterday on “Should the U.S. intervene in Syria?” focused mainly on chemical weapons, as all conversations about Syria yesterday did.

Lina, who had published a piece with Larry Diamond on Thursday making the case for military intervention (arms to the rebels plus a no-fly zone but no boots on the ground) in Syria, is concerned not only about chemical weapons use, the evidence for which she regards as “credible,” but about the fertile ground for Islamist extremists and the impact on the region.  The longer the fighting lasts, the worse it gets.

I don’t disagree with any of that.  But it doesn’t matter whether she and I think the evidence of chemical weapons use is credible.  What matters is what the Russians, Chinese, Turks and others think.  If there is going to be serious military intervention in Syria by the United States, it is going to need multilateral cover, preferably a UN Security Council resolution as well as an Arab League request.  The standards the evidence is going to need to meet are high.  The world is in no mood for another Middle East war based on flimsy claims related to weapons of mass destruction.

It is going to take time to assemble the evidence and convince skeptics.  Once we are ready, Peter Juul proposes a reasonable course of action to mobilize the UN Security Council and NATO (for both military action and humanitarian relief).  If that fails, the US will have to consider unilateral action without multilateral cover, but that is a course of action with many drawbacks.

There is also a credibility issue in the other direction:  if the US doesn’t act against Syrian use of chemical weapons, why would the Iranians believe that we would take action against their nuclear program?  This is a serious problem, but it should not drive the timetable.  Being 100% certain, and trying to convince others, is more important than the timing.

That is a cruel thing to say.  Syrians are dying every day.  The average is climbing towards 200 per day, 6000 per month.  The total by now is well over 70,000.  Those are staggering numbers.  Few of them are killed by chemical weapons.  Bombing, Scuds, artillery and small arms fire are much more common:

The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter what the weapons used.  Civilians are more important than the weapons that kill them.  The standards of proof are easily met.  The Syrian security forces and their paramilitaries are attacking and killing civilians daily with conventional weapons.

I would like to see the international community act on those grounds, rather than focusing on a limited (and difficult to prove) use of sarin gas.  But this is not the unipolar moment of 1999, when the United States led a NATO intervention in Kosovo without UN Security Council approval.  That is unlikely to happen.  So we are heading down a long road of difficult proof.

Some, like Leila Hilal on Chris Hayes’ show last night, would prefer a negotiated solution.  So would I.  But it is not looking as if Bashar al Assad is hurting badly enough to yield to the transition plans that Russia and the United States agreed in Geneva last June.  The mutually hurting stalemate that would provide the conditions for that will require that the revolutionaries do a bit better than they have managed so far.  More international assistance is going to be needed.