Why Recent Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria Matter

In 1972, AP photographer Huynh Cong Ut snapped a picture that changed people's minds...and the course of a war. The iconic, Pulitzer-Prize winning image of five Vietnamese children running for their lives near Trang Bang,Vietnam shamed us into questioning why we were there. That terrible sight – the clothes of one of the children, Phan Thi Kim Phuk, “The Napalm Girl”, had been burned off by the toxic jelly dropped on her village from South Vietnamese planes! - marked the beginning of the end for an American presence in Vietnam. We could not turn a blind eye to the pain and suffering captured so clearly on those small faces. Public and political support for the war began to fade and by 1975, we were out.

Fast forward to 2013 and another set of war time pictures – again of suffering children – and again forcing us to re-think our involvement in another country's civil war. The photos and videos that have flooded the airwaves and social and mainstream media sites since August 21, 2013, displaying dead and stricken child-victims of a now confirmed chemical weapons attack in a Damascus suburb has pricked the world's conscience and caused us all to ask “should we get involved?”. The irony is obvious.

By Dennis J. Herring [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons 

Vietnam wasn't the first time human beings employed poisonous gases/substances as weapons-of-war. (Strictly speaking napalm is an incendiary) During World War I both sides of the battlefield lobbed chlorine, phosgene and mustard-gas filled grenades, with devastating results: 100,000 soldiers died horrible deaths because of their use then. So horrific, in fact, that after the conflict ended, an outraged public demanded they never be used again. In the name of humanity these instruments of death were deemed too heinous even for war and in 1925 the imperfect Geneva Protocol was drawn up banning their use. In 1992, the much improved Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was drafted, prohibiting the manufacture, use, and stockpiling of such weaponry. With 189 signatories, the international arms control agreement went into effect in 1997. Incendiary weapons are covered in the 1980 Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the use of Incendiary Weapons. 

Why do people make a bigger deal about these types of munitions than conventional arms? After all, the damage done by bullets and bombs is certainly no less terrible to the victims. In fact, in the context of war such distinctions are hypocritical. Aren't they? Maybe. But it is hard to reconcile emotional response with intellectual understanding when you are watching someone (especially the very young or the very old) in the throes of chemical or gas poisoning: foaming at the nose and mouth, struggling to breathe, convulsing, screaming because their skin is burning and melting from an invisible fire...! Add to that the lack of obvious trauma: no blood or broken bones, no blown up buildings and the visceral reaction is almost guaranteed. It may be hard to articulate a difference but that does not mean there isn't one. When you don’t know what is responsible, when it is the very air you are breathing, when it is misting over your skin, maybe while you are sleeping...when you can't get away from it or run and hide from it...that makes it different.

Jan Breughel (II) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

1,400 innocent civilians – over 400 children! - died in a chemical attack in a Syrian suburb on August 21, 2013. The use of these weapons in this long-standing civil war demands a global response that goes beyond saber-rattling and warning. Once again those of us far from the battlefield can see with our own eyes innocent children paying a terrible price for grown-up wars. And once seen, we cannot unsee it.

As our leaders debate what message we should or shouldn't send in response to this evil, one thing is clear: President Bashar al-Assad, and the whole world needs to know “No means no! to the use of chemical weapons in warfare”. The question is how best to deliver that message? In 1972 we were standing on the wrong side of history. Where will we stand today?