There is understandably and rightly much talk about Syria right now, and I believe a lot of it misses the point. The point is poison gas. Some talk of doing more to encourage negotiations. Sure, that would be nice. No doubt that is being pursued behind the scenes by many with good intentions, from Ban Ki Moon to Switzerland to the U.S. State Department. For me, I do not expect there to be any negotiations any time soon with
Russia and Iran backing one side and the Saudis, Gulf States, Turkey and
France backing the other, not until one side feels it has lost on the
battlefield and is ready to capitulate. And none of that matters anyway, when it comes to poison gas.
A grand strategy would be
good. Do we back all the rebels, just the nice rebels, or stay out? We seem to be rather unsure. Most of us don't want to get mired down in the Syrian Civil War. And I agree we shouldn't. But that is a separate issue from the use of poison gas, which has
been illegal by international agreement since shortly after World War I.
As for me, I want to live in a world in which nobody ever uses poison gas and
the ban on it is strictly enforced. Whoever uses poison gas needs to
gets smacked, and hard. The calculation of any actor in the future has
to include the certainty that if it uses poison gas it will lose its air
force and a good many of its other assets capable of delivering more
gas. Ruthless people will do
anything they need to do to hold onto power until the cost outweighs
the benefits. Arguments of any rationale that end with the conclusion that we need to let anybody get away with using poison gas are terribly naive, as far as I'm concerned. We stop
this now or we will see more and more of it in the future. That's where I stand.
No comments:
Post a Comment