Letter 2 America for September 6, 2013

Dear America,

The lack of international abhorrence directed at the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad...or at least at his government...over the murder by nerve gas of over a thousand people in a single incident, and many more over the past year or so, is discomfiting to say the least.  It seems to me that there is a moral connection between this atrocity and the last such use of gas by a dictator, Saddam Hussein, who used nerve gas against both the Iranians in their war against one another, and against the Kurds in their rebellion against his regime, and it does not redound to the credit of the international community.  In both cases there has been broad self-righteous indignation, genuine or feigned, but in neither case has there been a call for action.  True, such "weapons of mass destruction" provided the pretext for George W. Bush's reelection war against Hussein and Iraq, but in the end, the actual previous use of lethal gas was nothing more than a gambit used to give credibility to the claims that he was still a threat to do so since there really wasn't any evidence to indicate that he still had any, or even had what he needed to make more.  But even that war had at best only half-hearted approbation in the world at large and our real allies in the enterprise comprised only Great Britain and Poland along with a couple of dozen other small countries who provided a handful of troops in the aggregate that didn't even amount to much more than the number of casualties the United States suffered there.  Of course, the lack of credibility of the justification for that war, as evinced by the scant nature of the "evidence" to support it, explains the world's half-heartedness in that case, but the gassing murder of the Kurds barely got mentioned on the news when it occurred, and to the best of my knowledge, Hussein was never prosecuted for it until he was captured after the Bush war, despite the fact that it was an obvious crime against humanity when it happened nearly two decades earlier.  And despite the fact that the war between Iraq and Iran was a matter of mutual hostility, the use of lethal gas even in warfare has been banned by universal conventions for nearly a hundred years, but no consequence was suffered by Hussein in that instance either.

To put all this in context, after World War II it became apparent that the Nazi regime had used lethal gas--in fact the same gas as is being used by Assad today, Sarin, was among the gasses used--in its concentration camps as a means of human extermination.  And while we often hear talk of the six million Jews who died that way, there were actually something between eleven and fifteen million victims: the Jews plus political undesirables, the handicapped, Poles, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and anyone else who didn't fit the German concept of the "master race."  Thus, after the war there were trials held at Nuremberg, and the twenty or so surviving Nazi oligarchs were prosecuted and many were executed or remained in prison for the rest of their lives.  The reason that I pointed out that the victims of the Nazi holocaust were not just Jews but were human beings of all kinds is that the current international ennui over the use of lethal gas on innocents and military adversaries begs the question of what would have been the prevailing mood in post-1946 Germany if only Jews had died.  Would it have been the same as it is now when it is only Arabs?

The popular consensus in the United States seems to be based on a series of considerations.  The first is the freshness of our memories of the costs of war in the Arab world, and they have been enormous for us in terms both of life and weal.  But there is also what used to be called "the credibility gap" that has grown between the American government and us Americans.  After the subterfuge used in the inspiration of the Iraq war became abundantly clear and the persistence of the war in Afghanistan even after the purpose of its inception--the capture of Osama bin Ladin and Al Qaeda's leadership--had become an unrealistic fool's errand that dragged on for ten years longer, the American people don't really want to hear the sirens' calls of patriotic duty and national pride.  Before committing to overseas military action, we all want to know exactly what is going to take place and how long it is going to take, not to mention at what cost, and rightfully so, I think.  And the pursuit of more ethereal ends like the protection of innocents from slaughter and mayhem is not nearly as clear a purpose as it used to be before efforts to do so ended in sectarianism and civil strife that at least ostensibly had been prevented in the past only by the grotesque existence of the ones we had just expelled from power.  And then, no one believes that Assad is susceptible to punishment as a deterrent, and no one wants to risk entrenchment in the bellicosities of Syria just to make some kind of point that will fall on deaf ears.  That is why the prospect of an attack intended to "punish" Assad seems so far fetched.  Add to all those reservations the unpopularity of our president among a substantial number of Americans for reasons varying from Tea Party irrationality to outright bigotry and the likelihood that President Obama's attempt to gain popular approval for bloodying Assad's nose with a few cruise missiles becomes remote at best...perhaps rightfully so.

What I think should be done starts with international politics.  The moral arguments about use of weapons of mass destruction should be renewed without the war in Iraq as a backdrop.  An international convention already exists, and has for many decades, but it seems time for a discussion world-wide about what the international community should empower itself to do about its breach, and the role of the UN should be central in the debate.  That entails a discussion of the dysfunction, and the very continuing existence as currently designed, of the Security Council of the UN.  The Security Council comprises five permanent members, each with veto power--the United States, the Russian Federation, China, France and Great Britain--along with ten other nations, each elected for a two year term.  That dysfunction would seem familiar to any American who follows congressional politics.  In the case of the Syria debate, for example, Russia is committed to using its absolute veto power to block UN action against Syria, and as that is the case, no international action can gain the imprimatur of the only duly constituted world body dedicated to peaceful international political dispute resolution.  If the Russians could not unilaterally prevent UN actions, the entire geo-political scenario would be different, and perhaps more than a thousand lives could have been saved from excruciating death due to gas exposure and tens of thousands as casualties of more conventional civil war.  That is what President Obama should be fighting for today...a permanent end to the peremptory interdiction by individual powers of consensus, international action.  There is no reason for the five most powerful nations of 1950 to continue to be the arbiters of international action in a world now as diverse as the one in which we live.  That is the position that President Obama should stake out, thus addressing all of the criticisms of what he now proposes, and doing so in perpetuity and for the universal benefits of the community of nations.  If the UN is to live up to its potential as an international quasi-government, that is what is required, and anything short leaves behind an often hollow shell where a grand idea should be.

Your friend,

Mike