How should the US respond to Syria using chemical weapons?

WASHINGTON >> On April 22, 1915, chlorine gas drifted from German lines toward enemy positions held by French troops near Ypres, Belgium. This was the first significant use of chemical weapons in a war; 100,000 tons of chemical agents would be used by both sides to kill almost 30,000 soldiers and injure 500,000. The injured included a German corporal who later rose to Germany’s pinnacle. The man who was U.S. president when Adolf Hitler committed suicide had been Capt. Harry Truman in 1918 when his artillery unit fired shells containing some of the chemical agents that the Allies had developed in response to what Germany did in 1915.

Such weapons, and especially mustard gas, which blistered skin and lungs, seemed so sinister that the 1925 Geneva Protocol banned their use in war, but not their development. This resulted in mutual deterrence during the next world war, when poison gas was used only for genocide. Might this fact have motivated Israel’s alleged attack on a Syrian air base a day and a half after the Syrian regime was again suspected of using a nerve agent against a rebel position in a Damascus suburb?

Since 1997, a chemical weapons convention joined by 192 nations, including Syria, has banned the production and use of such weapons. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014 claimed that “we got 100 percent” of Syria’s chemical weapons removed from that country following the 2013 attack in which a nerve agent killed 426 children and 1,003 others.

U.S. ability to influence events in Syria has been vanishingly small since Barack Obama ignored the “red line” he drew in 2012 regarding Syrian chemical weapons.

One year ago this month, Syria’s regime used sarin, which prompted U.S. cruise missile attacks that did not deter last Saturday’s use of chemical weapons. If at this late date the only, or primary, U.S. objective in Syria is to economize violence and minimize atrocities, the ghastly but optimal outcome is a swift final victory by Bashar Assad’s regime.

Almost seven years have passed since Obama, a practitioner of ineffectual rightmindedness, announced in August 2011 that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Assad remains unconvinced of that and will rule the rubble. This question, however, remains: What, if anything, should the United States do in response to the gratuitous use of these odious and indiscriminate weapons in an urban setting? Firing cruise missiles into Syria might be cathartic, but catharsis is not a serious foreign policy objective. Neither is pretending that there was forethought behind the current U.S. president’s promise of a “big price” that Syria must brace itself to pay. Whatever this price is to be, there is no reason for it to occur without congressional authorization, for a change.

Americans probably sense rising disorder around the world, and waning U.S. ability to influence events. From Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine, Europe’s geographically largest nation, to China’s attempt to impose its will in the South China Sea, the most strategically important portion of the world’s seas that for seven decades have been kept open and orderly by the U.S. Navy. From the semi-genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar to the slowmotion closing of open societies in Poland and Hungary. Maybe not.

America has embarked on an audacious, not-thought-through experiment. The nation is shrugging off its post-1945 leadership on behalf of democratic pluralism that makes nations lawful and tranquil, and is upending the world trading system it created. Saying goodbye to all that is saying hello to we know not what.