Right move in Syria, but not ‘humanitarian’

grounds. But when you talk to experts about why we should enforce the ban, the argument quickly turns to realpolitik: We don’t want chemical weapons used on our troops or civilians.

“This very easily could happen in the United States if we’re not smart, and if we’re not conscious of what’s happening,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on “Fox News Sunday.” (Full disclosure: My wife works for Haley.)

That is wholly legitimate. It’s the same logic we use for preventing rogue regimes from developing nuclear weapons. We don’t do much of anything to prevent North Korea or Iran from brutalizing their own people, but we don’t want them to have the ability to threaten our people or our allies. But that argument has little to do with humanitarianism. We haven’t told Assad that if he kills his own people — by dropping barrel bombs on hospitals, by firing squads, or by blocking humanitarian aid — we will punish the regime. We’ve said only that if he uses chemical weapons, he will pay a price.

Even here, our message is more muddled than it seems. If the National Security Council is to be believed, the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on its own people some 50 times since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. We’ve punished the regime twice.

Why those two times? Because there was video.

After the 2017 chemical attack that elicited our first attack, Trump told The New York Times: “I think it’s a disgrace. I think it’s an affront to humanity.”

It was a disgrace. But so is all the ongoing slaughter in Syria, including the alleged 48 other times the Assad regime used chemical weapons away from the cameras.

The U.S. was right to penalize Assad, but it is not obvious to me that we are sending the Syrian president and his Russian patrons a coherent message.

They know they can get away with mass murder if they use conventional weapons, and they know they can get away with using chemical weapons — as long as the images never appear on “Fox & Friends.”