The US Has NO audacity to Judge SYRIA

August 21^st, 2013 brought un-amusing pictures of what is now known to be the bodies of hundreds of men, women and children lined up after a chemical attack by the Syrian government on its own people. This is the “red line” that president Barrack Obama had set for Syria last year that would automatically warrant military action; the use of chemical weapons. The Syrian rebels blew the whistle on this attack in Damascus that they claim was carried out by government forces. 1430 people are claimed to have been killed in that particular attack alone, in a war that has claimed at least 100,000 lives and displaced millions of people.

As expected, the world’s policeman; the United States was quick to make a statement about how the Syrian government had crossed the line and military action requirements to solve the humanitarian nightmare. The accusations of the Syrian government seemed to come faster than the evidence of who actually carried out the attack as the blame game ensued between the Syrian government and the rebels. Meanwhile, The US’ strongest ally, UK was rushing to call out MPs from their break to the House of Commons to make a rushed decision whether the British forces should be involved in a military action against Syria. This motion was defeated in a dramatic vote. 

An August 26, Foreign Policy article revealed that, "CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran." One would hope that this revelation would change the propensity with which the US is moving to bomb Syrian targets. Probably it did, with President Obama now seeking the permission of Congress before attacking Syria. The revelation reinforces what has been a public secret; that the hands of the US war machine are not as clean as they portray them to be.

This reality leads to the question: Can a government that supported the use of chemical weapons in one conflict claim any moral, political or legal authority militarily to attack another country for using the same weapons, particularly when the attack is not authorised by the UN Security Council? The files further reveal that not only did the US aid the use of chemical weapons by the former Iraqi government on Iran; it also used chemical weapons on a large scale during its 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, in the form of depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition.

One wonders why chemical weapons are singled out for international condemnation compared out to other weapons considering that conventional weapons are also capable of producing more death and destruction on an industrial scale. Paul Waldman, in his December 6,2012 article, argues that chemical weapons are not as uniquely dangerous as biological or nuclear weapons because they lack the ability to kill tens or hundreds of thousands or people at once.

Dominic Tierney seems to believe that if we "strip away the moralistic opposition to chemical weapons" we'll find "strategic self-interest as powerful countries like the United States cultivate a taboo against using WMD partly because they have a vast advantage in conventional arms. We want to draw stark lines around acceptable and unacceptable kinds of warfare because the terrain that we carve out is strategically favourable."

Al Jazeera’s Dahr Jamail reported the use of Depleted Uranium by the US and UK has been the cause of many cases of Gulf War Syndrome suffered by Iraq war veterans, thousands of birth defects, cancer and other diseases - causing a "large-scale public health disaster" and the "highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied" - suffered by Iraqis in areas subjected to frequent and intense attacks by US and allied occupation forces.

So, for a country that has both supported and committed large-scale and systematic war crimes in one country (Iraq) to be leading the International effort to stop Syria from continuing to use chemical weapons against its own people, one wonders where it gets it audacity and legitimacy.

The moral mission over Iraq, and the invasion impetus to "liberate" women in Afghanistan have only left tens of thousands of people killed. 1,000 Iraqis were killed in July alone. That should make interventionists think twice about moral justifications - but it seems this hook is just too seductive, too perfectly attuned to a western enlightened sense of self.

Besides, for a war that has been ongoing since March, 2011, and claimed more than 100,000 lives as the west watched on from a distance, why should military action be necessitated by outrage over chemical attacks? Where was the “red line” when the US used depleted-uranium ammunition in Fallujah, Iraq? Or when Israel deployed white phosphorous in Gaza in 2008? Or when Saddam Hussein, then a western ally, gassed the Iranians and then his own people during the 1980s? This arbitrary and self-serving declaration of what's acceptable is precisely what makes the US so lacking in credibility when it comes to preaching codes of warfare to the Middle East.

This is not to say however, that nothing should be done to stop the bloodshed in Syria. But western leaders should not always seek to justify military interventions by using democratic values and lovely human rights slogans when it clear that war suits their particular agendas of the time.

Twitter: @PathyKlinn