Quote: (08-28-2013 08:07 AM)SexyBack Wrote:
The use of chemical weapons is very serious.
Why? Why is it more serious to kill someone with a "chemical weapon" than by a gun?
Whatever "chemical weapons" are available to a low tech military are likely to be very ineffective - if they were any good, they'd have been used in conflicts like World War II where no one flinched at the thought of bombing cities full of civilians to rubble. Chemical weapons were only ever used to any effect for a few years during World War I when they were new and then militaries figured out that simple training and cheap breath masks nullify most of the threat.
The big powers don't use chemicals because they're just not good weapons. That's why they gathered together to celebrate their great humanity in banning these ineffective but scary sounding weapons.
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But having someone use chemical weapons anywhere in the world in the 21st century is not compatible with NATOs security standards.
If Syrian troops were equipped with spears for the lack of any better weapons, would you conclude that a) using spears in today's world is barbaric and unacceptable and justifies painting Syria as a grave threat to the world or that b) using spears in today's world is so far behind the advanced weaponry of the West that Syria cannot be considered any threat at all to anyone besides their own population?
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Either scenario is a massive threat that has to be dealt with.
No, poison gas is no graver threat to anyone than just having Syrian troops go from house to house and shooting people. The fuss about chemicals is just deplorable moral panic propaganda over a weapon so inferior and outdated that the Western powers don't even use it anymore.
There's not even any actual proof of intentional use of poison gas. Syria is in a chaotic civil war with a lot of belligerents and hundreds of people dying in a day means that there are tons of corpses around with undetermined causes of death. As long as we have only a handful of corpses with evidence of poisoning we have absolutely no way of telling whether they were actually gassed or whether a bomb hit a pesticide warehouse next door.
Me, I'd be happy to consider saving some civilians from a massacre (poison gas or not) but the thing is, I want to be convinced that the intervention will actually do some good and the past few Western interventions in Arab countries have been disasters. Why would it be different this time?