There’s news this morning that the United States, Great Britain, and France have launched air strikes against the Assad regime in Syria. The strikes are in response to what the three Western allies call a chemical weapons atrocity committed by the Assad regime on its own people, and are targeting laboratories, production facilities, storage facilities, and other elements of the regime’s chemical weapons capabilities.
Nobody wants to see civilians assaulted by chemical weapons, of course, and I agree with President Trump that anyone who uses chemical weapons is a “monster.” The problem is that the Assad regime denies any use of chemical weapons, and its allies — namely, Russia and Iran — are backing the regime. Indeed, at one point Russia claimed that Great Britain had, for some elusive reason, staged the chemical attack. The outlandishness of that claim gives us a pretty good idea of how to assess the relative credibility of the charges and countercharges concerning who did what.
But in the curious arena of international affairs, questions of credibility and truth, and right and wrong, often don’t mean much. Attacking Syria will have consequences for our relations with Russia and Iran, such as they are, and might put other American allies, like Israel, at increased risk. Of course, it could also risk drawing the United States deeper into the quagmire of internal disputes in a foreign nation, a la Afghanistan and Iraq. On the other hand, do countries like the United States, France, and Great Britain, which have the ability to take concrete steps to try to stop the use of chemical weapons, have a moral obligation to do something like launching these attacks when international organizations like the United Nations prove to be incapable of protecting innocents from monstrous and barbaric attacks?
It’s a dilemma that is above my pay grade, and one which I hope our leaders have thought through thoroughly and carefully. I’m all for stopping the use of chemical weapons, but it is the unpredictable long-term consequences that give me concern.
