Even after 100,000 deaths in Syria, chemical weapons attack evoked visceral response
By Joby Warrick, WashPost, Published: August 31
After the guns of World War I fell silent, the world’s nations convened in Geneva to outlaw for the first time an entire class of weapons. Barely 1 percent of the war’s battlefield deaths had come from toxic chemicals, yet these had evoked greater horror than the blast wounds, shrapnel and bullets that killed millions more.
Nearly a century later, images of another chemical-weapons attack are stirring some Western capitals into action, this time over the alleged gassing of thousands of Syrian civilians by their government. Now, as then, the toll of dead and injured is relatively small, roughly equal to the average number of fatalities in an ordinary week in Syria’s civil war.
The response has prompted the same question that arose during the debates of the early 1920s: Why are chemical weapons different?
The question is central to arguments being made this week by both proponents and opponents of a military strike to punish Syria over its alleged use of nerve gas in an Aug. 21 attack on rebel strongholds near eastern Damascus. President Obama has accused Syria of crossing a moral and legal red lineby using weapons that are outlawed and uniquely repugnant, and on Saturday he denounced the alleged attack as “an assault on our human dignity.”
(More here.)
After the guns of World War I fell silent, the world’s nations convened in Geneva to outlaw for the first time an entire class of weapons. Barely 1 percent of the war’s battlefield deaths had come from toxic chemicals, yet these had evoked greater horror than the blast wounds, shrapnel and bullets that killed millions more.
Nearly a century later, images of another chemical-weapons attack are stirring some Western capitals into action, this time over the alleged gassing of thousands of Syrian civilians by their government. Now, as then, the toll of dead and injured is relatively small, roughly equal to the average number of fatalities in an ordinary week in Syria’s civil war.
The response has prompted the same question that arose during the debates of the early 1920s: Why are chemical weapons different?
The question is central to arguments being made this week by both proponents and opponents of a military strike to punish Syria over its alleged use of nerve gas in an Aug. 21 attack on rebel strongholds near eastern Damascus. President Obama has accused Syria of crossing a moral and legal red lineby using weapons that are outlawed and uniquely repugnant, and on Saturday he denounced the alleged attack as “an assault on our human dignity.”
(More here.)
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