The United States is in no position to take leadership in response to any use of such weaponry by Syria
By , 
If,
as alleged, the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons, it would indeed be a
serious development, constituting a breach of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, one
of the world’s most important disarmament treaties, which banned the use of
chemical weapons.
In
1993, the international community came together to ratify the Chemical Weapons
Convention, a binding international treaty that would also prohibit the
development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, and transfer or
use of chemical weapons. Syria is one of only eight of the world’s 193
countries not party to the convention.
However,
U.S. policy regarding chemical weapons has been so inconsistent and
politicized that the United States is in no position to take leadership in
response to any use of such weaponry by Syria.
The
controversy over Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles is not new. Both the Bush
administration and Congress, in the 2003 Syria Accountability Act, raised the
issue of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, specifically Syria’s refusal to
ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention. The failure of Syria to end its
chemical weapons program was deemed sufficient grounds by a large bipartisan
majority of Congress to impose strict sanctions on that country. Syria
rejected such calls for unilateral disarmament on the grounds that it was not
the only country in the region that had failed to sign the CWC—nor was it the
first country in the region to develop chemical weapons, nor did it have the
largest chemical weapons arsenal in the region.
Indeed,
neither Israel nor Egypt, the world’s two largest recipients of U.S. military
aid, is a party to the convention either. Never has Congress or any
administration of either party called on Israel or Egypt to disarm their
chemical weapons arsenals, much less threatened sanctions for having failed to
do so. U.S. policy, therefore, appears to be that while it is legitimate for
its allies Israel and Egypt to refuse to ratify this important arms control
convention, Syria needed to be singled out for punishment for its refusal.
The
first country in the Middle East to obtain and use chemical weapons was Egypt,
which used phosgene and mustard gas in the mid-1960s during its intervention
in Yemen’s civil war. There is no indication Egypt has ever destroyed any of
its chemical agents or weapons. The U.S.-backed Mubarak regime continued its
chemical weapons research and development program until its ouster in a
popular uprising two years ago, and the program is believed to have continued
subsequently.
Israel is widely believed to have produced and
stockpiled an extensive range of chemical weapons and is engaged in ongoing
research and development of additional chemical weaponry. (Israel is also
believed to maintain a sophisticated biological weapons program, which is
widely thought to include anthrax and more advanced weaponized agents and
other toxins, as well as a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal with sophisticated
delivery systems.) For more than 45 years, the Syrians have witnessed
successive U.S. administration provide massive amounts of armaments to a
neighboring country with a vastly superior military capability which has
invaded, occupied, and colonized Syria’s Golan province in the southwest. In
2007, the United
States successfully pressured Israel to
reject peace overtures from the Syrian government in which the Syrians offered
to recognize Israel and agree to strict security guarantees in return for a
complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory.
The
U.S. position that Syria must unilaterally give up its chemical weapons and
missiles while allowing a powerful and hostile neighbor to maintain and expand
its sizable arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is simply
unreasonable. No country, whether autocratic or democratic, could be expected
to accept such conditions.
This
is part of a longstanding pattern of hostility by the United States towards
international efforts to eliminate chemical weapons through a universal
disarmament regime. Instead, Washington uses the alleged threat from chemical
weapons as an excuse to target specific countries whose governments are seen
as hostile to U.S. political and economic interests.
One
of the most effective instruments for international arms control in recent
years has been the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW), which enforces the Chemical Weapons Convention by inspecting
laboratories, factories, and arsenals, and oversees the destruction of
chemical weapons. The organization’s most successful director general, first
elected in 1997, was the Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani, praised by the Guardian newspaper as a “workaholic” who
has “done more in the past five years to promote world peace than anyone.”
Under his strong leadership, the number of signatories of the treaty grew from
87 to 145 nations, the fastest growth rate of any international organization
in recent decades, and – during this same period – his inspectors oversaw the
destruction of 2 million chemical weapons and two-thirds of the world’s
chemical weapons facilities. Bustani was re-elected unanimously in May 2000
for a five-year term and was complimented by Secretary of State Colin Powell
for his “very impressive” work.
However,
by 2002, the United States began raising objections to Bustani’s insistence
that the OPCW inspect U.S. chemical weapons facilities with the same vigor it
does for other signatories. More critically, the United States was concerned
about Bustani’s efforts to get Iraq to sign the convention and open their
facilities to surprise inspections as is done with other signatories. If Iraq
did so, and the OPCW failed to locate evidence of chemical weapons that
Washington claimed Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed, it would severely weaken
American claims that Iraq was developing chemical weapons. U.S. efforts to
remove Bustani by forcing a recall by the Brazilian government failed, as did
a U.S.-sponsored vote of no confidence at the United Nations in March. That
April, the United States began putting enormous pressure on some of the UN’s
weaker countries to support its campaign to oust Bustani and threatened to
withhold the United States’ financial contribution to the OPCW, which
constituted more than 20 percent of its entire budget. Figuring it was better
to get rid of its leader than risk the viability of the whole organization, a
majority of nations, brought together in an unprecedented special session
called by the United States, voted to remove Bustani.
The Case of Iraq
The first country to allegedly use chemical weapons in
the Middle East was Great Britain in 1920, as part of its efforts to put down
a rebellion by Iraqi tribesmen when British forces seized the country
following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.According
to Winston Churchill, who then held the
position of Britain’s Secretary of State for War and Air, “I do not understand
this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using
poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes.”
It
was the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s,
that used chemical weapons on a scale far greater than any country had dared
since the weapons were banned nearly 90 years ago. The Iraqis inflicted close
to 100,000 casualties among Iranian soldiers using banned chemical agents,
resulting in 20,000 deaths and tens of thousands of long-term injuries.
They were unable to do this alone, however. Despite
ongoing Iraqi support for Abu Nidal and other terrorist groups during the
1980s, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department’s list
of state sponsors of terrorism in order to provide the regime with
thiodiglycol, a key component in the manufacture of mustard gas, and other
chemical precursors for their weapons program. Walter Lang, a senior official
with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, noted how “the use of gas on the battlefield by the
Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern” to President Reagan and
other administration officials since they “were desperate to make sure that
Iraq did not lose.” Lang noted that the DIA believed Iraq’s use of chemical
was “seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for survival.” In fact, DIA
personnel were dispatched to Baghdad during the war to provide Saddam
Hussein’s regime with U.S. satellite data on the location of Iranian troop
concentrations in the full knowledge that the Iraqis were using chemical
weapons against them.
Even
the Iraqi regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians was not seen as
particularly problematic. The March 1988 massacre in the northern Iraqi city
of Halabja, where Saddam’s forces murdered up to 5,000 Kurdish civilians with
chemical weapons, was downplayed by the Reagan administration, with some
officials even falsely claiming that Iran was actually responsible. The United
States continued sending aid to Iraq even after the regime’s use of poison gas
was confirmed.
When
a 1988 Senate Foreign Relations committee staff report brought to light
Saddam’s policy of widespread extermination in Iraqi Kurdistan, Senator
Claiborne Pell introduced the Prevention
of
Genocide Act to put pressure on the Iraqi regime, but the Bush administration
successfully moved to have the measure killed. This came despite evidence
emerging from UN reports in 1986 and 1987, prior to the Halabja tragedy,
documenting Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Kurdish
civilians—allegations that were confirmed both by investigations from the CIA
and from U.S. embassy staff who had visited Iraqi Kurdish refugees in Turkey.
However, not only was the United States not particularly concerned about
Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, the Reagan administration continued supporting
the Iraqi government’s procurement effort of materials necessary for their
development.
Given
the U.S. culpability in the deaths of tens of thousands of people by Iraqi
chemical weapons less than 25 years ago, the growing calls for the United
States to go to war with Syria in response to that regime’s alleged use of
chemical weapons that killed a few dozen people leads even many of Syrian
dictator Bashar Assad’s fiercest opponents to question U.S. motivations.
This
is not the only reason U.S. credibility on the issue of chemical weapons is
questionable, however.
After
denying and covering up Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the late 1980s, the
U.S. government—first under President Bill Clinton and then under President
George W. Bush—began insisting that Iraq’s alleged chemical weapons stockpile
was a dire threat, even though the country had completely destroyed its
stockpile by 1993 and completely dismantled its chemical weapons program.
Vice
President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Secretary of Defense
Chuck Hagel—when they served in the U.S. Senate in 2002—all voted to authorize
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, insisting that Iraq still had a chemical weapons
arsenal that was so extensive it constituted a serious threaten to the
national security of the United States, despite the fact that Iraq had rid
itself of all such weapons nearly a decade earlier. As a result, it is not
unreasonable to question the accuracy of any claims they might make today in
regard to Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons.
It should also be noted that many of today’s most
outspoken congressional advocates for U.S. military intervention in Syria in
response to the Damascus regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons were among
the most strident advocates in 2002-2003 for invading Iraq. Rep. Eliot Engel
(D-NY), whom the Democrats have chosen to be their ranking member on the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, was among the right-wing minority of House
Democrats who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that the country
possessed weapons of mass destruction. When no such weapons were found, Engel came up
with the bizarre allegation that “it
would not surprise me if those weapons of mass destruction that we cannot find
in Iraq wound up and are today in Syria.”
Engel
is currently the chief sponsor of the Free Syria Act of 2013 (H.R. 1327),
which would authorize the United States to provide arms to Syrian rebels.
UN resolutions
Unlike
the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, there are no UN Security Council
resolutions specifically demanding that Syria unilaterally disarm its chemical
weapons or dismantle its chemical weapons program. Syria is believed to have
developed its chemical weapons program only after Israel first developed its
chemical, biological, and nuclear programs, all of which still exist today and
by which the Syrians still feel threatened.
However,
UN Security Council Resolution 687, the resolution passed at the end of the
1991 Gulf War demanding the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons arsenal,
also called on member states “to work towards the establishment in the Middle
East of a zone free of such weapons.”
Syria has joined virtually all other Arab states in
calling for such a “weapons of mass destruction-free zone” for the entire
Middle East. In December 2003, Syria introduced a UN Security Council
resolution reiterating this clause from 12 years earlier, but the resolution
was tabled as a result of a threatened U.S. veto. As
I wrote at time, in reference to the Syrian
Accountability Act, “By imposing strict sanctions on Syria for failing to
disarm unilaterally, the administration and Congress has roundly rejected the
concept of a WMD-free zone or any kind of regional arms control regime. Instead,
the United States government is asserting that it has the authority to say
which country can have what kind of weapons systems, thereby enforcing a kind
of WMD apartheid, which will more likely encourage, rather than discourage,
the proliferation of such dangerous weapons.”
A
case can be made, then, that had the United States pursued a policy that
addressed the proliferation of non-conventional weapons through region-wide
disarmament rather than trying to single out Syria, the Syrian regime would
have rid itself of its chemical weapons some years earlier along with Israel
and Egypt, and the government’s alleged use of such ordnance—which is now
propelling the United States to increase its involvement in that country’s
civil war—would have never become an issue.
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Thanks for your comment. Peace, NB