TGIF:
The Cynical U.S. Policy on Chemical Weapons
by Sheldon Richman September 6, 2013
“I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.”
That was President Obama’s response this week to those who believe he wants to attack Syria in order to defend his own credibility. Secretary of State John Kerry said the same thing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They were referring to the 88-year-old Geneva Protocol (Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare) and the 20-year-old Chemical Weapons Convention (Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction).
Although 189 nations, including the United States, are parties to the CWC, it doesn’t follow that the United States has been anointed to enforce it. In fact, U.S. action against Syria would in itself violate international law, which permits the use of force by one government against another only in self-defense or as part of a UN-authorized action. Neither applies in this case. (There are libertarian grounds against war even when the UN has authorized it.)
Because the gruesome images of children and other noncombatants killed and wounded allegedly by Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons constitute a powerful part of Obama’s appeal for public support for his missile strike (or more), it pays to take a close look at the U.S. record on chemical weapons.
Fortunately, Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, where he chairs the program in Middle Eastern Studies, has done this. The record isn’t pretty.
Before looking at Zunes’s findings, let us note that while Syria is not a party to the CWC, neither are U.S. allies Egypt and Israel, which receive billions of dollars each year in military equipment. (Unlike Egypt, Israel signed the convention in 1993, but it has not been ratified by the Knesset, which means that Israel is not a party to it.) Israel, like Egypt, is considered to have stockpiles of chemical weapons; it also has biological and nuclear weapons. Indeed, Israel is a nuclear monopolist in the Middle East a fact usually left unmentioned in reports on Iran’s alleged nuclear-weapons program. Moreover, unlike Iran, Israel is not a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Syria’s chemical arsenal and Israel’s nuclear arsenal are linked, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, in “History Lesson: When the United States Looked the Other Way on Chemical Weapons”:
- Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged
gentleman’s agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had
nuclear weapons, Syria’s pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract
much public acknowledgement or criticism. (The Fact Checker, when serving
as The Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent, learned of this secret
arrangement from Middle Eastern and Western diplomats, but it was never
officially confirmed.) These are the sorts of trade-offs that happen
often in diplomacy. After all, Israel’s nuclear stockpile has never been
officially acknowledged, and Syria in the 1980s and 1990s was often
supportive of U.S. interests in the region, even nearly reaching a peace
deal with Israel.
- As documented in 2002 by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, the
Reagan administration knew full well it was selling materials to Iraq
that was [sic] being used for the manufacture of chemical weapons, and
that Iraq was using such weapons [against Iran], but U.S. officials were
more concerned about whether Iran would win rather than how Iraq might
eke out a victory. Dobbs noted that Iraq’s chemical weapons’ use was
“hardly a secret….”
- . . .
- In 1988, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered chemical weapons attacks against Kurdish resistance forces, but the relationship with Iraq at the time was deemed too important to rupture over the matter. The United States did not even impose sanctions.
- . . .
The Post report supports Zunes’s conclusion in his May 2 article, “The U.S. and Chemical Weapons: No Leg to Stand On,” that “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.” Zunes points out a glaring example of this inconsistency:
- 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 U.S. record on chemical weapons is poor in other respects. Zunes reports that the administration of George W. Bush forced the removal of the respected director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which enforces the Chemical Weapons Convention, Brazilian diplomat José Bustani:
- [B]y 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.
- 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.
The implications are shocking in light of the current crisis. Zunes argues,
- 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.
We’re witnessing the latest episode in that longstanding pattern today.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-the-cynical-u-s-policy-on-chemical-weapons/ --
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