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Why the return of chemical weapons is a big deal
<http://claysbeach.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-return-of-chemical-weapons-is-big.html>
> One day people will rue the day that poison gas was re-introduced into
> class warfare and the antiwar movement sat on its hands.
>
> Poison gas is the perfect ultimate weapon for the bourgeois to use
> against the proletariat. That is why Assad is using it now.
>
> When he took back Qusayr from the revolution, he started to move Shia
> and Alawite families into the formerly Sunni town in an attempt to
> secure it through ethnic cleansing. Problem was, since he had taken
> Qusayr with conventional bombardment, there wasn't a lot left standing
> to move them into. By using a poison gas that disperses within hours,
> he solves that problem.
>
> Poison gas is the perfect weapon for the bourgeois to use against the
> 99% because it doesn't destroy their precious property, only human
> lives. And there is the sheer terror of an odorless gas that comes in
> the night and kills the children first. It is the very best weapon for
> putting down rebellions. With conventional bombardment the Syrian
> landlords have to destroy their buildings to kill the people. Even
> where the 1% has nukes, they can hardly threaten to nuke a restive
> neighbourhood, and biologicals are very tricky. How can you be sure
> they won't migrant to the local Beverly Hills?
>
> Chemical weapons don't have these problems. Given modern weather
> forecasting abilities, poison gas can be accurately applied to
> selective neighborhoods, killing all people and animals but leaving
> most property unharmed. That alone assures it of a big role in
> imperialism's battle to remain on top as the struggle between rich and
> poor intensifies in this century.
>
> Worldwide revulsion at the horrors caused by the use of poison gas on
> the battlefields of what they called /"the Great War,"/ before we knew
> enough to number them, forced an international ban on chemical
> weapons. As the great powers moved on to even more grotesque weapons,
> their role as the /"poor man's nukes"/ help keep the ban in place.
> That ban has held for almost a hundred years with only one important
> violation until recently.
>
> From Wikipedia
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_I>, we see
> that poison gas proved to be a particularly ineffective weapon in the
> war between imperialist powers but that right after the war it started
> to be used for colonial and mass suppression before mass opposition
> force the ban that is now being violated:
>
> By the end of the war, chemical weapons had lost much of their
> effectiveness against well trained and equipped troops. At that
> time, chemical weapon agents were used in one quarter of artillery
> shells fired but caused only 3% of casualties.^[43]
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_I#cite_note-43>
>
>
> Nevertheless, in the following years, chemical weapons were used
> in several, mainly colonial, wars where one side had an advantage
> in equipment over the other. The British used adamsite
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamsite> against Russian
> revolutionary <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War>
> troops in 1919 and allegedly used
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_gas_in_Mesopotamia_in_1920>
> mustard gas against Iraqi insurgents in the 1920s; Bolshevik
> troops used poison gas to suppress the Tambov Rebellion
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambov_Rebellion> in 1920, Spain
> used chemical weapons in Morocco against Rif
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rif> tribesmen throughout the
> 1920s^[44]
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_I#cite_note-HD.shtml-44>
> and Italy used mustard gas in Libya in 1930 and again during its
> invasion of Ethiopia in 1936.^[45]
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_I#cite_note-rosenheck03-45>
>
>
> You will note while it was no longer used in inter-imperialist
> rivalries, chemical weapons found ready application as a weapon of
> mass rebellion suppression up until the Geneva Protocols were adopted,
> and even after. Saddam Hussein's murder of 5,000 Kurds with poison gas
> was also a use of this type. The Wikipedia entry goes on to say that
> mass opposition to the use of chemical weapons led to the ban:
>
> Public opinion had by then turned against the use of such weapons
> which led to the Geneva Protocol
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol>, an updated and
> extensive prohibition of poison weapons. The Protocol bans the use
> (but not the stockpiling) of lethal gas and bacteriological
> weapons, which was signed by most First World War combatants in 1925.
>
> The Geneva Protocol protections that public pressure won are really
> quite limited. Ratifying countries were free to stockpile chemical
> weapons and free to use them if they were used against them. It was
> violated in its first decade by Italy in Abyssinia and Japan against
> China. As noted <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol> in the
> Wikipedia entry on the Geneva Protocol, it has a number of important
> loopholes:
>
> Eric Croddy, assessing the Protocol in 2005, took the view that
> the historic record showed it had been largely ineffectual.
> Specifically it did not prohibit:[6]
>
> * use against not-ratifying parties
> * retalliation using such weapons, so effectively making it a
> no-first-use agreement
> * use within a state's own borders in a civil conflict
> * research and development of such weapons, or stockpiling them
>
> Note especially number 3 in the bullet point list. The Geneva Protocol
> was never designed to make what Bashar al-Assad is doing with chemical
> weapons in Syria illegal! It was never meant to disallow the use of
> poison gas by the bourgeois in putting down a revolution in its own
> country!
>
> As the worldwide crisis of imperialism limps forward and the struggle
> for survival, which becomes a struggle between the 99% and the 1%,
> intensifies, I'm afraid that we will see the kind of brutal and
> vicious defense of the realm that we are seeing in Syria, repeated in
> places all over the globe. And just as in Syria, the utility of
> something like sarin for ethnic cleansing or mass suppression is
> something a morbid system like ours will find very useful in spite of
> the taboo.
>
> While the Western powers may complain loudly about Assad's use of
> poisons, they have done nothing to deter him or anyone else. Instead,
> because he has promised to give up the chemical weapons he denied
> having, he is welcomed into a new partnership
> <http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/middle-east-north-africa/326963-kerry-faces-backlash-for-praising-syria-on-chemical-weapons>
> by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Organization for the
> Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is given the Noble Peace Prize
> <http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/world/2013/10/12/Syrian-opposition-unhappy-with-awarding-chemical-inpectors-Nobel-Prize-.html>
> for a year that has seen more chemical deaths than the last twenty
> years combined. Meanwhile, we have new reports
> <http://www.mojahedin.org/newsen/24550> of hundreds of tons of
> chemical & biological agents being transferred from Syria to Iran
> through an air-bridge, which, if true, means the whole CW disarmament
> agreement is a joke.
>
> I suspect that many in that top 1% are secretly happy to see Assad
> re-introduce chemical weapons into the arena of class warfare. And in
> a certain perverse way, he was the perfect man for the job, the way
> Nixon was the perfect US president to approach China. Assad has just
> enough support on the Left, and so much confusion has been sown around
> the Syria conflict, that those that might be expected to have a
> problem with the return of poison gas to class relations and rally the
> public to defend the hard won ban are missing-in-action.
>
> So let it here be noted that in the year 2013, poison gas was use by a
> government to suppress a revolutionary people for the first time in a
> quarter century. I fear it will be less than a quarter century before
> the next use and that it might become quite common as the struggle for
> the planet intensifies
>
> So I will not be silent about the use of poison gas in Syria and I
> will not excuse it and I think in the future the failure of the Left,
> the anti-war movement and the peace and justice movement to vigorously
> oppose this first new use will be like a badge of shame for this period.
>
> Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria
> <http://claysbeach.blogspot.com//2012/12/my-syria-diaries_1014.html>
>
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