But it would be the first time we’ve done so to enforce an international treaty which itself specifies the enforcement mechanism. To be sure, this would not be the first time we’ve elided that nicety of the UN Charter, which happens to be not only international law but, as a treaty ratified by the Senate, U.S. The problem with invoking international law here is that, while Assad has likely violated it, so would our enforcement of it through military force without authorization from the United Nations Security Council. The president correctly observed that, “When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory” and proclaimed, “The question now is what the United States of America and the international community is prepared to do about it, because what happened to those people, to those children, is not only a violation of international law, it’s also a danger to our security.” The difference is that we prioritize minimizing civilian casualties and Assad does not. Obama explained America must go to war over a thousand dead-after limiting ourselves to “humanitarian support” as 99,000 others were killed over more than two years-because “the civilized world has spent a century working to ban” chemical weapons and that their use is “a crime against humanity and a violation of the laws of war.” The president noted that they can “kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant,” which hardly distinguishes them from other weapons that Assad has used and that, indeed, the United States routinely employs. In a speech to the nation, President Obama warned that if the United States does not launch a punitive strike against Syria, Iran will pursue nuclear weapons, Al Qaeda will try to kill Americans, and bad men will do bad things.ĭespite “a brutal civil war” in which more than “a hundred thousand have been killed” and “millions have fled the country,” the president “resisted calls for military action because we cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Alas, the “situation profoundly changed” three weeks earlier when “Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people, including hundreds of children.”
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