Prepping the international community for U.S. military strikes on Syria, the Obama administration, through Secretary of State John Kerry, invoked moral terms: “The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity.” The British government raised the argument a level further today, claiming that “the legal basis for military action would be humanitarian intervention.”
And yet all signs point to an intervention narrowly focused on the Syrian military’s ability to deliver chemical weapons attacks. Nicholas Kristof sums up the rationale succinctly: “It would reinforce the international norm against weapons of mass destruction.”
There is a problem here. As Charli Carpenter points out, the kind of strikes under consideration appear aimed at the strategic goal of reinforcing deterrence against chemical weapons use rather than at strict third-party defense, as a traditional humanitarian intervention requires. She writes, “The question of whether intervention—at this time, in this way, for this reason—will protect civilians in Syria is a very different question than whether punishment for violating the chemical weapons taboo is warranted.”