Are chemical weapons really “different”?

President Obama has repeatedly said that if the Syrian government used chemical weapons it would cross a “red line” and there would be consequences. It is pretty certain they now have, and so now the president is boxed in to doing something in Syria or appearing to have just bluffed, with significant consequences for other situations in places like North Korea and Iran.  So the president, perhaps in cooperation with some allies, will no doubt make some sort of symbolic (but probably largely ineffective)  military strike in Syria.

But one has to ask if chemical weapons really are any different than other kinds of weapons. People are just as dead from bullets or machetes or shrapnel or bombs as they are from chemical attacks. What, really, is so different about chemical weapons in the end?

This is a repeat of the phobia about nuclear weapons, which in fact killed less people in World War II than firebombing.

In fact, both nuclear weapons and chemical weapons are really just terror weapons, not particularly effective battlefield weapons.  In the case of nuclear weapons, there is a tremendous amount of energy released, but it is too concentrated. On the battlefield it would only be useful if the enemy conveniently massed all their troops and tanks and artillery into a small area.  It might, for example, conceivably have been useful if the Soviet Army had ever invaded Germany through the Fulda Gap, thereby concentrating its forces into a very small area.  And it might conceivably be useful against an aircraft carrier group.  But otherwise it is just a terror weapon against civilians in cities.  

Chemical weapons are also of questionable use in the battlefield. Yes, it hampers the enemy, who have to wear cumbersome protective gear, but then so do the approaching friendly forces, since the winds can carry the gases or aerosols back into one’s own lines as well.  Again, chemical weapons are really just terror weapons, not particularly effective battlefield weapons.

The real concern is that rebel forces will get their hands on Syria’s stock of chemical weapons and they will pass into the hands of terrorists who might well like to use them against civilians in cities.  That concern has been there all along, not just now. And if President Obama really wants to deal with that threat he will have to send troops in (up to 60,000 troops by one general’s reckoning) to capture and remove those stocks before the rebels get them.  He doesn’t seem prepared to do that.

It is true that there are no good choices for the administration in the Syrian situation, just bad and worse choices.  But just staying out of the whole mess may well be the best of the bad choices, despite the ongoing slaughter.  The only effective way for us to stop the slaughter would be a full-scale invasion, giving us another Iraq.  We can do without that!.