Two weeks ago today, just after President Obama made his surprising and very welcome decision to seek Congressional approach before launching strikes on Syria, I posted a very long analysis by William R. Polk of the stakes, opportunities, risks, and alternatives in dealing with Syria. Despite its length it was for many days our most frequently read item about the choices the Congress, the president, and the public faced.
Polk, who first wrote about Iraq for the Atlantic in the later 1950s, and who served on the State Department's Policy Planning staff during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, has just written another long analysis of the choices and contradictions ahead. Like the previous one, it is organized as a set of questions and answers. Also like the earlier installment, it is worth reading when you have time to go through it all.
A word on formatting: Polk wrote this with a large number of bottom-of-the-page reference notes, which provided source-details for or elaborated on points he was making. There's no easy way to reproduce the bottom-of-page effect on a website. So for now I have (with Polk's permission) omitted the notes that were strictly source references, and converted the major explanatory notes to end-of-paragraph bracketed* comments. Later I might be able to put up a list of his sources. Now over to William Polk. [* Like this.]
By William R. Polk
Reflections on the Syrian Chemical Weapons Issue and Beyond
Because so much of the information and comment in the media, particularly in America, is fragmentary, diffuse and even contradictory, I thought it might be useful to attempt to put together a more coherent account of how we interpret what we now know. Since most of the focus in government pronouncements and the media is on weapons and their use, I will here provide notes on (1) weapons’ variety, their characteristics, their cost and their availability; (2) a short history of chemical weapons; (3) the Russian intervention; (4) why the Syrians have accepted the Russian proposal; (5) the prospects for ridding the area of the weapons of mass destruction; (6) the possibility of ending the civil war; (7) who the Insurgents are and what they want; and (8) predictable results of a collapse of the Syrian state.
- The Variety of Weapons and Their Characteristics
Three sorts of weapons figure in the Syrian conflict: the first are “conventional” light and heavy weapons: rifles, machineguns, grenades and artillery.* They have done most of the killing in the civil war. Of an estimated 100,000 casualties, they have killed over 99 in each 100. Perhaps the best guess on who the casualties were comes from an Non-Governmental Organization based in London, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It finds that 21,850 rebels fighters, 27,654 regular army soldiers, 17,824 militia fighters and about 40,000 civilians have been killed as of September this year.
[*I leave aside land mines as they do not appear to have been used in the Syrian conflict. of them, the so-called improvised explosive device (IED) was first reported in use by Afghan tribesmen in the 19th century and is common in guerrilla warfare. A more sophisticated version was laid by the British and German armies during the Second World War Unlike other conventional weapons, it is “passive;” that is, it can “lie in wait” for a footfall for decades. . In North Africa alone it was believed to have killed about 20,000 people.]
So far unused but prominent in any political calculation are nuclear weapons which are known as weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So far they are possessed only by Israel with which country Syria is at war. The third category of weapons, also regarded as WMD are chemical weapons. They figure in the inventory of several states including both Syria and Israel. These weapons are made of various forms of gas (mustard, which causes severe burns, and the nerve gases, Sarin, VX and perhaps others).
Weapons of Mass destruction are characterized by several common features. The first is that there is no effective means of protection from them. At the top end, a nuclear weapon, delivered by rocket or jet airplane cannot be detected or reliably disabled before reaching its target. Some chemical weapons do not even have to be delivered: they can be carried (as they were in the First World War) by wind or allowed simply to escape where they are to take effect. Gas masks were fabricated to guard against them over a century ago, but they offer only limited protection. Some gas compounds, particularly Sarin, can contaminate clothing and remain lethal long after the person removes the mask. Against white phosphorous, a particularly horrible form of napalm*, there is no effective means of defense if the person is in the open. [*The American army used both napalm and white phosphorous extensively in Vietnam and Iraq. The photograph of a still burning young girl running down the road had the same effect on Americans in the 1960s and 1970s as the sight of gassed children in Syria this year, a feeling of revulsion. US Secretary of State John Kerry called it “obscene.”]
The second common feature of chemical weapons of mass destruction is that their impact is dramatic. Even threat of their use spreads terror not only among intended targets but among the population of wide areas. This feature is heightened by the fact that unintended victims usually have no warning. All weapons of mass destruction are horrible, but they vary widely in cost and effectiveness. Nuclear weapons are the most expensive and not only can kill all life in a given area but also leave behind contamination that can kill or maim those who survived the initial attack for decades or more. Even “lesser” nuclear weapons such as depleted uranium shell casing are believed to have resulted in greatly increased cases of cancer. So far as I have been able to find out, depleted uranium has not yet been used in Syria, but such shells are known to be in the inventory of some of the armies.
Chemical weapons have been described as “the poor nations’ weapons of mass destruction.” Gas can be manufactured relatively cheaply and in what are relatively speaking rudimentary laboratories. According to a Russian study, the only publically available investigation, gas has been used several times in the Syrian war, once, the Russians assert, by the rebels in or near Aleppo. We do not yet, as of this writing, have the official UN study of the gas attacks near Damascus. Indeed, we do not yet know precisely how many people were killed. The numbers are variously reported: by Médecins Sans Frontières (355), French intelligence (281), British Intelligence (350), the insurgent “Syrian National Coalition” (650) and the American government (1,429).
Mention of the relatively small number of Syrian casualties caused by gas is not to excuse its use; on the contrary, it is to question why Western statesmen did not regard the death of the nearly 100,000 killed by convention weapons a cause for action. But the gas issue at least gives us a place to start ridding the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction.
If chemical weapons are relatively unimportant in the Syrian Civil War, why did the Syrian Government manufacture and keep them? The answer, of course, is that they were not intended to be used in a civil war; rather, they were intended to deter an Israeli attack and to balance against Israel’s own inventory of nuclear and chemical weapons.* Like nuclear weapons, those states that still have poison gas regard it as a means of deterrence rather than offense. This, of course, was the position of the United States on poison gas. It is perhaps worth pausing on that point since the statements by American officials will have been considered by other nations in the light of American actions.
[*Although “undeclared,” Israel is known to have not only upwards of 400 nuclear weapons but a robust program of chemical and biological warfare manufacture and training. It is known to have imported chemicals used for Sarin nerve gas from the United States.]
[**This was not true until fairly recently. The British government considered using poison gas on German civilians during the Second World War and it was not until 15 years later that most states agreed to start destroying stocks of poison gas. ]
So a bit of history:
2 A Short History of Chemical Weapons
The only nation to use poison gas during the Second World War was Japan, but the United States and other Allied governments feared that the Nazi regime might opt to do so as its defeat neared. Germany indeed developed and manufactured Sarin and other particularly lethal agents. So the United States also began to develop and manufacture them. In 1943, it shipped mustard gas to Europe. The ship carrying the gas was bombed and sunk by the Luftwaffe in Bari on December 2. Some 62 merchant seamen were killed by the escaping gas. Then, after the war ended, the US Army began to experiment with captured German gas. To gage its effect, the Army exposed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. As I mentioned in a previous essay, when I was a member of the Policy Planning Council and was studying weapons in the Middle East, I was given a briefing on chemical weapons at Fort Meade. I was so revolted by the videos I was shown that I wrote President Kennedy arguing that we must end the program and give up chemical weapons. Nothing was done until November 1969 when President Nixon unilaterally renounced first use of them and ordered the destruction of the then huge US stockpile of some 31,500 tons. In 1975 the US adhered to the Geneva Protocol on chemical and biological weapons. Thereafter, it continued destroying weapons, but in 1986, President Reagan restarted Sarin gas production when he was advised that Soviet Union was moving toward gas warfare planning. Nine years later, under President Clinton, the US Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.
This Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997 remains the standard against which issues of potential gas warfare are to be judged. As of September 2013, 190 states had ratified the convention; Syria is not a party to the Convention while Israel and Myanmar (Burma) have signed but not ratified it.
Ratifying the Convention legally obligated the United States to complete the destruction of its stockpile within a decade. It did not do so and made use of an automatic extension of five years. The extension ran out in April 2012. Today, the United States is in violation of the treaty as it still has approximately 3,000 tons of Sarin, VX and Mustard Gas. Presumably it has been delayed by strategic, safety, environmental and fiscal considerations. The program will cost perhaps $35 billion.
Use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict has been a matter of much speculation and controversy. The mandate of the UN inspectors does not require or perhaps even allow them to answer the question of who employed chemical weapons last month, but possibly they will be allowed to answer that question indirectly. That is, if the gas was of “military grade,” then presumably the rebels would not have had access to it although one allegation is that they may have received the gas that was used from a foreign military source; if, on the other hand, the gas was “home made” -- and there have been several recent allegations of attempts to purchase from abroad* the raw materials from which Sarin is made -- then presumably it was not from the Syrian army depot. Thus, hopefully, at least some of the contention over who did what to whom may be resolved in the report of the UN inspectors. [*The latest I have seen is in The Los Angeles Times of September 13, 2013, Patrick J. McDonnell: “Syrian rebel groups sought sarin gas material, Turkish prosecutors say.” The suspected groups were Jabhat an-Nusra and Ahrar as-Sham.]
3 The Russian Intervention
Like the United States, Russia has a perceived national interest in the politics of the Middle East. The American interest is usually seen as having five components – access to energy on acceptable terms, protection of the forces it has committed to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons into hostile hands, prevention of the spread of terrorism against America or American targets and the protection of Israel.
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