Bloomberg View: Chemical Weapons Alter the Calculus on Syria

No one can say that President Obama took a straight path to his decision on how America ought to respond to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. There will be time to address the kinks in the road, including the side-of-the-highway abandonment of two cabinet secretaries. What the moment demands is a return to first principles: With the deployment of chemical weapons on Aug. 21 against its own people, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad crossed a line that demands a response. With his decision to secure the approval of Congress before ordering a limited strike on Syria, Obama is making that case to the American people and the world.

After more than 100,000 Syrian deaths, why should the U.S. suddenly feel compelled to respond to 1,429 casualties from a chemical weapons attack? “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs” of a victim of a gas attack in World War I, in the words of the great English poet Wilfred Owen, you’d know the answer. Chemical weapons are different from bullets and bombs. Indiscriminate tools of terror, they cause horrific, painful, and often lingering deaths, particularly in the case of modern nerve gases such as sarin and VX. If U.S. figures turn out to be correct, the death toll in Ghouta on Aug. 21 was higher by a factor of about 10 than a bad day of casualties from conventional weapons during this conflict, and a distressing proportion of the dead were children. Once delivered, these munitions are at the whim of the wind and can pose an environmental hazard for decades.