The United States' president, Barack Obama, has said that he is ready to attack Syrian military targets, and he has sought authorisation from the US Congress for it. This comes after a United Nations report stated that there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that chemical weapons had been used in at least four attacks in the civil war in that country. The Syrian government has the world's third-largest stockpile of chemical weapons and is one of only five states that have refused to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the use of chemical weapons in combat. Mr Obama had previously drawn "a red line" at the use of chemical weapons. In this, he has the support of his French counterpart, Francois Hollande, and British Prime Minister David Cameron, but not of the majority of public opinion in any of the three countries. Britain's House of Commons, too, did not endorse the government's proposal after an extensive and well-informed debate.
The proposed missile strikes face major problems. The locations of the government's chemical weapons are difficult to trace. In any case, destroying that arsenal may have limited outcome on the scale of violence in Syria - the removal of President Bashar al-Assad is not on the US' agenda and would require far greater engagement than Messrs Obama and Hollande are likely to desire. Continuing Russian and Chinese support makes the regime even more intransigent; proxy champions of sectarian groups, the Saudis for the Sunni population and the Iranians for the Shia elite, will only add to the violence. The consequences of American involvement are, thus, deeply uncertain; the US Congress will have to weigh whether the result is worth the loss of credibility on preventing the use of chemical weapons or not.
Syria has suffered a grave human tragedy even before the alleged chemical attacks. In the two years that this war has raged, an estimated 100,000 people have died. Mr Assad has let loose on his own people violence in a manner that reminds a tired world of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Somalia and, most recently, Libya. Ideologies or political differences have seldom been the causes of such strife in the past two decades; ethnic-religious divisions have fuelled them in most instances. Nor is the Syrian Opposition better; they have been implicated in major human rights violations. In any case, they are amorphous and leaderless if Mr Assad is removed; the succession is not clear; and Syria might descend into worse chaos - a choice between atrocity and anarchy. Recent history shows that successor regimes to the ousted autocrats have had stormy and somewhat unstable passages. Ten years after Saddam Hussein, Iraq is still rocked by sectarian violence. Post-Gaddafi Libya is not quite at peace either. The question is whether even well-intended external intervention will add fuel to the fire, hurting most those who have already suffered considerably. That, too, must weigh on the collective conscience of the enforcers of the trans-national ethics of war.
