Changing The Calculus

"A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus."
"We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people."
U.S. President Barack Obama

Unequivocal, to say the least. Yet there remains room for equivocation. The American Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel, while concurring finally that Syria had used chemical weapons, in "two instances", hedges his bets by qualifying that concurrence with the 'but', of "on a small scale". Doesn't count. What the president meant was use of chemical weapons in a major attack.

A few artillery shells fired off with a veneer of chemical weapons won't do the trick. It's a trickle effect. Sarin is nasty, to be certain. An odourless nerve agent, used variously as a gas or liquid. It poisons when people breathe it in, absorb it through skin or eyes, or take it internally through food or liquid. It can cause convulsions, paralysis, death.

Britain and France have stated that they now believe the Syrian regime has made use of chemical weapons in its battle-to-the-death with the revolutionaries. Israel and Qatar, not on mutually friendly terms, and nor neither friends with Syria have both, as U.S. Middle East 'allies', stated there is evidence that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons.

Israel, in fact, through its top intelligence official, announced it had photographic evidence of rebel fighters demonstrating the unusual symptoms  of foaming at the mouth, dilated pupils that would suggest they were exposed to sarin nerve gas. Britain and France informed the UN they believed sarin to have been used in populated areas. Soil samples confirm reports from refugees and rebels of chemical weapons attacks.

But these disparate reports have yielded too few victims to truly draw the United States into the fulfilment of its promise. It's waiting for a populated area in Syria to be blanketed seriously with sarin gas, the result of a full attack. Of course such an event would be catastrophic. And even then, the U.S. would not be bristling with the intent to intervene, one assumes; not after Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.

On the other hand there is the deterrence effect. Do nothing and it is seen as quiet assent; no reaction, no problem. But there is a problem; it can and may be construed as disinterest, indifference, and perhaps even an flaccid invitation to proceed. We can bet our britches that there are other influences carefully watching the situation unfold. The situation is instructive.

If a little bit of a chemical attack here and there impacting on people other than ourselves is the problem and it can be sloughed off, why not the kind of creep that will allow a teeny-weeny bit of an atomic blast targeting the city of a country that the UN is more interested in censuring than any other on the Globe, being shrugged off as truly unfortunate, but that's the way the world turns.

Of course nothing is ever simple.