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Sign Here, Syria (and Israel, and Egypt)

Posted September 9th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

In the whole debate on whether to deploy a missile strike against Syria for the use of sarin gas, my mind has been (appropriately?) like the many-handed Hindu goddess of darkness and death, Kali.

— On the one hand, what exactly would a US missile strike achieve, especially since President Obama has so carefully described it as limited in scope and intent?

— But then am I really so callous as to say we should not move when chemical weapons are deployed, especially against sleeping civilians?

— Then again, the level of the debate has sickened me (all the talk about maintaining America’s credibility, for example, as though that were more important that what’s actually happening in Syria — or the talk about how we can’t let Assad “get away with it,” as though he were merely a schoolboy who’d broken the rules).

— But does that really mean we just sit back and do nothing?

— Though that’s exactly what we’ve been doing as an average of 5,000 Syrians have been killed each month.

— But is military action really the only option?

—  And isn’t the idea of a surgical strike another of those military oxymorons created for armchair warriors thrilling to missile-mounted cameras as though war were a video game?

—  And shouldn’t the US have intervened to prevent chemical weapons being used, instead of as a gesture of disapproval after their use?

All this, and I haven’t even gotten to the question of who would actually gain from such a strike.  And without even mentioning Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and…

Kali needs more than eight hands.

But today’s diplomatic developments seem to me immensely hopeful.

All I know at this moment is what you do:  Russia has publicly proposed that Syria give up its stockpiles of chemical weapons.  And since Russia has so openly supported the Assad regime (and been a major supplier of the ingredients for those weapons), and since Assad has so publicly claimed his regime did not use chemical weapons (all evidence to the contrary), the demand that he give them up to avoid a US-led missile strike may be an excellent example of his bluff being expertly called.

So I have a modest proposal that might sweeten the deal — for all of the Middle East.  It’s as follows:

Seven countries have held out on the international treaty against the use and manufacture of chemical weapons, aka the Chemical Weapons Convention.  Those countries are Syria, Israel, Egypt, Angola, Myanmar, South Sudan, and North Korea.  (Two of these — Israel and Myanmar — have signed, but so far, have not yet ratified it.)

So if we’re really serious about banning chemical weapons, and if we’re really serious about the search for some nascent form of Middle East peace (two big ‘ifs,’ but bear with me), we should demand not only that Syria give up its chemical weapons and sign and ratify the treaty, but that at least Israel and Egypt both step up to the plate too.

We should seize the moment and say “Sign here, Mssrs Assad, Netanyahu, and Sisi.”

And we should do it right now.  Before we forget about chemical weapons until the next time they’re used.  Before we leave Assad to keep killing Syrians with conventional weapons.  And before the American public again retreats into its normal state of apathy about anything that happens in countries where the majority are not apple-pie white and Christian.

At least let something good come out of all this horror.

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File under: Middle East, US politics, war | Tagged: Tags: chemical weapons, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Syria, treaty, United States | 6 Comments
  1. Irene says:
    September 9, 2013 at 11:15 pm

    Thanks Lesley!!!!! This is the best I have read and heard on this topic so far. I am with you. Completely.

  2. Dora Hasen says:
    September 9, 2013 at 11:26 pm

    By jove, I think you have got it! The time is definitely now and I appreciate your truthful comment about American public.

  3. nuzhat fakih says:
    September 10, 2013 at 12:01 am

    how TRUE Lesley……on every word said here….oh, what a disgruntled feel it is, to be a helpless observer to this insolent crime being flaunted for the rest of humanity to see…..misguidedly in the name of religion or politics or power.
    Our hearts and prayers remain with each innocent sufferer of this holocaust.
    had been waiting for your comment on this issue from you, and was expectedly rewarded with these enlightened views.

    Nuzhat.

  4. Chad says:
    September 10, 2013 at 4:31 am

    Me Like!

  5. Lesley Hazleton says:
    September 11, 2013 at 10:37 am

    But how? Per today’s NYT, finding let alone destroying Syria’s chemical arsenal may be all but impossible:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/world/middleeast/Syria-Chemical-Disarmament.html?hp

  6. Adil Rasheed says:
    September 19, 2013 at 7:00 am

    Lezley, I would like to bring to your kind attention that it is not only Sisi, Netanyahu and Assad who need to sign and ratify the treaty but even the US and Russia should be told to observe the CWC which required them to destroy their stockpile of chemical weapons before a final deadline required by the CWC, which elapsed in April 2012. So much for those who like drawing red lines.

To the Slaughter

Posted June 28th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

En route to Afghanistan.   I wish I could run this photo larger (left click to enlarge it slightly).   It’s heart-breaking.   Those tight rows of American soldiers in full gear, dwarfed by the cathedral-like ceiling of the plane.    The accompanying report said that some in this battalion are fresh out of basic training, others starting their fifth combat tour in nine years.    I stared at it for a long while, trying to pick out a particular face, to give individual identity to at least a few of these young men and women.    But I couldn’t even tell who was male and who female.  All identity is gone.    What remains is the tension — the awareness in their bodies that at least some of them are flying toward their death.    That, and the overwhelming sense of waste.

(Photo:  Damon Winter, New York Times.)

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File under: Middle East, war | Tagged: Tags: Afghanistan, deployment, soldiers, United States | 2 Comments
  1. Charlotte Gerlings says:
    June 28, 2010 at 2:29 pm

    A worse picture is the type they don’t publish for public consumption – a similar carrier filled with flag-draped coffins on their way home. Here in England dead servicemen and women are flown back to the RAF base at Lyneham in Wiltshire. No one organised the ritual, but a small market town called Wootton Bassett regularly comes to a halt while people line the main street to pay their respects as the sad trail of hearses passes through on their way from Lyneham to the coroner in Oxford. It is a sobering and heartrending sight and can reduce you to tears even to watch on TV. I think that sense of waste you speak of is overwhelming because we also know the process is never-ending. Iraq, Afghanistan – they’re just the latest on a grim list – and sometimes the battle sites are revisited through history. Remember the Forbury Lion, Lesley, in our old home town? A massive cast iron lion that commemorates men of a Berkshire regiment killed in Afghanistan 130 years ago! And only last month in a country church in Suffolk, in East Anglia, I saw a plaque to a soldier killed in Baluchistan – in 1920. But there’s one point I wanted to make – as the daughter of a serviceman who was posted away for most of my childhood – the uniform that reduces their identity in civilian eyes actually binds them closer to one another. It’s all part of the way they can bring themselves to go abroad and take the risks if our governments order them to. To the slaughter? Well, it’s obviously a dreadful possibility but I think too we should care far more for the survivors – there’s more than one way to waste a life.
    PS Congratulations, a great forum you’ve got going here.
    PPS I have to thank the RAF for my first flight, aged six, in a tinny old Dakota with moulded metal seats set sideways – no, I was never inspired to get a pilot’s licence!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 28, 2010 at 6:42 pm

      Hi Charlotte and thanks so much for the thoughtfulness of your comment. Yes, I’ve heard about what’s happening at Wootton Bassett, and you’re right, it’s absolutely remarkable, all the more since it’s spontaneous, done out of a deep sense of respect and not out of any political motive. And yet… if it were not for politics, the trail of hearses would not be moving with that horrible regularity through the small market town. I’m very much with those who say “Support our military — bring them home.” Alive, that is. To die for someone else’s political ambitions and inability to say they were wrong, to die because the military offers you a paycheck you would not otherwise find and educational opportunities you could not otherwise afford, as in the US, to die simply because, as in Vietnam, your very presence makes you a target that would otherwise not exist — all this, it seems to me, is the stuff of real tragedy. That’s what got to me about this photo — the awareness of the living. Every person on this plane knows that among them, some will make the return flight in coffins. Perhaps the person to their left. Or the one to their right. Or the one in the middle…

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