Carol Malouf

On August 21, US President Barak Obama broke his deafening silence on Syria. Unannounced, he surprised the press corps during a White House briefing and said the following:
 
“A red line for us is when we start seeing chemical weapons moving around, or being utilized.” This, according to the president, would change his calculus on Syria.

The “red line” for President Obama, what worries his administration, was not the blatant and ongoing abuse of human rights, or the killing of innocent Syrian civilians, but the “moving of chemical weapons” that might end up in the hands of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. That is the “red line.”

One might easily assume that President Obama’s statement is a tough stance against the Syrian regime. In reality, sending troops to Syria to secure those weapons will only be to ensure Israel’s security, in an effort to capture the American-Jewish vote and maintain Israel’s backing. After all, it is an election year.

The Assad family calculus is this: dictators + weapons = staying in power. The Syrian regime buys its weapons from Russia and Iran with money stolen from average working-class citizens through endemic corruption. It is under the pretext of fighting the enemy, Israel, even though the Armistice Agreement of 1973 between Israel and its Syrian and Egyptian neighbors marked the end of the conventional Arab-Israeli wars.
 
The real enemy of the Syrian regime is its own population, making the use of Russia-supplied weapons locally legitimate. It served longtime President Hafez al-Assad well by consolidating his grip on power. In 1982, Assad senior, with the help of his notorious brother Rifaat, used such weapons to crush an Islamist revolt in the city of Hama, leaving 25,000 civilians dead, according to the Syrian Human Rights Committee.

Bashar al-Assad inherited the regime after his father’s death in 2000. Upon assuming office, the new president promised the Syrian people economic reform leading to prosperity and modernization. Over the past 12 years, Syria’s economic “modernization” came in the form of spending increases on military expenditures and upgrading its Russian military arsenal. For the Syrian people, modernization came in the form of executions by MiG fighter jets.

But as long as “chemical weapons” were not used to silence the Syrian people, obliterate their towns and kill their children, no “red line” was crossed, according to President Obama. Other weaponry, your average artillery, seems to fall off his administration’s radar as if the mere act of blowing up civilians does not cross a line, red or otherwise.
 
What if the Syrian regime never uses chemical weapons? What number of casualties would the US president deem a “red line,” then? At what point will this conflict stop being a “civil, internal war” and become a humanitarian catastrophe?
 
In 1994, the world watched while Rwandans slaughtered each other. Nearly one million people died, around 20 percent of Rwanda’s population. Rwandans never used chemical weapons. They did not even use bombs. Their weapons of choice were primitive machetes and AK47s. When the dust settled and the counting of bodies began, then-President Bill Clinton claimed not to have fully understood the severity of the situation. The United Nations, from its safe offices in New York City, passed a resolution, then another, and negotiated and observed without doing anything to stop the Rwandan genocide.

History remembers those who sit on the sidelines preaching negotiation, compromise and restraint, pretending not to fully understand the magnitude of a human calamity while people die. As long as Bashar al-Assad kills innocent civilians with conventional weapons, he remains within the confines of the “green line”—untouchable.
 
According to human rights organizations, about 500 days of fighting have already produced 25,000 Syrian deaths. How many more can Bashar al-Assad kill with chemical weapons? Would that make those men, women and children more worthy of American interference if they had died by a different weapon?
 
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was accused, prosecuted and hanged for bombing Kurds with chemical weapons during the last days of the Iraq-Iran war, almost 20 years earlier. About 5,000 people were killed, 10,000 were injured, and thousands died from complications and related diseases. While the Halabja Massacre remains the largest chemical weapon attack aimed at a civilian population in history, back in 1988 Saddam Hussein was fighting America's war against Khomeini. Chemical weapons were not considered a red line by then-US President Ronald Reagan. After all, it was an election year.

Irrespective of the death toll and the staggering number of refugees, the atrocities committed by the regime, according to president Obama only the use of chemical weapons warrant US military intervention. However, and indirectly, if they were fighting America’s war, maybe this administration would be willing to turn a blind eye on even that.
 
After all, it is an election year.