On 14 April 2018, the United States, the United Kingdom and France launched a series of joint military strikes against three sites in Syria that were involved in the storage or testing of chemical weapons. It is said to be a response to the chemical attack in Douma on 9 April, which was ascribed to the Syrian government under Bashar Al-Assad. The allied forces claim that the Douma attack represented ‘a significant escalation in a pattern of chemical weapon use’(Donald Trump) and that the intervention was urgent, humanitarian, proportionate and without alternatives. Syria and Russia, however, insist that the Syrian government did not carry out the aforementioned chemical attack, and that without authorisation from the United Nations Security Council, the action violated international law. Overall, the military action is legitimate in that it is able to be defended with logic or justification, but lacks legality due to its breach of international law.
The leaders of the US, the UK and France have all argued for the strikes on humanitarian grounds. The President of the Untied States, Donald Trump, has emphasised that ‘Assad launched a savage chemical weapons attack against his innocent people’, and that ‘the purpose of our actions tonight is to establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread, and use of chemical weapons’. The French President Emmanuel Macron also said that the chemical attack posed an ‘immediate danger for the Syrian people and our collective security’. The atrocious chemical attack killed at least 70 people and affected nearly a thousand, disobeying the Security Council resolution 2118 that led to the supposed destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons in 2014 and breaking the Chemical Weapons Convention that it acceded to in 2013. Therefore, a narrow and focused response that destroys Syria’s capability of continuing its blatant violation of international law is, according to the United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, ‘justified, legitimate and proportionate’. The international law should not be violated without consequences.
However, it is doubtful whether the western powers are genuinely upholding international order, since they have witnessed other violations, including the annexation of Crimea by Russia, without intervening. The British House of Lords Labour Peer Andrew Adonis has argued that western countries have more moral duties to the dispossessed, and yet the Prime Minister, Theresa May, did not propose to ‘take our fair share of Syrian refugees’ in the press conference. Moreover, despite their brutality, chemical weapons were not the chief contributors to the bloodshed that has been going on for years in Syria, and limited strikes are unlikely to end the violence. Just as military intervention resulted in the continued weakness of governance and instability in Iraq, this time it could aggravate the situation in Syria.
More importantly, from a Syrian perspective, the military intervention itself violates international law. The Charter of the United Nations strictly prohibits military action in retaliation or reprisal to the act of another state, with only three exceptions – self-defence, authorisation by the United Nations Security Council and the consent of the territorial state concerned. Although, as the Washington Post reported in February, ‘Syrian government has repeatedly threatened to use force to ensure the departure of U.S. troops from Syria’, the Syrian threat to U.S. forces is not a direct threat to its national security, does not justify the strikes and even renders them disproportionate.
The three countries may say that, with Russia among the Permanent Five, a resolution authorising the strikes will always be vetoed. However, the prevention of war is one of the core goals of the United Nations, and the P5 was built exactly to avoid conflicts and wars between the great powers. In addition, if a convention for military intervention is established, countries including Russia and China that do not share western concepts of legitimacy can claim their own ‘legitimacy’ and destroy the rule-based international community. Nevertheless, the use of chemical weapons causes, according to the British government, ‘extreme humanitarian distress on a large scale, requiring immediate and urgent relief’. Doctrine of responsibility to protect (R2P) was applied in rescuing the Kurds of north Iraq and the Marsh Arabs in south Iraq, remaining unopposed in cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Although the doctrine of forcible humanitarian action was narrowed down after 1999, it still proves that there is ‘no practical alternative to the use of force if lives are to be saved’. As long as the strikes are ‘strong enough to deter but weak enough not to provoke the Russians’, they are in accordance with the core values of the United Nations.
Another argument presented by Russia is that the Syrian government was not responsible for the chemical attack. The strikes were launched hours before the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were able to investigate the chemical attack, which means there was no independent source that confirmed the Syrian government’s responsibility. Russia believes that the video reporting the attack was staged by members of the White Helmets, and even an experienced war reporter, Robert Fisk, concluded that the attack never happened. The intelligence failure that aggravated the Iraq War also makes the chemical attack report less convincing. However, if the attack was fabricated by the west, the Russian resistance that the OPCW met when they attempted to enter the sites can not be explained. There is no obvious reason for America, the UK and France to launch limited strikes without convincing evidence of high level intelligence.
Yet from a western point of view and a more realist perspective, Russia has threatened the west by poisoning the double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018. It showed flagrant disrespect for Britain’s sovereignty, and the west needs to respond when such a sign of increasing power occurs, though indirectly. Furthermore, when the global balance of power is shifting, it is in the European countries’ interest to demonstrate to Russia and potentially China that Donald Trump is on their side, despite Russian interference in the 2016 American election that assisted him. However, on the US side, the American President does not have coherent foreign policies with regard to Syria, as he tweeted his wish to withdraw American troops from Syria a month ago. It is very likely that Donald Trump, who later tweeted joyfully ‘mission accomplished!’, was acting out of impulse instead of reason.
In conclusion, the joint military intervention in Syria theoretically violated the international law and was not absolutely legal. There is a small possibility that the chemical attack never happened. Yet it was a legitimate response to the extreme humanitarian distress in Syria, since it was impossible for the P5 to authorise the action, and that the lives of innocent civilians as well as the rule-based international community need to be protected.
Dolores Xu 