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Syrian Views on Obama's Red Line: The Ethical Case for Strikes against Assad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2020

Wendy Pearlman
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Abstract

Much ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of U.S. president Barack Obama's decision not to strike the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after that regime launched a deadly chemical weapons attack in 2013. Often missing from those debates, however, are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. While not all Syrians oppose Assad, and not all opponents endorsed intervention, many Syrian oppositionists resolutely called for Obama to uphold his “red line” militarily. As part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay analyzes diverse expressions of such opinion and finds that they highlight three dimensions of the ethical case for limited strikes against Assad. First, they remind us that the ethical context of the red line question was many Syrians’ sense of abandonment by the international community. Second, they emphasize the ethical stakes of the limited strikes; namely an opportunity to hold the Syrian regime accountable, weaken it from within, and thus change the equation of the war. Third, they make sense of the ethical consequences of the nonintervention outcome, and especially its effect in deepening civilians’ despair, accelerating extremism, and convincing Assad and his allies that they could kill with impunity. These views controvert both legalistic arguments precluding military intervention and assumptions that U.S. intervention is always imperialist and warmongering. In this case, consideration of the case for military intervention from the viewpoint of those on whose behalf the intervention would have taken place challenges us to think deeply about circumstances in which limited strikes might be not only ethically justified but also imperative.

Keywords

Syriachemical weaponsmilitary interventionhumanitarian interventionlimited strikesBarack ObamaBashar al-AssadRussiaMiddle Eastred line
Type
Roundtable: The Ethics of Limited Strikes
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 189 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

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2 Nina Burleigh, “Obama vs. the Hawks: Critics Have Branded Him Weak and Feckless on Foreign Policy, but an Inside Look Reveals How the President Faced Down the War Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 1, 2014, www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/obama-vs-the-hawks-98415/.

3 Barack Obama, quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine: The U.S. President Talks through the Hardest Decisions about America's Role in the World,” Atlantic, April 2013, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/#2.

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8 See Alison Tahmizian Meuse, “Social Media Buzz: Chemical Attack Echoes on Facebook,” Syria Deeply, August 27, 2013, www.newsdeeply.com/syria/articles/2013/08/27/social-media-buzz-chemical-attack-echoes-on-facebook; and Abdallah al-Hallaq, “United by the Revolution, Syrian Intellectuals Have Different Views regarding US Strike,” Syria Untold, September 11, 2013, syriauntold.com/2013/09/11/united-by-the-revolution-syrian-intellectuals-have-different-views-regarding-us-strike/.

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10 For more information, see Pearlman, Wendy, “Narratives of Fear in Syria,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (March 2016), pp. 21–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/narratives-of-fear-in-syria/4ABF48BEE7D4796DD1EA4554D55A2566; as well as its online methods appendix, Pearlman, Wendy, “Online Appendix for ‘Narratives of Fear in Syria,’” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (March 2016), pp. 1-17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Available at the same link under “Supplementary Materials.” www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/narratives-of-fear-in-syria/4ABF48BEE7D4796DD1EA4554D55A2566#fndtn-supplementary-materials.

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21 Interview by author, Irbid, Jordan, October 11, 2012. Interviews were conducted confidentially, and the author has withheld the names of the interviewees.

22 Interview by author, Irbid, Jordan, August 14, 2013.

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30 Mohammed al-Khatieb and Alison Tahmizian Meuse, “Syria Rebels Say Hit Hard, or Not at All,” Syria Deeply, September 2, 2013, www.newsdeeply.com/syria/articles/2013/09/02/syria-rebels-say-hit-hard-or-not-at-all.

31 Chulov and Mahmood, “Syria's Elite Join Compatriots.”

32 Michel Kilo, “Michel Kilo: The U.S. Is Now Obliged to Strike,” interview by Syria Deeply, ed. Lara Setrakian, August 30, 2013, www.newsdeeply.com/syria/articles/2013/08/30/michel-kilo-the-u-s-is-now-obliged-to-strike.

33 Local Coordination Committees, “LCC-Statement regarding a Possible Military Strike,” Adopt a Revolution, September 2, 2013, adoptrevolution.org/en/lcc-statement-regarding-a-possible-military-strike/.

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51 See, for example, O'Connell, Mary Ellen, “The Popular but Unlawful Armed Reprisal,” Ohio Northern University Law Review 44, no. 2 (2019)Google Scholar, digitalcommons.onu.edu/onu_law_review/vol44/iss2/5.