Lt. Colonel Shane Reeves of the US Army remarks on the problems of justifying the legality of the Syrian missile strike, writing in Lawfare:
As Professor Deeks highlights, the United States may eventually attempt to shroud this moral justification in legality by arguing that the missile strikes were part of a humanitarian intervention to protect the Syrian people from Assad’s chemical weapons. Under this controversial use of force theory, moral legitimacy equates to legal justification for military action. Some have made efforts, most notably the United Kingdom following the Syrian use of chemical weapons in 2013, to outline conditions that trigger the right to intervene. However, these criteria are not widely accepted and decisions to use military force for humanitarian purposes remain subjective and inherently political.
The Russian involvement in the Ukraine is illustrative of this point. In March 2014 Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula, a recognized territory of the Ukraine, and occupied the region. Then-Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers condemned the act by stating the “intervention is without legal basis—indeed it violates Russia’s commitment to protect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of the Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, claimed the intervention, in large part, was for humanitarian purposes including to protect Russian-speaking minorities and to stop anti-Semitic violence.
While Putin’s justifications were easily dispelled, his response was that of a humanitarian interventionist. Here lies the problem with these types of moral-based use of force decisions: they are inherently subjective and, consequently, easily abused. For example, why is there an obligation to stop the use of chemical weapons in Syria but not to stop the daily atrocities committed in North Korean work camps? When does the moral responsibility that justified an intervention end? Why do certain states have a moral imperative to act while others do not? This lack of clarity empowers states to make these determinations unilaterally and results in divergent views on the appropriate use of force. Even more dangerously, this ambiguity allows a state with nationalistic goals to act with aggression under the pretext of a moral obligation.
While I have little expertise in these matters, I’d suggest the incidents up for debate are not members of the same category, as Colonel Reeves seems to think. Let’s use the North Korean example as the contrast to the Syrian gas attack. The former differs from the latter in that the latter poses a long term threat to the interests, citizens, and allies of the United States, unlike the former. I will agree that, if torture is happening in the North Korean camps, it’s an atrocity; but it’s an atrocity which, generally speaking, poses no threat to the United States.
Possession of a deadly weapon such as sarin, VX, or any others of that class, on the other hand, have the potential to inflict serious harm on United States citizens, or for that matter U.N. peacekeepers, if it were to be deployed by Syria – or by those who were to steal it from them – in any location.
I think we could justify the Syrian missile attack on the grounds that destroying this weapon – if in fact it had been specifically targeted – is a matter of collective self-defense, which is noted by Colonel Reeves as an accepted justification for just such a military action.
I think the intellectual error in this scenario is to focus on the concrete results of the activities, rather than the potential, worse-case results. Through the latter lens, it becomes clear that the North Korean activities, as self-destructive as they may be, are not in the same class as possessing one of the more foul weapons devised by mankind.
