America has a responsibility to respond to Assad’s chemical attacks, the author writes. | REUTERS The progressive case for Syria action

I hate the notion that there are “norms” of war.

But the appalling, senseless use of chemical weapons to slaughter civilians must not be tolerated — not by Americans and not by the international community. It was one of the great international progressive victories of the 20th century to prohibit the use of chemical weapons, and this fragile compact becomes meaningless if left unenforced.


Bashar Assad is evil. I don’t need U.N. inspectors to tell me that he has made the brutal calculation that he will slaughter his own people as much as the international community will allow. America doesn’t need even more evidence to see that as bullets and bombs and rape and torture did not achieve his desired outcome, he turned to nerve gas to massacre hundreds of children of his own nation.

Yes, there are important questions about if and how we should intercede, and progressives around the world are asking them. In Britain, a disastrous war fought on a faulty premise cast a long shadow over the debate and ultimately, champions of the left, like Ed Miliband, won the argument against intervention in Syria.

But we must take care not to draw the wrong conclusions from the mistakes of Iraq. I get, as my friend Paul Begala reminded me, that Mark Twain said, “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove, either.”

Syria is not Iraq, and Barack Obama is not George W. Bush. President Obama, the military he commands, and a new generation of Americans who lost loved ones in Iraq live with the consequences of that war every single day.

The president was right on Iraq — to oppose it and then to end it when elected. He was right on Afghanistan — to put a sensible strategy behind it and then to wind it down. He was right on Osama bin Laden — and the whole world is safer for it. For Americans, Iraq isn’t the reason to oppose military action, it is the reason to know that our commander in chief still has the same judgment that put him in office.

We have another lesson of history too, again in Iraq. In 1983, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran. And according to recent reporting, the United States knew, but did nothing. Five years later, Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people — slaughtering Iraqi men, women and children.

If we do nothing in Syria, it is not a question of if chemical weapons will be used again, it is a question of when.

The goal of a targeted bombing campaign does not have to be to turn the tide of this war. It doesn’t have to be the toppling of Assad. It should be as straightforward as what the president laid out in his Rose Garden address this weekend: We must “hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior and degrade their capacity to carry it out.”

Enforcing the ban on the use of chemical weapons is something that progressives should stand behind. It’s something our intellectual forebears fought for — because it was something that mattered a century ago, and matters still today.

I know this is a political debate. No decision before Congress is that detached from what voters are thinking. That’s politics.

But members of the House and Senate have the privilege and responsibility of representing voters who hope they will do the right thing — even if it isn’t always politically popular.

Telling the world that the United States will not stand for the use of chemical weapons — especially against children — is a good place to find one’s self on the arc of human history, regardless of the polling.

I stopped myself from looking at the pictures of those murdered children in Syria for more than a week after the attack. I’ve got this perfect 2-year-old son, and now I feel differently about crimes against children than I did before he was born.

When I did finally look, some of the images were even more gruesome and heartbreaking and profoundly tragic than I could have imagined. But some of them — like the photo that ran on the cover of The Guardian — were shockingly serene.

I was immediately reminded of what naptime looks like at my boy’s nursery school.

The children don’t have visible injuries. They’re passive, lying in a jumble on the ground without expression — just like my little guy does every day right after he eats his lunch, in a roomful of his classmates.

One tragic difference, of course, is that after the violent and painful death they experienced, those Syrian kids will never wake up from that sleep — happy or grumpy, active or snuggly, sprinting without a care in the world. Those perfect sons and daughters of Syria that were stolen in a crime against our humanity will never wake up to anything.

If being a progressive means anything, it means standing up against the abuse of the powerless by the forces of the powerful. It’s what Bobby Kennedy stood for. It’s what defined every day of Paul Wellstone’s life in service — including the day he supported air strikes in Kosovo. It’s what President Obama is standing for when says that in this time, on our watch, we will not tolerate the slaughter of innocents. We will not stand for the indiscriminate murder of men, women and the smallest citizens of our world with the worst weapons ever conceived.

The case for action isn’t just that Assad is evil, nor is it just that he targets his own people. It’s that chemical weapons are different. We have a duty to punish him for their use and if we fail to, more innocents will pay this same terrible price.

America has a responsibility to respond to Assad’s chemical attacks. For progressives, that fight is our fight.

Bill Burton is executive vice president and managing director at Global Strategy Group. He was deputy press secretary in the White House and co-founder and senior strategist of the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA Action.

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