Contributor & author: Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
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Preview:
- One may ask how to draw a red line between chemical agents that poison and burn and chemical agents that explode? The latter, called “conventional” weapons, kill by tearing people apart or setting fires. Is this a more humane death?
- Then there are the methods used by Assad’s enemies: burning children alive, running over them with a truck, crucifying them, or beheading them. And there are the true weapons of mass destruction: biological agents (which have a doubling time instead of a half life) and nuclear weapons.
- Chemical Weaponry is not the Demon that must be slain at any cost. It is one of a legion of horrors called War.
April 18th, 2017
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Syrian President Bashar al Assad is being read out of the human race, and the Trump Administration seems to have done a 180-degree turn on the necessity for “regime change” in Syria because Assad used horrible, horrible! weapons against civilians, including helpless little babies.
A journalist might ordinarily assert the word “allegedly” before the charges—if for no other reason that while no one thinks Assad is good, some might think he is not that stupid. But he has already been tried and convicted, by the media and the government. That’s the infallible tribunal that sequentially declared that Iraq had chemical weapons, then didn’t (might they have shipped them to Syria?), and that the Syrian regime had disposed of theirs, but now had used them to kill their own babies.
Chemical weapons seem to be in a class by themselves: the ultimately gruesome way to die. Their use crosses the final Red Line to a heinous crime against humanity, and is a violation of international law. Of course, we don’t always do much about it. More
