SYRIA thread

[Montmorency]

Rules of war forbade targeting population centers. POW mistreatment. Mass murders. Concentration camps. Atomic bombs...

It's not specifically about chemical weapons, which were not used because there was no pressing need to use them, you could achieve terror effects with other weapons, which were easier to use, mass produce, transport and handle.

Difficult point I've encountered (more so in context but you the inferences are available): Conventional weapons without much strain could be defined as "chemical" weapons.

Categories such as "chemical," "conventional," and "weapons of mass destruction," in short, are not natural but are the products of politics.

Book, mostly locked behind Google Books, apparently seeks to make a case against the limitations of "deductive" (e.g. utilitarian, instrumentalist, or pragmatic) and "essential" (argued from essential characteristics or distinctions) theories in why chemical weapons are treated and regarded as they are, and so takes a constructivist/Foucauldian approach.

"The Argument" is unwalled on Google Books version, pp. 11-13.

Book was published before Syrian War, but to extend what it seems like its core argument might be, Assad's use and Russia's defense of Assad's use of chemical weapons is in large part a symbolic assault on his adversaries both at home and abroad. This would certainly be in keeping with Russia's ongoing attempts to undermine and reorganize the international system in its favor.

EDIT: To elaborate, an assault on the international hierarchy of arbiters of chemical weapons and their 'curators', especially the United States, who gets to stockpile them while claiming its non-use as a moral high ground in forming its identity and rhetoric. Which obviously has implications beyond chemical weapons.

EDIT 2: I was wrong, the US has nearly eliminated its CW stockpiles and Nixon (!) pioneered their disposal with first-use renunciation. Though in light of his bombing campaigns, perhaps this lends credence to the constructivist theory.

(Although that interpretation kind of circuitously reinforces the 'mixed' appreciation of CW as straightforwardly "weapons of terror" rather than of war. But then on the other^2 hand, why do we need to think of a "weapon of war" in a strictly operational and bodily-destructive way?)


Also, laterally Nietzsche complicating a concept like Chesterton's Fence:

For every kind of historiography there is no more important proposition than this, which has been discovered with so much effort, but now also ought to be discovered once and for all: the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual usefulness, its actual employment and incorporation into a system of aims, lies worlds apart; whatever exists having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed and redirected by some power superior to it... and the entire history of a 'thing,' an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations, whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in purely chance fashion. The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ is thus by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force—but the succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. The form is fluid, but the "meaning" is even more so.