Will Syria Redefine the Just War?

Will Syria Redefine the Just War?

"... 3. Very likely it is for this reason that President Obama redefined the goals of his threatened Syria strikes. Although his moral case is still fundamentally humanitarian, the stated purpose of the threatened strikes is not saving lives but upholding and reinforcing the world-wide norm against chemical weapons. Ironically, a unilateral U.S. threat to use force—plainly illegal under the UN Charter—is now justified as law enforcement. (Neither the U.S. nor Russia have mentioned another, lesser, irony: both countries missed the April 2012 deadline for destroying their own chemical weapons, and the U.S. Army has announced that it will not complete the job until 2023. As my colleague David Koplow has shown, both countries are at least technically in breach of the very treaty they have forced Syria to join.)..."