by Patrick Appel
Matt Steinglass thinks the “decisive factor” propelling America’s to intervene in Syria is “the rapid availability of mesmerisingly horrifying video imagery of the gas victims” (such as the video above):
In Iraq, video imagery of Saddam’s Kurdish gas victims ultimately came out, but it took years; there was no sense of urgency or an ongoing threat. Even so, the imagery of the massacres ultimately seeded a longstanding American sympathy for the Kurdish cause and remained the clearest indictment of Saddam as a mass murderer. The impact of such video images rests partly on the unique horror of poison gas in the Western imagination.
Waldman makes an important point about these images:
If you’ve watched the coverage of these events on television, you’ve no doubt heard the warnings from anchors: “The images we’re about to show you are disturbing.” And indeed they are, particularly the ones of children—a child being washed down in a dingy hospital while crying out in anguish, rows upon rows of dead children’s bodies, and so on. But it’s precisely because chemical weapons leave no visible injuries that these images can be shown. If the same number of children had been blown apart by bombs, you’d never see the pictures at all, because the editors would have considered them too gruesome to broadcast. And not having seen the images, we might be just a little less horrified.
Erik Voeten identifies one reason the taboo against chemical weapons exists:
Historically, chemical weapons have been heavily associated with poison; the quintessential weapon of the weak, which undermines proper battles for political power based on physical strength. This makes chemical weapons usage easy to associate with cowardice.
Earlier Dish on chemical weapons here.
The Dish 