I don't really have a formed opinion on this yet. I certainly understand the arguments against doing this and am very troubled by the loss of life this can cause. My question though is, should there be an international ban on chemical warfare? If so, how else would it be enforced in cases like this other than a strike?
I ask that honestly because I am genuinely interested.
There is an international Chemical Weapons Convention which entered into force in 1997 and has been ratified by every country except Egypt, Israel, South Sudan, Palestine, and North Korea. (FTR, Israel
has signed the treaty). Syria has both signed and ratified the convention.
The treaty is "administered" by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which can be thought of as a chemical weapons equivalent of the IAEA.
Syria is further legally compelled to eliminate its chemical stockpile by UNSC Resolution 2118, which all members of the UNSC voted for. This was supposed to be the "no-strike" option, and appeared to work for a while. The fact that it didn't work is pretty much what left us with the option of "missile strike or ignore."
Theoretically, if we wanted to "enforce" these resolutions, it would come down to the UNSC passing a resolution similar to UNSC Resolution 1973, which paved the way for NATO intervention in Libya. However, Russia would be extremely opposed to such a resolution, leading to the question of "at what point do we just ignore Russia and go in to save people's lives?"
If Russia were on board with foreign intervention, but we
didn't want a missile strike, the only course of action left would be some sort of UN-administration of
all Syrian missile sites, seeing as Russian oversight of weapons dismantlement evidently didn't work - fat chance of that happening
