The Trump administration accuses the Syrian government of using chemical weapons, and claims this is a rare occurrence from a rogue government.
Not only did Sean Spicer say that Hitler never used chemical weapons, but Secretary of Defense Mattis said:
Even in World War II chemical weapons were not used on battlefields. Even in World War II, chemical weapons were not used on battlefields. Even in the Korean War, they were not used on battlefields.
***
Since World War I there’s been an international convention on this.
But U.S. used chemical weapons against civilians in Iraq in 2004. Evidence here, here, here, here, here, here. The use of those weapons greatly increased the rate of birth defects.
The U.S. armed and supported Iraq after it invaded Iran and engaged in a long, bloody war which included the use of chemical weapons. The U.S. provided chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein to use against Iran.
Here is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam in the 1980’s, several months after Saddam had used chemical weapons in a massacre:
Moreover, the U.S. and Britain have been dropping depleted uranium in virtually every country they fight, which causes severe health problems. See this, this, this and this.
University of California at Irvine professor of Middle Eastern history Mark LeVine writes:
Not only did the US aid the use of chemical weapons by the former Iraqi government, it also used chemical weapons on a large scale during its 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, in the form of depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition.
As Dahr Jamail’s reporting for Al Jazeera has shown, the use of DU by the US and UK has very likely been the cause not only of many cases of Gulf War Syndrome suffered by Iraq war veterans, but also of thousands of instances of birth defects, cancer and other diseases – causing a “large-scale public health disaster” and the “highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied” – suffered by Iraqis in areas subjected to frequent and intense attacks by US and allied occupation forces.
And Israel has been accused of using depleted uranium in Syria.
Israeli also used white phosphorous in 2009 during “Operation Cast Lead” (and perhaps subsequently). Israel ratified Protocol III of Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (“Protocol III”) – which outlaws the use of incendiary devices in war – in 2007. So this was a war crime.
Moreover, the 1925 Geneva Protocol (which is different from Protocol III) prohibits “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases”.
The use of White phosphorus (“WP”) may also be a war crime under other international treaties and domestic U.S. laws. For example, the Battle Book, published by the U.S. Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, contains the following sentence: “It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets.”
The U.S. National Safety Council states that “White phosphorus is a poison . . . If its combustion occurs in a confined space, white phosphorus will remove the oxygen from the air and render the air unfit to support life . . . It is considered a dangerous disaster hazard because it emits highly toxic fumes”. The EPA has listed white phosphorus as a Hazardous Air Pollutant.
Indeed, it is interesting to note that the U.S. previously called white phosphorous a chemical weapon when Saddam used it against the Kurds.
And Saudi Arabia is currently using U.S. supplied white phosphorous in Yemen.
It is therefore hypocritical for the U.S., Britain or Israel to say that we should bomb Syria because the government allegedly used chemical weapons.
Postscript: Ironically, many intelligence and military officials say that Syrian government did not use chemical weapons.
On the other hand, two Turkish Parliament members said that Turkey provided chemical weapons to Islamic jihadists for the 2013 chemical weapons attack which was blamed on the Syrian government.
And see this.
