Furthermore there's the whole argument that the administration made, that so many people were killed by chemical weapons. Their number was around 1,400, the fact of the matter is that over 40,000 other people were killed with bombs and bullets, before those 1,400 people. If 40,000 people were killed, and that didn't provide a moral justification for intervention, what's the moral justification for killing people... when 1,400 die with chemical weapons. I don't get it, in fact, I don't think there's a moral case to be made for intervention.
American political scientist
John J. Mearsheimer (born December 14, 1947) is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is an international relations theorist. He is the leading proponent of a branch of realist theory called offensive realism, a structural theory which, unlike the classical realism of Hans Morgenthau, blames security competition among great powers on the anarchy of the international system, not on human nature.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Native Name:
John Joseph Mearsheimer
Alternative Names:
John J. Mearsheimer
From Wikidata (CC0)
... after the war, he became a big proponent of the argument that chemical warfare or gas warfare was actually a more humane form of warfare than shrapnel and bombs, because he saw what all those shrapnel and bombs did to all the boys who climbed out of the trenches and tried to cross no man's land, with German machine guns and artillery on the other side, he said I'll take the gas any day. I'm not making the case for gas warfare, but the idea that getting killed by gas is, more horrible than getting ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets is not one I buy. And when I see the Obama administration putting pictures of people killed by gas up on the internet, I say "let's put pictures of the people who got killed by shrapnel up there, and lets have a debate about which pictures look worse". It won't even be an interesting debate, getting killed by shrapnel, in my opinion is a lot more gruesome and a lot worse.