Last fall, over a single week in the battle for Aleppo, 96 Syrian children were killed. Across Syria in 2015 and 2016, at least 1,200 children were killed (but possibly many more). Why then, after 27 children died in Tuesday’s alleged chemical attack in the Syrian province of Idlib, did an emotionally charged President Trump, highlighting that “beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,” abruptly reverse his noninterventionist stance on Syria, thrusting the United States into a risky conflict against the Russian-backed government of Bashar al-Assad? Why did Trump, a businessman not widely known for his humanitarian impulses, react with dramatic violence to an incident devoid of any immediate threat to US security or economic interests? What is it about the use of chemical weapons?
After six years of civil war, hundreds of thousands of Syrians are dead, almost all of them killed by conventional weapons. But very few images of people killed by conventional arms appear in major news outlets; such photographs and videos are generally deemed too horrific for public consumption. [continued]
Article reposted with permission from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Read the full story.
Brooke Higgins is a student in the biodefense master’s program, and Charles Blair is an adjunct professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government.