United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon submitted to the UN Security Council this morning the report of his appointed team of chemical weapons experts on the alleged use of chemical weapons on August 21, 2013 in the Damascus suburbs of Syria. “The report makes for chilling reading,” the Secretary General told reporters after his briefing. “The results are overwhelming and indisputable. This is a war crime.”
The team, under the leadership of Swedish scientist Professor Åke Sellström, worked alongside experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in conducting their investigation. Their report concluded that chemical weapons were indeed used “against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.” The report did not specifically attribute blame for the chemical weapons attack. Consistent with its mission, it simply confirmed with incontrovertible scientific evidence that the attack had in fact taken place on a large scale and involved surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin. The evidence included testimony from survivors, medical personnel and first responders, biomedical evidence and dozens of soil and environmental samples. Eighty-five per cent of the blood samples tested positive for sarin. A majority of the environmental samples confirmed the use of sarin. A majority of the rockets or rocket fragments recovered were found to be carrying sarin.
Ban Ki-moon refused to say whether he thought the Syrian regime was responsible. But the UN ambassadors from the United States, the United Kingdom and France did not hesitate in citing the technical details in the report as what they characterized as proof of the Syrian government’s culpability. They mentioned, for example, the type of munition cited in the UN report – 122mm rockets – that has been associated with previous regime attacks and the fact that the quality of the sarin was higher than that of the sarin used by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.
The Security Council, which has been stymied since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in dealing with the crisis, is now being asked to help implement the terms of the Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons agreed to by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last weekend in Geneva. That agreement, to which the Syrian regime is not a party but is expected to fully comply with, would require the Syrian regime to hand over a full listing of its chemical stockpile within a week. This means handing over to international chemical weapons inspectors the names, types, and quantities of Syria’s chemical weapons agents, types of munitions, and location and form of storage, production, and research and development facilities. The removal and destruction of all categories of chemical weapons related materials and equipment would be expected to be completed by the middle of 2014, including stocks of chemical weapons agents, their precursors, specialized chemical weapons equipment, and chemical weapons munitions.
Even if the Syrian regime fully cooperated, this schedule is virtually impossible to meet, as past precedents in Libya and Iraq demonstrate. Moreover, without a massive international force present on the ground to conduct under tight security its own thorough search of the widely dispersed chemical weapons stockpiles, Syrian President Bashar Assad will be able to play a cat and mouse game, which could include transfers of some of the weapons to his ally Hezbollah to keep for “insurance” purposes. Also, Assad will retain his huge biological weapons stashes, which are not covered by the US-Russia deal. Assad knows what happened to both Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein when they gave up their weapons of mass destruction, and he does not want to suffer the same fate.
Meanwhile, President Obama will have to rely on the man whom he has said must go, Bashar Assad, as well as the wily former KGB agent, Russian President Vladimir Putin, to push Assad towards compliance. And Putin has insisted that the Security Council, where Russia has not been hesitant to use its veto power, assume a central role in the whole process once the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which Syria has informed the UN it intends to join, decides on the specific terms for inspection and destruction of the chemical weapons. The Security Council would then pass a binding resolution incorporating these terms and containing steps to ensure effective verification, implementation and enforcement.
Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter is the enforcement mechanism on which the U.S.-Russian Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons would rely “in the event of non-compliance, including unauthorized transfer, or any use of chemical weapons by anyone in Syria.” Chapter VII enforcement tools range from economic sanctions to the use of collective military force, although Russia insists that military force to punish Syrian non-compliance must be off the table. President Obama, on the other hand, has not ruled out possible use of force in the future if Syria does not comply, whether or not done under the auspices of the UN Security Council.
If all this sounds somewhat familiar, it is. Think back to Iraq. The opponents of the second Iraq war, which commenced in 2003, contend that there should have been a second Security Council measure following Iraqʹs failure to comply with Security Council Resolution 1441ʹs weapons inspections requirements. They claimed that Resolution 1441 did not itself contain a specific authorization for member states to use military force to enforce its terms. And they challenged the U.S. position at the time that Iraq’s failure to comply with the conditions of the ceasefire ending the first Gulf War, or with any Security Council resolutions adopted thereafter, including Resolution 1441 (passed unanimously by the Security Council in the fall of 2002), provided sufficient justification for direct military action by the member states themselves. They pointed to the use of a two‐step process in both Korea and the first Gulf War, when Security Council resolutions were passed that specifically authorized the member states to use all means necessary to repel aggression against another country after the first resolution denouncing the aggression was ignored.
Russia can be expected to make the same sort of argument if the Obama administration tries to use a Security Council resolution, incorporating the Framework for Elimination of Syrian Chemical Weapons and the terms for implementation decided by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as a pretext for military action if the Assad regime does not fully comply according to the stated timetable. A reference to the possibility of Chapter VII enforcement does not in itself translate into direct authorization of military force, Russia will argue. For example, the Council could make recommendations for non‐military actions against the Assad regime under Article 41 of Chapter VII rather than move immediately to military action under Article 42. In other words, if the Secretary General reports to the Security Council that Syria is in non-compliance, the Russians will insist that only then can the Security Council consider a range of enforcement options which would start with sanctions. The use of military force would require a separate, specific resolution, a point made today by Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin in response to my question.
All of this buys time for the Assad regime to build up its conventional arms and continue its momentum in pushing back against the rebel forces. Obama will be constrained from moving too far in helping the rebels by supplying them with arms because, as mentioned above, he is effectively enlisting Assad as a partner in the gathering and destruction of his chemical weapons stockpiles while keeping them out of the hands of the jihadist forces seeking to take Assad down. If, as well may happen, Assad does not fully comply with the chemical weapons resolution and Russia, as expected, vetoes a further resolution calling for military force against the Assad regime, we’ll be right back where we started. Obama will either be knocking at Congress’s door again for authorization to strike Syria or he will risk international and domestic opprobrium if he decides to go it alone. Obama may want to call George W. Bush for advice. At least Bush did have congressional authorization and a large coalition of other countries on his side when he decided to initiate an attack against Saddam Hussein without a second Security Council resolution.
