Pyschopathic bullies without boundaries eventually turn into mass murderers.
War-weary Americans don’t want to get involved in Syria, and understandably so, given the un-ending war against terrorism, and the un-ending conflict in the Middle East.
But there is a wider issue here. Psychopathic bullies without boundaries eventually turn into mass murderers. When 1.5 million Armenians were murdered during World War I, to prop up a declining Ottoman empire, the world looked away. But one person who did not was Adolph Hitler.
When Hitler was planning to kill, in the name of his master race that would control what people did, believed and owned, he set aside fears of his Nazi generals, by reportedly telling them, “Who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?’”
Indeed, what was done to the Armenians, in 1915, gave rise, in 1944, to the term “genocide” as an explanation of what was done to Europe’s Jews – the targeted, systematic destruction of an entire group of people.
Americans, prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, did not want to be involved in another world war. But, it was American involvement that helped end the Nazi genocide.
This is why the United States, with, or without, its Allies, needs to react to the use of chemical warfare in Syria. This is the type of warfare that leads to global conflict when nothing is done.
Poison gas is a very efficient tool for mass murderers. The Nazis started using poison gas against mental patients in 1939. By the end of World War II, the Nazis gassed 6,000 Jews daily at Auschwitz.
Anyone old enough to have read a newspaper, in 1972, remembers the photo of Vietnamese children, running in horror for their lives down a Vietnamese highway, after a South Vietnamese plane dropped flaming napalm, in error, on South Vietnamese troops and civilians.
Napalm, concocted, in part, with gasoline, and made to incinerate whatever it landed on in 10 minutes, and Agent Orange, a concentrated herbicide made with kerosene, maximized the war’s destruction. It is estimated that the toxic defoliant destroyed six million acres of forest in Vietnam, and that its effects harmed more than three million Vietnamese, including 500,000 children. The use of these weapons and their effect is something Secretary of State John Kerry, who was a soldier, and not a policymaker, in Vietnam, would know well.
Diplomatic efforts have so far failed to stop the wars and conflicts in the Middle East. Further chemical warfare, in Syria, holds the potential for global catastrophe in terms of loss of life, as well as harm to the environment. A study by an expert in warhead design, who formerly worked for Raytheon, and a professor of physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, of images from the Aug. 21 chemical attack, on the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus. indicates that the rockets delivering the sarin gas had 50 times more nerve agent than originally estimated.
The elevated amount is why analysts attribute the attack to the Assad regime, and explain why the attack sickened and killed an estimated 1,000 people, including 400 children.
What is happening in Syria is a global concern, and one the United States should not turn away from. The United States needs to act, even if France is the only country among our Allies to join in support. This is a test of global resolve against, not only the use of chemical warfare in one country, but against tyrants and terrorists, and what they are doing to gain support through organizations, like Hezbollah, in Lebanon, where every fourth person is said to be displaced from another country, and where this increasingly armed Shiite, anti-Israel militant organization supports Bashar al-Assad.
Anne-Gerard Flynn is Lifestyle editor of The Republican.