Journal of Global Security Studies, 4(1), 2019, 37–52
doi: 10.1093/jogss/ogy040
Research Article
Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo
Richard Price
Abstract
Has the use of chemical weapons (CW) in Syria eroded the CW taboo? In this article I argue that, despite the significant violations of the CW taboo in the Syrian conflict, the trend overall is not indicative
of the erosion of the long-standing international norm that prohibits the use of chemical weapons
in warfare. I consider evidence that supports but could also challenge such an assessment, drawing
upon indicators for norm robustness and erosion, including the nature of the violations, reactions to
violations by third parties, concordance in belief and practice, and implementation and institutionalization.
Keywords: chemical weapons, norms, constructivism, international norms, chemical weapons taboo
Introduction
On August 21, 2013, after months of allegations of the
use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict, an attack
of at least a dozen sarin-filled rockets that poisoned thousands in the suburbs of Damascus confirmed without a
doubt the first significant lethal use of chemical weapons
(CW) by a state in warfare in over a quarter-century. Under intense threat by the United States, Syria soon thereafter joined the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC),
yet eventually numerous allegations of other attacks of
a variety of CW emerged, culminating in another sarin
attack in April of 2017 that again ignited the world’s
attention and provoked US President Trump to order a
retaliatory strike days later. This was the first time the
world had seen a military response targeting a state following the violation of the CW taboo. A second punitive attack against Syria a year later by the United States,
the UK, and France in response to yet another apparent
CW attack surely will give pause to any other potential
government user of CW. Yet, such candidates for violation are much scarcer than for other norms analyzed
Contribution to Special Issue: Norms Under Challenge: Unpacking the Dynamics of Norm Robustness
in this special issue. This therefore puts into question
the concern that “increasing deployment of once taboo
chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, with apparent impunity, is eroding decades of work to control their
manufacture and use” (Harrison 2017). Indeed, I argue
that, despite the significant violations of the CW taboo
in the Syrian conflict, the trend overall is not indicative of significant erosion of this long-standing international norm that prohibits the use of chemical weapons.
In what follows, I consider the evidence in support of and
against this argument, drawing on the indicators highlighted in the framing article: compliance and the nature of the violations, reactions to violations by third
parties; concordance in belief and practice, and implementation/institutionalization. The case also provides an
empirical demonstration of the argument that, while the
broadening and deepening institutionalization of a norm
is a key indicator of its global robustness, it also ironically means that norm-breaking behaviors amount to
being even more brazen than in less institutionalized contexts. In this sense, increased institutionalization can intensify potential damage to the credibility of a norm if
law gets too far ahead of what politics are willing to
enforce.
Price, Richard (2019) Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo. Journal of Global Security Studies, doi: 10.1093/jogss/ogy040
© The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
journals.permissions@oup.com
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University of British Columbia
38
Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo
The Norm and Its Violation
1
2
3
See, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
uLc4zoAmbRE.
Amy Smithson, quoted in Rogin (2015).
Which a US State Department official stated, see Labott
(2013).
4
Such gases are allowed in situations of domestic riot
control.
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From its origins in the 1899 Hague Declaration ban on
the use of shells in warfare, which diffused asphyxiating gases, to the Geneva Protocol’s expansion to all “asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases” in 1925, and more
recently to the Chemical Weapons Convention (1997),
which clarified that the norm applied also to use of
tear gases in war, the scope of the CW taboo has expanded over the decades through increased institutionalization in response to challenges (see Price 1997). Despite widespread use in World War I, the use of CW has
been exceedingly rare in warfare since that time, making the CW taboo an unusually robust norm of warfare.
This by itself is a major reason why CW uses in Syria
have received such global attention. As I show in this article, violations in the Syrian context at times threatened
the scope of the taboo, yet overall the norm is not in a
death spiral. Indeed, in the face of novel challenges from
nonstate actors (who cannot be parties to CW treaties),
it is clear that there is an expectation that such actors are
also not exempt from the prohibition on the use of toxic
chemicals as weapons. Instead, not one but two military
responses to CW violations were deployed to enforce the
norm in unprecedented fashion.
The first pubic allegation of chemical weapons use
was made by Syrian rebels who claimed that an attack
on Homs on December 23, 2012, was the eighteenth such
attack by government forces. Harrowing videos purporting to depict victims in the aftermath of the attack were
uploaded on YouTube and Facebook by rebels and activists, introducing a new social media cyberfront in the
politics-of-war propaganda (Zeiger and Winer 2015).1
While there was no immediate public response from the
international community, a leaked cable from an Obama
administration official pointed to the use of an incapacitating agent that “is certainly on the less harmful end of
the spectrum of chemical warfare agents believed to be in
the Syrian arsenal” (Rogin 2015).2 Given that the attack
came in the wake of US President Obama’s December
warning against the use of CW, the use of a riot control
agent3 supports the conjecture that the Syrian regime was
testing the waters to see what response there might be to
the use of gas. In the language of this special issue, Syria’s
actions may embody a conscious attempt at applicatory
contestation of the CW norm, namely a test of whether
the use of incapacitating—as opposed to lethal—agents
might be tolerated, despite restrictions provided in the
CWC.4
In March of 2013, the Syrian government accused
rebels of using chemical weapons in Aleppo, claiming
that twenty died and an additional 124 civilians and soldiers were intoxicated (United Nations 2013a, 5, 13). It
also alleged that another attack took place in the Damascus suburb of Otaybah. Counterallegations by British
and French diplomats claiming to have evidence of the
Assad regime’s use of CW charged that, while Syrian soldiers may have been casualties, these events were cases
of “friendly fire” in which a Syrian shell hit the wrong
target (Lynch and DeYoung 2013). The United Nations
(UN) eventually concluded that credible evidence corroborated the allegations of an attack in territory under
the control of Syrian government forces in Khan al-Asal,
though the team could not adjudicate between conflicting witness testimonies that alleged it came from a bomb
dropped by aircraft or a rocket fired from the neighborhood (United Nations 2013a, 19, 32, 33). Later allegations of the dropping of CW munitions from a helicopter
on March 29 would point to Syrian regime use; the UN
team later confirm through autopsy that civilian casualties tested positive for sarin (ibid., 41).
It is an indicator of the international salience of the
CW norm that even a nonparty state (Syria) to the treaty
expression of this norm sought to gain diplomatic benefits by accusing its enemies of violating it, thus hopefully
diminishing their opponents’ legitimacy. This is commonplace in the fog of war, as actors routinely seek reputational benefits by depicting their adversaries as occupying the low ground of committing atrocities. Such
self-serving invocations of the norm are backhanded
compliments to the accepted status of norms so abused:
they can only have such instrumental effects if others care
about the norm. It is an additionally notable indicator
of a norm salience when the state seeking to capitalize
upon such allegations—in this case Syria—is one of the
very last few holdouts to the treaty banning such behavior. States are abundantly aware of the importance of articulating their explicit objection to a widespread norm
they don’t accept, largely to avoid becoming subject to
its obligations should that norm be regarded as having
ascended to binding, customary law status. In the case of
Syria, however, the Assad regime did not adopt a “persistent objector” stance, but instead upped the ante in the
propaganda game and requested that the UN conduct an
investigation into the March 19 attack on Aleppo. UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that the UN
39
RICHARD PRICE
The UN report did not identify who conducted the
attack. The scale of the violation, the location of its
civilian victims in rebel-held or contested territory, and
the delivery systems used were enough to condemn
Assad in the court of US, European, and even Arab
League government opinion, whose spokespersons all
blamed the Assad regime for the attack. Human Rights
Watch’s investigation found that the rockets used against
Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta had been filmed by government forces, and the other rockets used against Moadamya in Western Ghouta are known to be in Syrian government weapon stocks and include a design for sarin
warheads. Neither rocket, nor the vehicle-based launchers needed to fire them, had ever been reported to be
in the possession of opposition forces (Human Rights
Watch 2013, 5, 20). The United States claimed to have
evidence of communications to Syrian troops detailing
preparations for a CW attack just days before and orders
to cease operations later on August 21 and indicated the
rocket trajectories were from government-held positions.
Intense conventional shelling continued for days after the
CW attack (Office of the Press Secretary 2013a). Syria
and Russia contested the claims, accusing rebels of the
attack.
Third-Party Reactions
Proactively Reinforcing the Threshold
As noted by Kratochwil and Ruggie (1986), a critical
element in assessing the effects of norm contestation is
not just the facticity of violations but how third parties
react. In this case, warnings were famously made even
before violations occurred. In response to a question at
a press conference on August 20, 2012, US President
Barack Obama engaged in an unambiguous attempt to
preemptively give force to the CW taboo: “We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the
region that that’s a redline for us and that there would
be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement
on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculations significantly” (Office of the Press Secretary 2012).5 Seymour
Hersh has claimed that the United States had a secret sensor system inside Syria that gave it the capability to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical
warheads; as warheads filled with sarin only have a shelflife of three days, these sensors in effect provided an early
warning system of imminent use (Hersh 2013). Hersh
therefore contends it was warnings from these sensors
5
See Bentley (2016) for an extended analysis of Obama’s
rhetorical use of the taboo.
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would do so, in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The fact that the
Syrians then subsequently permitted the UN inspection
team access only to Aleppo (rather than all sites requested
by the team) does not exactly undermine suspicion that
the Aleppo attack was friendly fire and the other attacks
were conducted by Syrian government forces.
On August 14, 2013, after months of negotiation, the
Assad regime finally agreed to allow the UN team into
Syria to investigate the series of allegations; the team arrived August 18 and began its investigation the next day.
This was a notable new threshold in international monitoring of the CW taboo and very important for putting
the overall status of this norm in long-term context. Improbably, an attack by a dozen or so sarin rockets in the
West and East Ghouta suburbs of Damascus just days
later on August 21, 2013, ignited the world’s attention,
as scores of videos depicting victims went viral. The Assad government reported to the secretary-general that, on
August 22, soldiers in Bahhariyeh in the eastern Ghouta
region had inhaled poison gases and complained of respiratory and other symptoms. The final UN report subsequently indicated that blood tests of those affected were
negative for CW agents, though the same report concluded that Syrian soldiers had tested positive for sarin
from attacks alleged to have come from improvised devices in Jobar and Ashrafiah Sahnaya on August 24 and
25 respectively. In these latter cases, no munitions were
found as the team did not get access to the attack sites.
Moreover, the team “could not establish the link between
the alleged event, the alleged site, and the survivors” in either case (United Nations 2013a, 5, 15, 17, 18).
The UN team, whose original mandate was to investigate previous allegations, refocused its efforts to investigate the mass attacks in Ghouta, though it wasn’t
until August 26–29 that temporary cease-fires were arranged to allow for the investigation. While that allowed
plenty of time for the sites of the attack to be compromised, the team nonetheless “collected clear and convincing evidence that chemical weapons were used also
against civilians, including children, on a relatively large
scale” (ibid., 19). This attack differed significantly from
the other reported incidents in that it was the only attack deemed “relatively large scale” and involving the
use of surface-to-surface rockets, in contrast to other incidents that involved canisters or improvised munitions.
Casualty figures are contested: the high end of deaths on
the government side is 1,429, while Medicine Sans Frontiers reported that they received approximately 3,600 total victims with neurotoxic symptoms, 355 of which died
(MSF 2013).
40
manent harm.” Notably, the (Chemical Weapons Convention 1997, Article II.2) CWC does permit the use of
agents like tear gas for purposes not defined as war (e.g.,
law enforcement and riot control). This special issue usefully underscores that expanding or restricting the scope
or content of a norm does not necessarily imply strengthening or weakening as such by itself, but rather is indicative of norm change.
Interestingly, the Syrian regime did not contest the
scope of the norm and did not claim that the attack
was launched as a form of domestic riot control, which
it might have since it routinely characterized its enemies as mere terrorists rather than acknowledging a state
of armed conflict. However, insofar as the conflict was
widely regarded as a situation of warfare, third parties’
lack of response to the attack amounted to failures to uphold the international normative standard, given that tear
gas too was also now forbidden in war. One could thus
speculate that the low-key US statement that allegations
of CW use by the Syrian regime have “not been consistent
with what we believe to be true about the Syrian chemical
weapons program” (Dyer 2013) might well have served
to embolden the user. To be sure, however, such use by
Syria would not strictly constitute a legal violation, since
Syria was not even a party to the CWC.6 In response to
more serious reports in the spring of 2013, the United
States for its part was initially more cautious than the
UK and France, who had written Ban Ki-moon alleging
Syrian regime use of CW. Still, at a press conference in
Israel the day after the March attacks, Obama again reinforced his redline in remarking that it was still a “game
changer,” though the international community still had
to gather the facts and “find out precisely whether or not
this redline was crossed” (Office of the Press Secretary
2013b).
Did Confirmation of Violation without
Punishment Encourage Noncompliance?
A few weeks after rebels alleged on April 13, 2013, that
the Syrian army dropped gas bombs on Aleppo, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel revealed that “our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of
confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical
weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin” and that “[w]e do believe that any use of
6
The taboo might be considered a norm of customary international law (as proclaimed by officials like Ban Kimoon) and thus incur legal obligations upon all states
regardless of CWC participation. Syria was party to the
Geneva Protocol of 1925, though that prohibited the use
of asphyxiating gases only against other state parties.
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that triggered US President Obama’s statement months
later, while other reports indicated it was Israeli intelligence that notified the United States that Syria was filling
five-hundred-pound bombs with chemicals (Schmitt and
Sanger 2013). In any case, on December 3, 2012, Obama
reiterated that “I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command. The world is watching. The use of chemical weapons is, and would be, totally unacceptable, and if you make the tragic mistake
of using these weapons, there will be consequences, and
you will be held accountable” (quoted in Williams and
Chulov 2012). The Syrian Foreign Ministry for its part
declared that “Syria has stressed repeatedly that it will
not use these types of weapons, if they were available, under any circumstances against its people” (ibid.). The response of the world’s preeminent military power to possible preparations for the use of CW constituted a powerful
norm-bolstering exercise.
Responses to the first allegations of CW use in December of 2012, however, were tepid. A US official indicated that the attack was with a riot control agent, but
“that doesn’t make it a chemical weapon” (Labott 2013).
Notably, it was not Obama but other officials that spoke
to the issue, which is significant insofar as it marked a
step down the previously high threshold of politicization.
Here, the response paralleled the US reaction to Iraqi
tear gas use in 1982, which only prompted the United
States to react by saying it was confident Iraq had not
used lethal CW (Price 1997, 137). To be sure, this may
be due to the inability to confirm exactly what was used;
in January 2013 a State Department spokesperson stated
there was “no credible evidence to corroborate or to confirm that chemical weapons were used” (Khatchadourian
2013).
While this special issue highlights norm institutionalization as an indicator of norm robustness, institutionalization can have effects that cut in different directions,
especially when considered in light of a dynamic conceptualization of norms over time. Namely, responses to
Syrian use of riot control agents that were similar to
those directed at the Iraqi use of the same methods in the
1980s actually amounted to something of a step back;
consider that the scope of the CW taboo had expanded
in the period between the two attacks. In the case of
Syria, therefore, the tepid response amounted to a failure to instantiate the taboo, since the use of any gas in
warfare—even nonlethal irritants like tear gas—had been
banned by the 1997 CWC. Importantly, the treaty defines
banned weapons as munitions specifically designed to
cause death or other harm through the toxic properties of
toxic chemicals, which in turn are defined as any chemical
that can cause “death, temporary incapacitation, or per-
Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo
41
RICHARD PRICE
Military versus Legal/Diplomatic Responses to
Violation
The Ghouta attacks in August 2013 represented a very
significant escalation in scale and effects. US Secretary
of State John Kerry depicted the norm violation as a
“moral obscenity” that “should shock the conscience of
the world. It defies any code of morality . . . Make no mistake, President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous
weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people”
(BBC 2013). Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected
assigning responsibility to the Assad regime, but he also
did not use the occasion to conventionalize CW. Rather,
Putin participated in a discourse that regards CW as sufficient an aberration to warrant unusual interventions. He
wrote as much in an op-ed in the New York Times: “No
one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there
is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian
Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention
by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding
with the fundamentalists” (Putin 2013), blame echoed in
some media.7 Notably, however, the Arab League condemned the Syrian regime and advocated for “deterrent
and necessary measures against the culprits of this crime
that the Syrian regime bears responsibility for” (Deutsche
Welle 2013). For its part, China condemned any use
of CW—without naming names—and pointed out that
China “opposed those weapons in all forms” (United
Nations 2013b).
Of course, the violation in Ghouta amounts to a flagrant act of noncompliance as measured by the behavioral dimension of norm robustness. In terms of rhetorical indicators of concordance, however, the episode lies
at the opposite end of the spectrum of discursive contestation indicating erosion, insofar as the violator did not
offer any justifications that outright rejected the norm.
What’s more, no party attempted to justify the violation
as an exception to the norm, and no one attempted to
redefine what could count as a violation. In other words,
neither validity nor applicatory contestation in discourse
accompanied the behavioral violation of the norm. This
is quite different from some other cases presented in this
special issue, including those that discuss norms related
to torture or sovereign immunity. In that regard, the justificatory practices indicate that the challenges to the CW
taboo fell significantly short of contesting the actual validity of the norm. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the
taboo having higher discursive salience among significant
third parties than during 2013. The flagrant crossing of
the redline elicited widespread condemnation by governments and led Obama to underscore the moral threshold
that needed to be upheld: “This attack is an assault on human dignity. . . . It risks making a mockery of the global
prohibition on the use of chemical weapons” (Office of
the Press Secretary 2013d). Obama stated boldly that he
had “decided that the United States should take military
7
E.g., Deutsche Welle (2017), which suggests the August
2013 and April 2017 sarin attacks were by opposition
forces.
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chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime” (Miller 2013). But belief
was not proof, and the seemingly decisive assessment
was not to be taken as a smoking gun; while reiterating
the redline, in the aftermath of the intelligence fiascoes
of the 2003 Iraq war, US officials cautioned that “[w]e
are continuing to do further work to establish a definitive judgment as to whether or not the redline has been
crossed”(Rogin 2013). The UK, for its part, had submitted letters to the UN secretary-general in March and May
alleging CW attacks in a variety of locations. On June 4,
2013, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius released
a statement indicating “France is now certain that sarin
gas has been used in Syria several times and in a localized
manner” (France 2013). His statement that “[i]t would be
intolerable for those guilty of these crimes to enjoy impunity” further raised the normative ante (ibid.). Despite
wide presumption that the Syrian regime was in possession of sarin gas, there was insufficient proof in the eyes
of the broader international community that it was Assad’s forces who had actually used sarin.
On week later, the White House again contributed to
keeping the salience of the norm high by releasing a statement that “our intelligence community assesses that the
Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the
nerve agent sarin” (Office of the Press Secretary 2013c).
The statement underscored that “[w]e believe that the
Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We
have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that
the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical
weapons.” The critical point here is that it is not difficult
to imagine that public declarations of Syria’s responsibility for the use of sarin by the US government, but a lack
of follow-up in terms of a forceful response to back up
previous threats could easily have been interpreted by Assad as a signal that it was unlikely that the United States
or others would respond forcefully to further CW use.
The profusion of commentary to this effect in the wake
of the August 2013 attacks overlooks what in fact may
have been these key earlier failures to sanction CW use
that likely set up the deadliest of all CW attacks.
42
Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo
action against Syrian regime targets,” articulating a powerful exercise in norm-bolstering:
Not content in confining his justification for a military
response to this particular norm violation, Obama also
appealed to the broader potential consequences of other
weapons of mass destruction if this norm could not be
enforced:
Make no mistake—this has implications beyond
chemical warfare. If we won’t enforce accountability
in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about
our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would
choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorist who would
spread biological weapons? (ibid.)
The Saudi foreign minister similarly declared that
“[a]ny opposition to any international action would only
encourage Damascus to move forward with committing
its crimes and using all weapons of mass destruction”
(Deutsche Welle 2013). Invocation of precedent-setting
implications for the use of other types of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) exemplify the additional leverage for
forestalling norm erosion that can be gained from being embedded in a dense normative environment as highlighted by Zimmerman and Deitelhoff.
However, in the aftermath of opposition in the British
Parliament and UK Prime Minister Cameron’s decision
not to join in any enforcement action, Obama reconsidered and decided to seek approval of Congress before
launching the strikes. Obama later explained the factors
leading to this decision, which included a mix of strategic interests and conflicts with other normative concerns:
the fear of civilians being placed as human shields close
to targets, the safety of UN inspectors on the ground, and
the possibility of drifting toward war in yet another Muslim country. The most important factor, he claimed, was
“our assessment that, while we could inflict some damage
on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would
then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the
strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United
States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the
absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have po-
Within an hour, an hour and a half, I got a phone
call from Sergei Lavrov of Russia suggesting that was
a really good idea, why don’t we work on whether
or not we could do that? And President Obama and
President Putin had actually talked about it a few
weeks earlier in St. Petersburg, and I’d already talked
to Lavrov—I’d actually talked to Prime Minister Netanyahu about it, who thought it was a good idea. And
so all of a sudden, Lavrov and I were thrown together
by our presidents in an effort to try to achieve that.
And guess what? We did achieve it before Congress
voted. (Lund 2017)
The Syrian foreign minister indicated on September
10 that his government would agree to a deal to join the
CWC, declare its CW materials, and submit Syrian facilities to inspection. By September 15, Russia and the
United States had agreed to a plan requiring Syria to give
up its CW capability. In an astonishing chain of events,
at least from the perspective of third-party responses reinforcing an international norm immediately after violation, Syria was on its way to becoming a party to the
CWC and allowing the OPCW to verify the dismantling
of its chemical weapons capability less than a month after
the sarin attacks.
A more powerful case of third parties buttressing an
international norm in the aftermath of its violation is difficult to imagine. Yet, the outcome nonetheless spurred
a vigorous debate, with many levying criticism against
Obama for having failed to follow through on his threat
to attack Syria. To observers, this undermined not only
US credibility but the credibility of the CW taboo. In order to concisely weigh in on the latter, critics must reckon
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What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no
price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of
chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United
States is not enforced? (ibid.)
tentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it”
(quoted in Goldberg 2016). The fact that Obama pulled
Russian President Vladimir Putin aside one week later at
the G20 summit to tell him “that if he forced Assad to
get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike” suggests
that the option was still on the table, even if Obama
himself stated he was proud of his decision to reconsider
(Goldberg 2016 and Todd 2013).
As the world waited to see if and when the United
States might attack, US Secretary of State Kerry extemporized in a press conference that Assad could give up
Syria’s chemical arsenal within a week to avoid an attack. The State Department later emphasized the remark
was rhetorical insofar as Kerry himself stated in the same
breath “that he isn’t about to do it” (quoted in Wintour
2015). Nevertheless, Russian officials seized on the idea
as the basis for a way forward that would avoid military
retaliation. As Kerry later recounted:
RICHARD PRICE
Implementation
Norms that are formally adopted are often contested
by failures to implement them, behavior that can precipitate norm erosion, especially if it is intentional and
widespread. In 2014, reports began to surface of the use
of chlorine bombs in Syria. The OPCW had concluded
by September of 2014 that chlorine was used “systematically and repeatedly” in attacks in northern Syria from
April to August, though as with the UN investigations,
the mandate did not allow for identification of the culprit.
Neither Security Council Resolution 2118 mandating the
destruction of Syria’s CW nor the CWC specifically prohibited Syria from possessing chlorine as such. Chlorine
is a classic dual-use material that has numerous commercial and other uses; the CWC thus prohibits the use of
chlorine when used as a weapon.
Given that anti-Assad opposition forces have not been
known to use helicopters, the reported delivery method
for chlorine bombs, attacks using chlorine gas made it
evident that Syria was not only in violation of the moral
norm, but now also its formal CWC treaty legal obligations. In this sense, the 2014 attacks marked an even more
severe degree of formal (legal) norm violation by the
Syrian regime than the August 2013 attacks. On March
6, 2015, the Security Council adopted Resolution 2209
(2015), condemning the use of chlorine and noting this
was the first use of chemical weapons on the territory of
a party to the CWC. The UN also indicated its decision
to impose measures under Chapter VII in the event of future noncompliance. The Security Council did not have
to wait long for the opportunity, as allegations of a series
of thirty-five attacks, mostly against civilians using chlorine bombs from March to May of 2015, surfaced. The
OPCW later concluded that these attacks, which killed
six people, “likely involved the use of one or more toxic
chemicals—probably containing the element chlorine—
as a weapon.” Once again, however, diplomatic formalities stunted the compliance mechanism as it did not
have the mandate to attribute them to the Syrian military
(OPCW 2015). The absence of the naming and shaming
techniques often favored by nongovernmental organizations to foster norm compliance gave Assad room to escape clear culpability, a significant weakness in the formal
mechanisms of norm enforcement.
Three years after Syria’s adoption of the CWC, the
OPCW indicated that it was “not able to resolve all identified gaps, inconsistencies, and discrepancies in Syria’s
declaration and therefore cannot fully verify that Syria
has submitted a declaration that can be considered accurate and complete” (OPCW 2016). Syria has always
maintained it has been in full compliance, claims subsequent uses of chlorine and sarin clearly defy. Still, despite
cheating, the supervised destruction of twenty-five of
twenty-seven Syrian chemical weapons production facilities, all declared Syrian chemical munitions, and nearly
1,300 tons of chemicals is an impressive enforcement
achievement. Without appreciating that the standards
had been raised over time, it is easy for critics to see such
cheating by one state previously outside the regime as indicative of significant erosion of the international norm.
Yet the nonuse norm had been buttressed since the CWC
with a prohibition on even possessing CW, a key expansion of the taboo’s scope. On this front, the taboo was
better off than before the vast majority of Syria’s CW arsenal was destroyed, even as Syria clandestinely retained
a significantly diminished capability.
More damaging, to be sure, was actual behavior of
using of CW. Western intelligence sources have indicated
that Assad delegated day-to-day CW decisions to his senior commanders (Deutsch 2017; Koblenz 2017). These
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that the Pentagon estimated it could at most eliminate
25–30 percent of Syria’s lethal chemical weapons with air
attacks, leaving “hundreds of tons of lethal poisons at the
continued disposal of a wounded and vengeful regime—
or adrift in Syria’s chaotic civil war, the day Assad lost his
grip” (Lund 2017). Syria’s ascension to the CWC only occurred under the pressure of Obama’s threat of attacks.
Should the United States have turned down the opportunity of Syria joining the CWC and opening up the vast
bulk of its CW capability to destruction and instead go
forward with attacks that Kerry himself conceded would
have to be “unbelievably small” (Lund 2017)? Even in
hindsight, and in light of events that would suggest that
Assad could well have been emboldened to continue to
use CW by having escaped military punishment for the
Ghouta attacks, I would argue there is still merit to the
position (Price 2013a) that giving the CWC process an
opportunity to vastly degrade Syria’s lethal CW capability was on balance the right decision in September 2013.
After all, it didn’t preclude the possibility of future use of
force in response to any subsequent violations of Syria’s
new treaty commitments (which did indeed eventually
occur, if belatedly). The main point for this analysis, however, is that, at the time, the outcome in September 2013
bolstered, rather than undercut, the global significance
of the CW taboo after its significant violation. It was
subsequent failures to punish Syria for chlorine attacks
that undercut the credibility of commitment to the taboo
and likely encouraged even more CW use by the Syrian
regime. The next section turns to these shortcomings in
implementation and to the failures of attempted diplomatic enforcement.
43
44
dynamics toward normalizing use of CW by Syria represent a deeper legal challenge to the CW taboo, compared
to vastly more lethal sarin attacks of August 2013.
Third-Party Enforcement II
international enforcement. It was the JIM’s third report,
delivered to the UN Security Council in August of 2016,
that for the first time named names and determined that
on two occasions there was sufficient evidence to conclude that Syrian regime helicopters dropped devices that
released toxic chemicals. The subsequent report would
add a third confirmation (United Nations 2016a). The
chlorine attacks did not garner nearly the extent of media
coverage and public and political outrage as the Ghouta
attacks; this impression might be in part due to the lack
of graphic videos that the latter spurred, but surely also
to the vastly decreased scale of casualties in these subsequent attacks. One lesson here is the well-established
traction of graphic images in inducing emotions of empathy that can bolster international humanitarian norms.
There is something of a paradox in that, in human terms,
the Ghouta violation was many magnitudes worse than
the rest of attacks combined. Legally, however, the chlorine violations after Syria joined the CWC were an even
greater slap in the face of the CW taboo, insofar as the
regime now had a formal legal obligation not to engage
in chemical warfare. Certainly, these may be considered
as fine legal lines, as the expectation is for all to refrain
from using toxic chemicals as weapons. Nevertheless, in
the wake of this high point in the implementation of the
OPCW process and JIM, some degree of fatigue with
high-stakes norm-politicking seemed to have set in. It was
replaced by a more deeply institutionalized and bureaucratized third-party response further removed from the
political limelight. Such processes don’t preclude highprofile taboo-bolstering interventions by heads of state,
but they make it easier to avoid insofar as governments
are allowing proper diplomatic and legal processes to
play out.
There is something of an ironic dilemma here, akin
to how to respond to vetoes against humanitarian interventions as beset the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) over Kosovo in 1999: governments can stand
still in the face of a lack of legal authorization and be
accused of allowing moral atrocity and crimes to occur
or be accused of the hypocrisy of violating international
law by proceeding with extralegal military action if UN
Security Council authorization is not forthcoming. In this
regard, deepening international legal institutionalization
of a norm doesn’t come without a price. The more procedures are developed to implement international laws that
apply to more actors, the more it can create opportunities
to procedurally—thus legitimately from a process point
of view—block legal action and thus be confronted with
seemingly legitimate failures to enforce international law.
This in turn risks undercutting the integrity and legitimacy of international law even as it expands its scope, if
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It is hardly surprising that a leader who has ordered operations killing hundreds of thousands of his own people
would recoil from violating international norms. Yet, just
as one would not conclude that a norm against human
sacrifice is no longer robust because of one sociopath’s
violation, it is key to assess overall robustness of an international norm with respect to how much any given violation spurs a trend toward more general weakening of the
norm among the other members of that community (analyzed later below). Indeed, we might expect third-party
responses to have an important impact in this regard. International responses to Syrian regime chlorine attacks
took a sharp step back from the previously highest levels
of public norm-bolstering diplomacy of the United States
and a few other states. In fact, instead of regarding these
chlorine attacks as crossing the redline, Obama in effect
engaged in what can be assessed as a form of applicatory
contestation of the norm as a side effect of not wanting to
sabotage peace talks with Russia by responding aggressively against CW use (Lynch 2017). “It is true that we’ve
seen reports about the use of chlorine in bombs that had
the effect of chemical weapons,” Obama said. “Chlorine
itself historically has not been listed as a chemical weapon
but when it is used in this fashion can be considered a prohibited use of that particular chemical” (quoted in Office
of the Press Secretary 2015). Such complicated equivocation, including not pointing the finger at the Assad
regime (let alone engaging in strikes to back his famous
redline), stands in stark contrast to Obama’s earlier efforts at norm-bolstering and seems likely to have been
taken as a signal of impunity by the Syrian regime. This
represented a potential change to the scope of the norm—
that chlorine use would not incur the same kind of reactions as sarin. Yet, this potential rupture stood in contrast to Obama’s own UN Ambassador Samantha Power,
who at the March 2015 Security Council debate stated,
“[o]nly the regime of Bashar Assad had the capabilities
to deploy and use chlorine weapons and must be held accountable for its violation of international law (United
Nations 2015).” The French ambassador seconded the
attribution, while Russia’s Vitaly Churkin resisted it.
It was not until August 2015 that the Security Council passed another Resolution (2235) establishing a Joint
UN OPCW Investigative Mechanism (JIM), which for the
first time had the mandate to determine culpability for
CW attacks. This again was a new threshold reached in
Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo
RICHARD PRICE
8
While there are unresolved inconsistencies, which the
JIM report concedes, such as the timing of some casualties arriving for treatment, those inconsistencies are
much less damning than the shortcomings of the Syrian
and Russian claims; see Browne, Reneau, and Scheffler (2017); France Diplomatie (2017), and United Nations
(2017).
sad feeling further emboldened by US Secretary of State
Tillerson’s indication the week previous that the “status
of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people” (quoted in US Department of State 2017a). However,
HRW attributed three other nerve agent attacks by warplanes in previous months to the Syrian regime (HRW
2017), and the OPCW confirmed both chlorine and sarin
attacks prior to this attack (OPCW 2018b).
Continuing its pattern of vetoing measures to hold
Syria accountable, Russia had even vetoed the continuation of the JIM the previous fall, a step back from the
zenith of international verification of the taboo. Ironically, this step may have helped set the table for what
was to come, insofar as it pushed a third party to respond
militarily, as no timely independent verification of the attack was in the cards. Yet, it is nothing short of astonishing that US President Donald Trump, challenger of so
many liberal international norms, was reportedly moved
by pictures and videos of dead babies (Parker, Nakamura,
and Lamothe 2017) to reinforce the taboo and order an
unprecedented retaliatory attack of a Syrian airfield, reportedly destroying 20–25 aircraft after the April sarin
attack.
Naturally, alternative motives are plausible. Trump
may have been seeking to distance himself from Obama’s
inaction, demonstrate his qualities as a decisive leader, or
use the strikes as a distraction away from his domestic
troubles. The key point as it relates to this analysis is that
Trump could only reap a political win in reversing his
previous position opposing US strikes against Syria for
CW use by playing on the fact that upholding the norm
by punishing Syria with an attack would be widely perceived as appropriate by those whose support he sought
most. His actions represent a classic backhanded tribute
to the norm’s power. What’s more, Trump directly echoed
Obama’s earlier language when describing the April 2017
attack as an “affront to humanity” that “crosses many,
many lines, beyond a redline” (Borger, Smith, and Rankin
2017). US Secretary of State Tillerson’s explanation for
the strikes, again incongruous for an administration hostile to so many international norms, constituted another
example of norm-bolstering. Specifically, he argued that,
rather than allow for the normalization of CW, “it’s important that some action be taken on behalf of the international community to make clear that the use of chemical weapons continues to be a violation of international
norms” (US Department of State 2017b).
While one might have thought that the US military
response would put an end to Syria’s use of CW saga,
another apparent Syrian chemical attack on the rebel
stronghold of Douma on April 7, 2018, was the source
of another wave of media and diplomatic sensation. The
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law reaches too far out in front of what politics can deliver. In a case such as the Syrian chlorine attacks, then,
a strong normative argument can be made that limited
strikes by Obama against Syrian airfields and/or helicopters to enforce the CWC without Security Council authorization was a missed opportunity for extralegal norm
enforcement as a last desperate measure given Russian
refusal to approve enforcement measures. The argument
that such enforcement would not be legitimate because
it would violate international law risks insufficiently appreciating the deeply corrosive effect on international law
itself as toothless when failing to uphold egregious violations, as well as the importance of the political as opposed to strictly legal dimensions of a norm. Either course
of action represents a failure to uphold international law,
which is why it presents a dilemma; at least action designed to prevent something all states nonetheless agree
to—preventing the use of CW—addresses some substantive moral good if at the cost of procedural justice already
being abused.
Russia’s increasingly active intervention in the conflict on behalf of Syria removed the prospects of successful Security Council (UNSC) punishment of Russia’s ally,
as Russia vetoed attempts for the UNSC to take punitive measures against Syria. Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, challenged the conclusiveness of the JIM
reports in remarks to reporters in the fall of 2016, stating “[t]he proof is not there for any punitive action to
be taken” against the Syrian government (Lynch 2016).
In turn, the United States emphasized “we risk lasting
damage to this international norm” if Syria is not held
accountable for its violation (ibid.). Power proved prescient, as on the morning of April 4, 2017, a sarin attack in the northwestern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun
garnered world attention and reportedly caused at least
ninety-two deaths and poisoned hundreds more. US,
French, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and western media analyses all pointed to a bomb dropped from Syrian
aircraft, a conclusion that the JIM also later reached in
its analysis. Syria and Russia, on the other hand, claimed
that a bomb had hit a rebel warehouse storing chemical
weapons or that rebels had detonated a chemical munition themselves.8 It is tempting to suggest that this reescalation to sarin could well have been the result of As-
45
46
Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo
9
The US and French governments claimed they had evidence of at least chlorine being used, while the Syrians
and Russians claimed no chemicals were used and the
attack was staged either by rebels or by the UK (BBC
2018).
the behavior of other actors. One serial violator among
some two hundred states does not mean there is no longer
a norm unless that spurs imitators. It is thus to the criteria
of concordance that we now turn.
Concordance
There have been numerous allegations of the use of chemicals by nonstate armed groups throughout the region.
The allegations have focused particularly on the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Initial reports of the use
of rudimentary chemical shells followed earlier allegations by Kurds that ISIS had filled trucks with chlorine
in a truck-bomb attack in January 2015. These were not
the first attacks in Iraq, as suicide bombers on a number of occasions drove chlorine-filled tankers in truckbomb attacks that spiked in 2007 (Associated Press in
Iraq 2015; Cave and Fadam 2007; Semple 2007). A number of attacks in Afghanistan during 2010–2012 were
also reported to have involved poison gas against girls in
schools; the Afghan Ministry of Health confirmed that
blood tests of some victims were positive for chemical
compounds used in pesticides, as well as traces of sarin
and VX nerve agents (Nordland 2010).
The JIM determined there was sufficient evidence to
conclude that ISIS had used mustard gas on at least
one occasion close to Aleppo, killing one child. It seems
entirely likely there have been more uses of chemical
weapons by ISIS and possibly other armed groups that
have not been confidently verified. One report from
November of 2016 indicated that ISIS may have used
chlorine and mustard on as many as fifty-two occasions
since 2014 (Schmitt 2016). All told, there have been at
least 350 allegations of chemical attacks by various parties in the Syrian conflict at the time of writing. The Syrian
government has asked the OPCW to investigate numerous instances where it claimed its soldiers were harmed
by CW, and the OPCW has confirmed the use of chemicals in some instances. However, apart from the ISIS attack mentioned above, the OPCW has not been able to
attribute the attacks to any particular side. These uses
seem to have largely involved improvised weapons such
as canisters, though there are reports of the use of rockets
as well, such as in Iraq in 2016 (CBS News 2016).
The future use of CW by ISIS, including in other areas of the world through its globalized campaign of terror attacks, would not be surprising. Its ability to launch
such attacks is likely dampened by its military defeats
in Syria and Iraq. The United States in 2016 targeted
ISIS CW production sites based on information obtained
from a captured former Iraqi chemical weapons expert
working with ISIS. The launch of airstrikes means that
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WHO reported that some five hundred patients were
seen with symptoms consistent with chemical weapons
exposure, and forty-two died (WHO 2018). This time,
however, the UK and France joined the United States in
launching missile attacks a week later against sites associated with clandestine Syrian CW facilities. The objective of the strikes “was specifically the prevention of
further use of chemical weapons,” according to the UK
(OPCW 2018a). This was powerful norm enforcement
as three UNSC members joined the operation, though
it fell short of the epitome of norm enforcement, which
would have included UNSC authorization. No previous
allegations of chlorine attacks had drawn as robust a response from Obama, Trump, or other states, which had
threatened to narrow the scope of the enforcement of the
CW taboo to apply to sarin but not chlorine.9 Notably,
had Russian and Syrian claims been true that this or any
other alleged CW attack was a “false flag” operation by
rebels, that would be evidence more in favor of the robustness of the CW taboo (than if the Syrian regime had
in fact yet again violated the taboo). But like the credibility of numerous other denials that evaporated as evidence came to light, this seems entirely unlikely; an initial draft of a UN commission’s report on possible war
crimes in the government’s siege of the Douma neighborhood detailed six chemical attacks from January to
April in 2018, all attributed to government and/or affiliated militias (Gladstone and Haberman 2018). This and
other evidence attributing a chlorine attack to the Syrian regime (see Browne et al. 2018) is even more credible at time of this writing. Accounts highlight the latest
gas attack’s consistency with previous attacks involving
the release of similar munitions via helicopters (which no
opposition groups possess) and with attacks verified by
JIM/OPCW: the shifting versions of denials (no attack,
victims killed by dust, or rebels or UK staged the attack);
denial of OPCW access to the attack site for two weeks;
and credibility problems of intimidation and coercion involved witnesses presented by Syria and Russia.
In the aftermath of these instances of international
norm enforcement, it may seem too easy to conclude that
the CW taboo is not likely to erode. Yet, such a conclusion cannot depend solely upon these occasions of military and diplomatic norm enforcement against one state,
despite their unprecedented and powerful nature. The
following section assesses how norm violations impact
RICHARD PRICE
but the latest in a series of suspected poisonings of Kremlin opponents through a variety of toxic agents (Groll
2018). Russia appears to have a long history of such
attacks (Gedmin 2015). Importantly, these events open
a different dimension of norm contestation—the use of
toxic substances by states to engage in targeted killings
of individuals, rather than in mass casualty attacks in
the context of war. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to note
here that casualty numbers in such attacks are low, and
the number of states apparently willing to use such methods thus far amount to two. Yet, these practices by a few
states provide an inauspicious model including for nonstate actors that could prove most worrisome if not vigorously stemmed.
Besides violating the taboo oneself, another form
of contestation is abetting violations by others and/or
shielding them from the consequences. An unreleased
UN report implicated North Korea in Syria’s chemical
weapons program (Schwirtz 2018), and Iran has criticized the attacks against its ally Syria. While China has
consistently spoken out against the use of CW, it has
sometimes aligned with Russia in vetoing UNSC resolutions aimed at sanctioning Syria for violations. Put in historical perspective, it is worth noting that such shielding
on the part of great powers is hardly novel and by itself
is not indicative of norm irrelevance even though it exposes grave limits enforcement and thus a chief weakness
of norms. For instance, the United States was similarly
complicit in Iraq’s use of CW against Iran in the 1980s,
but the norm rebounded to its even stronger form thereafter.
This article has focused on evidence of the relative
metastasizing of violations of the CW taboo over the
last decade and on responses to these violations, which
might give the impression of a norm in trouble. However, it should be underscored that this evidence must
be weighed against the criteria of concordance for assessing norm robustness. That is, there is only one state
among some two hundred in the international system
that is clearly in repeated violation of the ban on the use
of CW in warfare, and there may be one other that has
violated it in far less serial fashion, as well as two states
that have used toxic chemicals in the form of targeted assassinations. Only four states remain outside the CWC’s
regime banning possession of CW (Israel, Egypt, North
Korea, and new state South Sudan). This trend line does
not forebode significant norm decay. Of course, treaty
ratification does not make violation impossible, as other
contributions to this special issue and Syria’s violation of
the CWC make all too clear. Yet, despite Syria’s violations since joining the CWC, one of the world’s last significantly threatening CW arsenals has nonetheless been
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the United States made recourse to the instrument of
military norm enforcement before Trump’s attacks, albeit without great fanfare and against a nonstate actor
(Cooper and Schmitt 2016). Importantly, this action is
constitutive of a taboo, which applies to nonstate actors even though they cannot sign the international treaty
prohibition.
ISIS is not the first terrorist group to engage in attacks with deadly modern chemical agents—the Aum
Shinrikyo cult used sarin in Japan in 1995—nor are they
likely to be the last, particularly given Syrian and Iraqi
chemical arsenals and the know-how of those involved.
Over the last decade, there has been little compunction
by some nonstate actors against using chemical weapons
when available in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. ISIS, Al
Qaeda, and the Taliban have all accused of doing so.
Given that there are far more nonstate actors involved
in armed conflicts around the world than states, such
use is potentially a significant source of the spread of
norm erosion. Yet, it is worth keeping in mind that, just
as one would not generally say that the existence of violations of laws by criminals implies the normalization
of a particular crime, violations by nonstate actors are
not equivalent to state violations. Nevertheless, the extent of CW use by nonstate actors could at a certain
point represent a serious erosion of norm facticity if it
becomes prevalent enough. One obstacle to effectively
weaponizing CW for mass casualty attacks is the CWC’s
ban on production, trade, and possession of prohibited
materials.
Beyond the Middle East, potential evidence pointing
toward further erosion of the taboo includes reports of
the use of CW by Sudanese forces in Darfur (Amnesty
2016), although these have yet to be confirmed. Such instances are reminiscent of the historical pattern of occasional but still rare CW use. From Italy’s use in Abyssinia
and Japan’s in Manchuria in the 1930s, Egypt in Yemen
in the 1960s, and Iraq in the 1980s, the most recent
uses of CW can be viewed as the latest installments in
a twenty- to twenty-five-year pattern of occasional regional norm violations. Despite this pattern, the facticity of the norm remains robust overall, particularly when
occasions of attacks are compared to the relative infrequency of violations per number of conflicts and conflict
participants worldwide.
The killing of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s half
brother with VX in Malaysia in February of 2017 embodies a more ominous potential change in the scope of contestation. Similarly, the sensational case of the poisoning
of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in
the UK in 2018 with novichok, an agent only known to
have been manufactured in the former Soviet Union, was
47
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Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo
Validity
The fact that no party to the conflict in Syria has claimed
responsibility for the chemical attacks testifies to and reinforces the discursive validity of the norm. In television
interview from August 2013, Syrian President Bashar alAssad denied Syrian use of CW, a position he has maintained for all subsequent attacks.10 In response to JIM’s
report to the Security Council, which identified the Syrian regime as having used chlorine bombs, the Syria government in October of 2016 challenged the reports as
“unprofessional” and “politicized,” and denied such use.
The regime argued instead that chlorine is “ineffective in
the field compared to conventional weapons” and that
chemical weapons weren’t used when Syria lost important strategic locations: “why would it then use such
weapons against civilians?” (United Nations 2016b) The
Syrian response instead pointed to the interests of “armed
terrorist groups to marshal international public opinion against the Syrian government by accusing it of using such weapons and fabricating numerous incidents”
(ibid.). Similarly, following the April 2017 sarin attack,
the Syrian foreign minister maintained that “the Syrian
army has not, did not, and will not use this kind of
weapon” (Al Jazeera 2017), and Syria and Russia similarly denied that the 2018 attack even took place and
then maintained that it was staged by rebels and/or the
UK.
It is additionally remarkable that the norm has gone
uncontested discursively even while CW were being deployed by ISIS, a group that has notoriously gone out
of its way to publicize its violations of the laws of war
and humanitarian law. ISIS in its monthly magazine went
so far as to charge that “[Assad] used illegal chemical
weapons against innocent civilians. These crimes have
been documented by neutral international organizations
to prevent any doubt in the matter,” quite the claim given
that the group does not otherwise recognize civilians as
10
See (CBS News 2013).
innocent and international organizations as neutral.11
Similarly, in response to Amnesty International’s accusation of CW use, the government of Sudan declared that
“we were very astonished to hear this accusation. It is the
first time for us to get knowledge of such [an] allegation,
which implicates a heinous humanitarian crime. It takes
no effort to categorically repudiate such an assumption”
(Amnesty 2016, 104). North Korea and Russia have both
also denied all accusations of assassination attempts using toxic substances.
The only kind of discursive contestation of the taboo
has come in the form of considering why chemical
weapons attract so much attention when so many people have been killed by other means in the context of the
Syrian conflict. Beyond Assad’s statement in a television
interview that killing by CW isn’t any worse than other
forms of killing, such contestation has mostly been made
by academics (Bentley 2016) and other commentators
and apparently mirrors a common view on the ground
in the region that has not placed extraordinary importance on the use of CW as a means of death given the
vast destruction by other means.12
No government has challenged the validity or application of the CW taboo. That is, no state has publicly
sought to redefine what constitutes the legitimate use of
certain kinds of chemicals in war, to carve out an exception for their use against certain targets such as terrorists,
or to defend the use of CW as a regrettable exception in
extremis. In this sense, the validity of the CW taboo remains tightly defined in scope, in contrast to other norms
in this special issue where exceptions of definition and
application have challenged existing norms. In sum, the
international norm prohibiting the use of CW in war remains discursively robust.
Conclusion: Trending Whence?
In January of 2013, I predicted that the overall outcome
of the episode in Syria would be a tightening of the noose
around the use of CW, even despite the violations (Price
2013b). This was before the series of 2013 attacks and
the chlorine and sarin attacks that occurred after Syria
joined the CWC. How much and what kind of CW use,
one might reasonably ask, would provide sufficient evidence that such a prediction has simply been proven
wrong?
11
12
ISIS (2015, 14).
Personal correspondence, according to observations
by Will Plowright, UBC PhD student, from research
on armed groups in Syria and Professor Marc Lynch’s
reading of Arab language (social) media.
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massively diminished through OPCW-verified disarmament and missile strikes against Syrian facilities. This
metric of concordance provides an important basis for
the conclusion that, overall, the trend does not point to
significant erosion of the CW taboo. Moreover, the fact
that the potential for violation does not for the most part
rest in the hands of rank and file fighters (as with some
norms analyzed in this forum like torture), but is highly
centralized and politicized to a much smaller range of decision makers (see Morrow 2014), provides further resistance to norm metastasis.
49
RICHARD PRICE
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to: Will Plowright for insight into the situation in Syria; Parmida Esmaeilapour for her research
assistance; reviewers for their helpful comments; and participants at the special issue workshops and UBC IR Colloquium for their suggestions.
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While Syrian use of CW became increasingly normalized, an overall assessment needs to take into account a
larger catalogue of indicators, as developed in this project
and applied in this article, and assess Syria’s use of CW in
terms of wider global trends. Placed in broader historical
context, the high point of third-party reactions against
Syrian CW use in fact mark an unprecedented raising of
enforcement from the last previous violation of the CW
taboo, by Iraq in the 1980s. In this latter case, meaningful
state or international mobilization against such use during the conflict was largely absent. This is significant, as
the tepid reaction to Iraq at the time was consistent with
the longer historical pattern, which had been that the use
of CW since WWI was to be avoided, but use in areas outside the leading industrialized—“civilized”—world could
be overlooked. At times, the reactions in Syria have mirrored this pattern. But the CWC created after Iraq’s use
of CW provided for intrusive international verification
that was kicked into action for the first time ever with
the 2013 investigations, before Syria joined the CWC.
Third parties actively pressured Syria to join the CWC
during the conflict, leaving only four states as nonparties
to this agreement—indicative of extremely high concordance. Thus, thanks to the robust institutionalization of
this norm, even though the taboo has been egregiously violated and was not sufficiently strong to prevent the likes
of Assad and possibly a handful of other actors from using toxic chemicals, there is not a large stampede of likely
would-be state violators waiting in the wings to follow
suit.
Using toxic agents in assassinations is the one potential expansion of the scope of norm challenge, though
as twenty countries and NATO joined the UK in expelling Russian diplomats in response to the Skripal case,
increasingly common challenge to this challenge would
seem a much more unlikely prospect than other challenges to norms against assassination such as targeted
killings with drones, which tend to take place without
such high-profile diplomatic reactions. In addition, violations by nonstate actors will remain attractive possibilities precisely because killings by such methods garner far
more attention than by other means—it remains highly
abnormal. One might also instructively compare the
patchier global adherence to other norms, such as prohibitions against the use of cluster munitions and child soldiers, against sexual violence, or against the targeting of
aid and health workers and facilities—violations of these
are occurring in the Middle East but also elsewhere in the
world with much more frequency. Placed in proper context, the criteria that we use to assess the status of norms
do not point to the CW taboo as trending in the direction
of gasping for air.
50
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