The Thin Red Line

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be slight differences in wording and content.

BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brain Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, how Americans have sorted through what’s legitimate and illegitimate when it comes to fighting wars.

BARACK OBAMA: And on Syria, let me just say this. We will continue to support the legitimate aspirations–

BRIAN: This is President Obama in December, addressing reports that Syrian president Bashir Assad was on the verge of using chemical weapons against rebels in his country.

BARACK OBAMA: And today, 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.

PETER: When Obama made this speech, the civil war in Syria had been raging for more than a year and a half. And an estimated 60,000 Syrians had been killed, which got us wondering– what is it about chemical weapons that conjures up threats of retaliation in a way that the deaths of 60,000 people by so-called conventional means do not? Why is it that they so obviously cross a red line?

BRIAN: For those answers, we turn to Richard Price, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, who wrote a book called The Chemical Weapons Taboo. His story begins in 1899, when delegates from the world’s most powerful nations got together in the Hague and hashed out a list of things that would make war fighting more humane, like banning bullets that expand on impact and explosives fired from balloons. and yes, the use of projectiles designed to spread asphyxiating gases. Here’s Price.

RICHARD PRICE: It would be a mistake to single out what we now know as chemical weapons as being a highlight of that conference. My stance was it was a decidedly minor issue, almost a throwaway, because the delegates said, well, nobody has this anyway. So sure, it’s not going to harm any of us to go ahead and come up with this ban.

BRIAN: So they’re banning something that had never been used before? Isn’t that kind of the opposite of what usually happens here?

RICHARD PRICE: That’s exactly right. Typically what you see is the introduction of a new weapon in warfare. And whether it was the crossbow or the first firearms, submarines, you almost always see reactions that, oh, this is a new horrible thing. Surely we can’t go there. What was different about this one was, before you got there, you had people saying we shouldn’t go there.

Right from the get go of this weapon, it was tagged as having this moral sensibility around it.

ED: A little over a decade later, World War I, then called the Great War, broke out in Europe. And while that moral sensibility may have been the thing that kept chemical weapons from being used against civilians, it didn’t keep them off the battlefield. By the war’s end, some estimate that 40% of artillery shells were being deployed with chemical rounds.

BRIAN: Again, people worried about how this now very real weapon might be used in the future. And sure enough, we get another international agreement banning chemical weapons, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, a protocol that was greeted with a whole lot of scepticism.

RICHARD PRICE: Everybody expects World War II is going to be a chemical war. The curious thing, though, is because of this ban, there are these thresholds and these lines that were drawn that didn’t apply to other weapons. So you make allocation requests.

Well, President Roosevelt in the US said, we’re not supposed to use these things. So you don’t get appropriations. So then you feel well, we can’t really initiate this kind of war, because we’re probably not as well equipped as our opponent. Ironically, that’s what the Germans felt.

They thought the exact same thing. So this really precarious threshold somehow survived, even as virtually every other boundary in World War II was exploded.

ED: 35 years after World War II had ended, that threshold was crossed. Throughout the 1980s, Iraq used chemical weapons in its war with Iran, mostly against enemy soldiers, but also against civilians in the Kurdish region of Iraq. But Price argues that even this outbreak of chemical warfare underscored the power of the taboo against it.

RICHARD PRICE: When the Germans first used chemical weapons during World War I, what they eventually argued was, why are we concerned about this anyway? This is actually a more humane method of warfare than bayoneting people or blowing them to pieces with shells. Fast forward to the Iran-Iraq war and now to Syria. Nobody argues that.

In fact, in the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqis refused to admit that they had used chemical weapons, even as abundant evidence emerged to the contrary. They wouldn’t acknowledge it. So they actually contributed in a curious way to the notion that the use of these weapons is aberrant, even as they used them.

ED: Today, all but six of the world’s nations have signed the latest ban, the chemical weapons convention. But for Price, the strength of the taboo is more a product of history than of international law. Over the course of the 20th century, he says, we never got accustomed to images of civilians choking on poison gas the way we did, unfortunately, to images of civilians killed by aerial bombardment.

The longer chemical weapons existed but were not used, the more people believed they should never be used. What started as a kind of dotted line at the turn of the 20th century had by the turn of the 21st century coalesced into a solid red line.

BRIAN: Richard, you’ve obviously thought about this a great deal. In your mind, is there anything about chemical weapons that makes them worse– substantively, inherently?

RICHARD PRICE: It’s really fascinating just on a very personal level. After I had written my book on the subject, it was only after I had finished the book that my mother informed me that her father, my grandfather, had in fact been gassed at Ypres in the trenches in World War I and somehow survived the attack.

BRIAN: And you then went on to explain, don’t worry, it’s no different than any other weapon.

RICHARD PRICE: Well, exactly. So I delve into this material, they say, well, how can I say this? But I read the diaries. I read the popular novels of the time. And All Quiet in the Western Front, did they single out gas? No.

Actually, what they singled out were the tanks. They said, oh, my goodness, this is this new mechanized monster. What kind of era have we entered into? And so there were different reactions to this. And that just led me just say, it’s not that people don’t feel horrified by this weapon. What’s really fascinating to me is how other things that we ought to also feel horrified at are put into this category we call conventional weapons, which is sort of soothing.

It’s OK if you get blown up.

BRIAN: It sounds kinder and gentler, doesn’t it?

RICHARD PRICE: Exactly. So the whole point of this project was less to say, these aren’t horrible. It’s to say, these other things are horrible, but we’ve put them in this category of so-called conventional weapons, which means it’s OK to get burnt to death, to get blown up to death, all these other horrible ways is which warfare is conducted. So I actually turned that around.

And I hope that that’s the message, is to get people to think, wow, why is it that we accept it’s OK to blow people up or burn them to death?

BRIAN: Richard Price is a professor of political science at University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Chemical Weapons Taboo. Thanks so much for joining us today, Richard.

RICHARD PRICE: My pleasure.