Link to video: Barack Obama addresses the nation on Syria – video
Upholding and enforcing the longstanding global norm against chemical weapons – while deterring Bashar al-Assad from using them again against his own people – offers a compelling rationale for even a punitive use of force by the United States against Syria. Tuesday night, Barack Obama made a semblance of that argument; but he lathered it in so much threat-exaggeration and maudlin imagery that it was virtually impossible to take his case for war seriously.
If anything, the fact that Obama was forced to rely on contradictory and deceptive arguments to sell the American people on the idea of military intervention in Syria did more to undermine the case for intervention than reinforce it.
The best argument for the use of US military force against Syria is actually a rather simple one: international norms dictating how wars are fought and how civilians are treated in wartime matter because they make wars less likely to occur. And when wars do happen, those norms ensure that that conflicts are just a bit less deadly.
In fact, the reason we uphold and enforce norms, like those on chemical weapons, is not because the world is a hotbed of violence, but actually, because it's never been safer. Sometimes, it is necessary to punish behavior that goes far beyond commonly accepted international norms and legal rules governing armed conflict.
Of course, such universalist, almost symbolic arguments are not easy ones on which to base a military intervention. And so it is perhaps not surprising that Obama felt the need to broaden his message … into the world of the fantastical.
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