Are chemical weapons effective?

There’s a crescendo of concern over Syria’s chemical weapons, which the regime has threatened would only be used against “external aggression”.

What’s the historical record on chemical weapons use? Thomas L. McNaugher has a slightly outdated (1990) but still interesting argument in International Security, titled Ballistic Missiles and Chemical Weapons: The Legacy of the Iran-Iraq War:

Beginning in April 1988, in counterattacks against Iranian forces occupying Iraqi territory, Iraq’s forces reportedly used chemical weapons successfully to create panic among Iranian soldiers. Chemical weapons, Robin Wright concluded, were “clearly … a major factor in Baghdad’s stunning victories”. Both technologies [ballistic missiles and chemical weapons] have been credited with bringing Iran to the negotiating table after eight years in which Iranian intransigence, rather than confusion and panic, had been the norm. (p.5)

McNaugher argues, by contrast, that the role of chemical weapons has been overstated: “a strong argument can be made that chemical weapons, even if used, were not essential to Iraq’s successes in these final battles … CW was tricky to use and somewhat unpredictable”, effective mainly against unprotected troops.

Historically, they’ve only worked under narrow conditions:

Chemical weapons were used extensively during World War I, and in lesser quantities by the Italians in Ethiopia in the 1930s and by the Japanese in Manchuria during World War II. They have been used infrequently since, most notably by Egypt in North Yemen in the mid-1960s. They have been tactically useful, but they have produced the kind of panic attributed to Iranian troops in 1988 only against ill-equipped anad untrained soldiers. (p.7)

When Germany first introduced gas in World War I, it caused great panic among British and French forces, but thereafter World War I combatants tended to become inured to the CW threat and also acquired protective equipment. Chemical weapons normally caused panic only among troops that were untrained, ill-equipped, or low in morale for other reasons … chemical weapons acquired their 1988 reputation for dramatic effectiveness [against Iranian forces] from special circumstances that took several years to emerge. (pp.20-21)

Chemical weapons can also be counterproductive if used without care:

Iraq’s initial tactical experiments with chemical weapons in the Iran-Iran war were with nonlethal riot control agents like tear gas. These were introduced into battle in northern Iraq in 1982, with disastrous results; a change in wind direction blew the gas cloud back towards Iraq’s own troops”. (p.17)

As the official British history of World War I put it: gas “made war uncomfortable … to no purpose”.

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Update: RUSI’s new Syria report (in which I have a chapter on pathways to regime collapse) includes a contribution from Paul Schulte on chemical weapons. Schulte was formerly Director of Proliferation and Arms Control in the UK Ministry of Defence, and UK Commissioner on the UN Special Commissions for Iraqi Disarmament.

On the likelihood of use and effectiveness:

Use of chemical weapons by the government side, during the fighting seems improbable, except as an act of utter desperation and revenge.  Operational solutions to the technical problems of optimal dispersal and necessary persistence in high temperatures would have been practised.  The use of any of the CW types available in the government arsenal would probably be devastating against those unprotected insurgents who were in the area under attack.  But, as with gunship sorties or heavy artillery bombardment, individual CW attacks against agile and dispersed opponents could not be expected to be strategically decisive, although they would be almost certain to kill significant numbers of intermingled civilians.  Such actions would have to be expected to provoke extreme pressures for outside intervention to prevent and punish a crime against humanity.   The US has already explicitly strengthened deterrent messages by publicly warning Syria that this would cross ‘a serious red line’.

On a post-Assad regime’s relationship to chemical weapons:

[A] rapid collapse of the Syrian Army and regime and their replacement by a new government, backed by the Free Syrian Army (FSA), with effective control throughout the national territory, would also give little justification for forceful outside involvement.  But strong diplomatic efforts could be expected to persuade the new regime, perhaps as a condition of assisting and supplying it, to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and accept assistance from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and friendly states in eliminating its stocks.  This would, however, be taken as a regionally controversial pro-Western move. It could not automatically be assumed that a new government (whose composition is unknowable) would willingly opt to eliminate expensive, high salience , national military assets.  Elimination is happening in Libya, largely because Qadhafi had already publicly renounced them (though, typically, still retaining undeclared stocks), and the new regime wanted to please NATO nations  whose intervention had been critical in overthrowing him ,and wished to signal a generally Western orientation.  But a new Syrian government which is looking decreasingly likely to have any similar reason for such gratitude might ’insist on retaining at least some CW stocks as a counter to Israel’s nuclear capabilities and as a bargaining chip in future negotiations over the Golan Heights?’ These are, after all, the kinds continuing  geostrategic reason for which they were originally acquired.

On elimination:

Conceivably, also, chemical weapons could be rapidly burnt, exploded, or chemically neutralised, as was done with captured stocks in Iraq by US forces in 1991, and by UNSCOM in the destruction campaign it improvised , under complicated and unsatisfactory political conditions, between June 1992 and June 1994 . Chemical munitions, bulk agent, and precursors stored throughout Iraq were consolidated , and incineration or neutralisation disposed of more than 38,000 filled and unfilled chemical munitions, 690 metric tons of bulk and weaponized CW agents, and over 3,000 metric tons of precursor chemicals. But there would be significant safety hazards to those conducting similar activities within Syria , and resultant accusations of long-term toxic contamination, like those involved in allegations of Gulf War Syndrome after Desert Storm.

Civil war and revenge

Quite rightly, there’s increasing attention being paid to the prospects of minority communities in Syria during, but especially after, the civil war. From Stephen Starr’s valuable reflection on the ambiguities of the conflict:

Today, the regime is openly espousing sectarianism (for example, it has supplied weapons to Alawites living in the Mezzah 86 area of Damascus), but so too are Sunni civilians who back the revolt. Alawite civilians in Syria are being murdered for no other reason than their religion … One Syrian working in the international press told me that Sunnis and Alawites can no longer live together, that some Alawites should be pushed back to the mountains of western Syria.

As one survivor of the Houla massacre told Channel 4’s Alex Thompson:

He says to us: “They have slaughtered us, they have killed us. When this is all over we will be victorious. And we will go there. And we will find them out and we will slaughter them and we will kill them. We will kill their men, women and children as they killed our men, women and children.”

One thing to remember is that this type of retribution is typical of such bitter conflicts. You will recall the ethnic cleansing in Iraq, but this is prevalent even in the aftermath of conflicts other than civil war, and even from groups that we, near-universally, consider as righteous and noble. [1] Tony Judt, in his brilliant history of postwar Europe:

In France some 10,000 people were killed in ‘extrajudicial’ proceedings, many of them by independent bands of armed resistance groups, notably the Milices Patriotiques, who rounded up suspected collaborators, seized their property and in many cases shot them out of hand.

About a third of those summarily executed in this way were dispatched before the Normandy landings of June 6th 1944, and most of the others fell victim during the next four months of fighting on French soil … no-one was surprised at the reprisals – in the words of one elderly former French prime minister, Edouard Herriot, ‘France will need first to pass through a blood bath before republicans can again take up the reins of power’.

The same sentiment was felt in Italy, where reprisals and unofficial retribution, especially in the Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions, resulted in death tolls approaching 15,000 in the course of the last months of the war – and continued, sporadically, for at least [!!] three more years.

In Poland, the main target of popular vengeance was frequently Jews—150 Jews were killed in liberated Poland in the first four months of 1945. By April 1946 the figure was nearly 1,200 … the worst pogrom occurred in Kielce (Poland), on July 4th 1946, where 42 Jews were murdered and many more injured following a rumour of the abduction and ritual murder of a local child. (pp.42-43)

Europe did pretty well at stemming the tide:

[N]owhere did the unregulated settling of accounts last very long. It was not in the interest of fragile new governments, far from universally accepted and often distinctly makeshift, to allow armed bands to roam the countryside arresting, torturing and killing at will. The first task of the new authorities was to assert a monopoly of force, legitimacy and the institutions of justice … This transition took place as soon as the new powers felt strong enough to disarm the erstwhile partisans, impose the authority of their own police and damp down popular demands for harsh penalties.

The disarming of the resisters proved surprisingly uncontentious in western and central Europe at least. A blind eye was turned to murders and other crimes already committed in the frenzied liberation months: the provisional government of Belgium issued an amnesty for all offences committed by and in the name of the Resistance for a period of 41 days following the official date of the country’s liberation.

All in all [in France] the épuration (purge), as it was known, touched some 350,000 persons, most of whose lives and careers were not dramatically affected. No-one was punished for what we should now describe as crimes against humanity. Responsibility for these, like other war crimes, was imputed to the Germans alone. (p.44)

Even so, 10,000 is a lot of killing for a movement that “provided the country with an inspiring example of the patriotic fulfillment of a national imperative”. Oh, and then there’s this.

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[1] There’s a useful edited volume on this: The Politics of Retribution in Europe:World War II and Its Aftermath, edited by István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt

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Update: David Gardner has an optimistic view of rebel discipline in his FT column this morning:

When [the Assads] do fall, there is natural concern about what will replace them – especially since the Wahhabi Saudis and Qataris are directing their support towards the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Yet despite the regime’s slaughter of (mostly Sunni) civilians, and a few attested rebel atrocities, there have been no mass reprisals against the minorities. This suggests discipline and deliberation by opposition forces on the ground: the regional military councils and the local co-ordinating committees of activists driving the civic uprising. As in Libya, an international alliance against the Assads may have something to work with.

Sectarian rivalry, Alawite retreat and Syrian Balkanisation

In light of the accelerated collapse of the Syrian state, it’s worth looking at the sectarian angle and the prospects for Syria’s territorial unity – and, in particular, at the question of whether Assad and his allies will seek an Alawite state or “mini-state” carved out of the country.

A few passages from Roots of Alawite-Sunni Rivalry in Syria, a recent article in Middle East Policy (Vol. 19, Issue 2, pages 148–156, Summer 2012).

On the historical roots of Alawite domination:

During the period of the French mandate (1920-46), sectarian divisions were deliberately in- cited in order to suppress Arab nationalism … In 1922, the Jabal al-Druze region, located in an area of Druze concentration south of Damascus, was proclaimed a separate unit under French protection, with its own governor and elected congress. The mountain district behind Latakia, with its large Alawite population, became a special administrative regime under heavy French protection and was proclaimed a separate state. Later, in 1922, all but the Jabal al-Druze were united in a Syrian Federation that was dissolved at the end of 1924 and replaced by a Syrian state comprising the states of Aleppo and Damascus and a separate Sanjak of Alexandretta. The Alawite state was, however, excluded from this new arrangement. Except for a brief period, from 1936 to 1939, Alawite and Druze states were administratively separate from Syria until 1942. (p.148)

Until 1920, the Alawites were known to the outside world as the Nusayris or Ansaris. The name change was imposed by the French when they seized control in Syria. “Nusayri” emphasizes the group’s different approach to mainstream Islam, whereas “Alawi” suggests an adherent of Ali (the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad) and accentuates the religion’s similarities to Shii Islam. The Alawites benefited from the mandate more than any other minority group, gaining political autonomy and escaping Sunni control. (p.150)

Origins of Alawite domination of the military:

Another major instrument of French influence on the Alawites was their recruit- ment into the Troupes Spéciales du Levant, a local military force formed in 1921 and later developed into the Syrian and Lebanese armed force … By the end of the mandate, several infantry battalions were composed almost entirely of Alawites. Not one battalion was composed entirely of Sunni Arabs. Even those few battalions with significant Sunni Arab components were filled mostly with men from rural areas and far-off towns … Depressed economic conditions made the army a vehicle for social mobility. For the first time, Alawite youth benefited from a small, but secure, income and became disciplined, trained and exposed to new ideas (pp.150-1)

Post-1963:

On March 8, 1963, a coup by a group of officers, including the Military Committee, brought down the “separatist regime.” Five of the 14 members of the Baathist military committee were Alawites. After the coup, the gaps in the army resulting from purges of political opponents were filled by Alawites. Even the graduating Sunnis cadets were denied their commis- sions: “The representation of Alewis [sic] among the newly appointed officers was as high as 90 percent.” As Batatu points out, many Sunnis are still in the officer corps, but, if they are important, they are important not as a group but as individuals. (p.154)

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With whispers that Assad himself has fled to Latakia, erstwhile capital of the Alawite state, there is renewed interest in the prospect of Syria’s de facto partition, or outright Balkanisation.

Franck Salameh, in The National Interest, asks An Alawite State in Syria?:

For beyond the killings, the world’s indignation and the Syrian regime’s continued recalcitrance, there lurked a method to Assad’s madness that very few observers have deigned address: what animates Assad are communal-survival concerns and Alawite group contingencies; that the international community and the Syrian opposition’s oratory about Syria’s unity and national integrity are the least of the regime’s preoccupations; that it might be too late at this point in the game for the Alawites to abdicate their reign and resign themselves to a subservient future in Syria; that many assumptions about the current shape of the Syrian state are broken beyond repair; and that the Alawites would rather dismantle their existing republic and retreat into fortifications in the mountains than share power with a Sunni-Arab majority ill-prepared to grant either democracy or clemency to its erstwhile wardens.

On ethnic cleansing as a strategy for partition:

And so today’s strings of wanton murders, sexual assaults, torture, arbitrary detentions, targeted bombings and destruction of neighborhoods—and what they entail in terms of displacements, deportations and population movements—are nothing if not the groundwork of a future Alawite entity; the grafting of new facts on the ground and the drafting of new frontiers. No longer able to rule in the name of Arab unity (and in the process preserve their own ethnic and sectarian autonomy), the Alawites may retreat into the Levantine highlands overlooking the Mediterranean.

On the viability of an Alawite state:

Though its industrial resources are quite limited, this projected Alawite region benefits from a well-developed infrastructure, rich arable highlands, fertile coastal plains, abundant water sources, Syria’s only deep-water harbors—Tartous and Latakia—and an international airport that would make an emerging state self-sufficient and supremely defensible

Katie Paul, in Foreign Affairs, has a Letter from Tartus:

In several conversations, Alawites said that thousands of families have relocated to the coast. Others spoke of friends and family members who have not yet moved but have purchased homes there in anticipation of a shift in fortunes. Although the real figure is impossible to determine, visits to Damascus, Homs, and Tartus indicated that such numbers are plausible.

Paul offers a note of caution on viability.

Import-export businesses fuel the economies of Tartus and Latakia, and those would suffer if a de facto partition develops further, since merchants would be unable to move their goods to market in Damascus and Aleppo across a hostile border. Although there is some discussion among the Alawi elite that they might find oil and gas on the coast offshore … sectors such as tourism and agriculture are not enough to sustain an Alawi state on their own. The entity’s regional neighbors, wary of their own domestic secessionist movements, would be loath to recognize it.

Roula Khalaf, in the Financial Times, quotes a sceptical Emile Hokayem:

For months now, opposition activists have been claiming that the regime’s long-term survival plan is to create an Alawite enclave. They say the military strategy has been designed to secure religiously mixed areas around the cities of Homs and Hama that could be connected to the coast, and crucially also to nearby Lebanon. The displacement of population in the fighting has meant that more Alawites have moved to the coastal areas, and more Sunni have left the mixed areas in central Syria.Emile Hokayem … question[s] whether an Alawite militia could be sustainable. The Assad regime would have little strategic value for its allies, be it the Russians or the Iranians, or even Lebanon’s Hizbollah, if it ended up defending an Alawite enclave. If that happened, Mr Hokayem points out, it would be solely focused on survival – and on revenge.

Richard Spencer, in a persuasive and reflective piece in The Telegraph, is also doubtful:

But Syria is not the same [as Yugoslavia]. Whatever the current state of the European Union financially, its superstructure has been a security blanket for nearly all the former Communist nations of Eastern Europe, whether they have joined or only seek to do so. The superstructure of the Levant is a continued angling for sectarian advantage, where emotions and fears, even of a majority that would dearly love to forget all about differences of religion, are easily stirred. Syria’s role model is not Czechoslovakia but Iraq, where Sunni and Shia can exercise power over each other but are unwilling to share it; or even Israel and the Palestinian territories, where the Jewish engagement with Arabs seems to be based around an assumption of permanent semi-conflict.

In short, the division of Syria would be a recipe for permanent instability, in which the West, Russia, Iran and a variety of Islamist sub-groups would be constantly manoeuvring to press their ends, and in which, as in the Occupied Territories, war and diplomacy are simply extensions of each other

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Finally, courtesy of Wikileaks, a 2006 US diplomatic cable on regime dynamics:

At the end of the day, the regime is dominated by the Asad family and to a lesser degree by Bashar Asad’s maternal family, the Makhlufs [sic], with many family members believe to be increasingly corrupt. The family, and hangers on, as well as the larger Alawite sect, are not immune to feuds and anti-regime conspiracies, as was evident last year when intimates of various regime pillars (including the Makhloufs) approached us about post-Bashar possibilities. Corruption is a great divider and Bashar’s inner circle is subject to the usual feuds and squabbles related to graft and corruption. For example, it is generally known that Maher Asad is particularly corrupt and incorrigible. He has no scruples in his feuds with family members or others. There is also tremendous fear in the Alawite community about retribution if the Sunni majority ever regains power.

Massacres and intervention in history

The Houla massacre – in which 108 people were killed, most executed – has renewed calls for intervention in Syria.

General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has been touting the “military option” on television. The philosophe of the Arab Spring, Bernard-Henri Lévy – hard as this is to believe – has called for action.

I still think war is highly unlikely, as I spell out in this piece for BBC News. But I thought it interesting to look at the relationship between massacres and intervention.

The passages below are taken from Martha Finnemore’s Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention [PDF], a chapter in the 1996 edited volume The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics.

On the history of intervention:

Before the twentieth century virtually all instances of military intervention to protect people other than the intervener’s own nationals involved protection of Christians from the Ottoman Turks. In at least four instances during the nineteenth century, European states used humanitarian claims to influence Balkan policy in ways that would have required states to use force – in the Greek War for Independence (1821-1827); in the Lebanon/Syria conflict of 1860-1861; during the Bulgarian agitation of 1876-1878; and in response to the Armenian massacres (1894-1917). Although full-scale military intervention did not result in all these instances, the claims made and their effects on policy in the other cases shed light on the evolution and influence of humanitarian claims during this period.

On who used to get protected:

[The Greek War for Independence] illustrates the circumscribed definition of who was “human” in the nineteenth-century conception of that term. The massacre of Christians was a humanitarian disaster; the massacre of Muslims was not. This was true regardless of the fact that the initial atrocities of the war were committed by the Christian insurgents (admittedly after years of harsh Ottoman rule). The initial Christian uprising at Morea “might well have been allowed to burn itself out ‘beyond the pale of civilization'”; it was only the wide-scale and very visible atrocities against Christians that put the events on the agenda of major powers.

Hypocrisy has pedigree:

[H]umanitarian action was rarely taken when it jeopardized other stated goals or interests of a state. Humanitarians were sometimes able to mount considerable pressure on policy makers to act contrary to stated geostrategic interests, as in the case of Disraeli and the Bulgarian agitation, but they never succeeded. Humanitarian claims did, however, provide states with new or intensified interests in an area and new reasons to act where none had existed previously. Without the massacre of Maronites in Syria, France would almost certainly not have intervened. Further, she left after her humanitarian mission was accomplished and did not stay on to pursue other geostrategic goals, as some states had feared she would. It is less clear whether there would have been intervention in the Greek war for independence without humanitarian justifications for such interventions. Russia certainly had other reasons to intervene, but she was also probably the state with the highest level of identification with the Orthodox Christian victims of these massacres.

On the reluctant humanitarians:

What is interesting in [some] cases is that states that might legitimately have claimed humanitarian justifications for their intervention did not do so. India’s intervention in East Pakistan in the wake of Muslim massacres of Hindus, Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda toppling the Idi Amin regime, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia ousting the Khmers Rouges – in every case intervening states could have justified their actions with strong humanitarian claims. None did. In fact, India initially claimed humanitarian justifications but quickly retracted them. Why?

How humanitarian intervention has evolved:

[T]he definition of who qualifies as human and therefore as deserving of humanitarian protection by foreign governments has changed. Whereas in the nineteenth century European Christians were the sole focus of humanitarian intervention, this focus has been expanded and universalized such that by the late twentieth century all human beings are treated as equally deserving in the international normative discourse. In fact, states are very sensitive to charges that they are “normatively backward” and still privately harbor distinctions.

Finally, on the norms of intervention, and power:

[T]he way in which normative claims are related to power capabilities deserves attention. The traditional Gramscian view would argue that these are coterminous; the international normative structure is created by and serves the most powerful. Humanitarian action generally, and humanitarian intervention specifically, do not obviously serve the powerful. The expansion of humanitarian intervention practices since the last century suggests that the relationship between norms and power may not be so simple.