Nine years ago this month, the air in Ghouta, near Damascus in Syria, was made fatal to breathe. Over a thousand choked to death in terrible pain. As with all chemical weapons, the sarin used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad on this rebellious suburb was more effective on women and children.
The children were too small to escape the gas, which clung, heavier than air, to the ground. And the women, some of them doomed by traditions of modesty, were not hosed down fast enough to remove the chemical agent from their bodies.
For almost a decade now, this event has become part of two myths. One of them is broadly correct, the other a scurrilous lie. It’s hard to know whether the truth or the lie has travelled further.
The lie first, for clarity. Instantaneously, and growing in strength thereafter, the regime and its allies in Russia, Iran and China began to claim that the attack everyone had seen and observed, and the chemicals smuggled out of the country and tested, cannot have meant the things our eyes, ears and laboratory equipment told us they meant.
It wasn’t a chemical attack, they said; it was a chemical attack but the chemical used was not sarin; it was a chemical attack, but it was carried out by America, or Turkey, or the rebels themselves.
If these all sound mutually contradictory, they are. If these excuses seem desperate and grasping, that’s because they are those things. If they appear a transparent attempt to ‘flood the zone’ and to overcome Ockham’s razor with force of numbers — they were that, and little else.
In Brian Whitaker’s book about this subject, Denying the Obvious, he surveys the landscape of alternative theories and notes that they are all post-hoc, feeble, and built more on the mutual reinforcement of unreconcilable trivia, and the psychological need to believe, than a reckoning with the facts.
They never could fit all the facts, but that’s hardly the point. The accumulated theory built on vague suspicions, channelled through minutiae, in service of a sectarian, minoritarian government dependent on Russia and Iran for survival.
The chemical attack soon became an intellectual choose-your-own-adventure. So determined were so many factions and sub-factions to defend the Assad regime from the possibility of retribution — everything was grist for their mill.
In the years since, two other large-scale chemical attacks caught international attention: in Khan Sheikhun in April 2017, and Douma a year later. Idle for years, but with a growing toolkit, the regime’s allies, defenders and agents jumped in, offering reasons why these could not possibly have been committed by the only armed force capable of committing them. No one polls this question, but millions of Americans likely believe them.
As before: a catalogue of evasions, lies, or excuses for why — if the regime had used chemical weapons — it would have been ultimately justified. Since August 2013, all percolated happily in millions of minds.
Some facts. The Syrian civil war has been fought for over eleven years. In that time, the regime is alleged to have used chemical agents, not once or twice, but many hundreds of times. Three hundred uses were collated in a 2019 report from the Global Public Policy Institute, which remains the benchmark for study of the subject.
To doubt this tide of evidence does not make you informed or savvy. It makes you beholden to the lies of others, and a fool of your own making.
In 2013, all of this was hard to predict. In the ten years I have covered Syria’s war, it was only relatively late that informed opinion — especially among the Arab states and their diplomats — concluded that the regime would not be forced from power.
Even after Russia intervened to save the regime in 2015, the intelligent people insisted that this was a last-minute rescue mission, and would conclude with Assad being elbowed aside in favour of a more acceptable regime figure, who could begin to reach a negotiated settlement.
What people forgot then was the effect that using weapons of mass destruction successfully — without retribution — as on a regime and a leader.
Saddam Hussein did the same thing, remember. He got away with using chemicals to murder in war and against civilians, and therefore thought — in his own mind — that he was special, given celestial permission, and was beyond the reach of consequences and the law.
Now for the other myth.
In August 2013, the president of the United States and the British parliament derailed any attempt to punish the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons, or to use force to prevent the next chemical attack.
The Obama administration fell for an eleventh-hour plan from Russia, of all countries, to disarm the regime’s chemical arsenal, like the worst schmucks alive. For years afterwards, and even in their memoirs, officials maintained that this transparent con job had been a fantastic piece of diplomacy on their part, even as the other attacks mounted up — and the US, France and Britain struck the regime to damage its surviving chemical infrastructure.
At the time, others predicted that Ghouta would license more sabre-rattling and more violence from America’s enemies, who scented weakness and saw a Western Alliance divided and captive to an inferiority complex. The intelligent people demurred, and said that things don’t work like that.
Russia invaded Ukraine, in the first salvo of what became this year’s attempt at wholesale annihilation, seven months later. Again, the smart people said: we simply cannot attribute the one thing to the influence of the other.
But people do take their cues, whether or not our expert class believes they ought. Seven months after the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government, and humiliated the United States and NATO in August of last year, Russia invaded Ukraine again, this time with annexation on its mind.
in the past ten years, it had chemical weapons to try to assassinate Russian exiles in Britain. We would be remiss, nine years on from Ghouta’s suffering, to overlook these connections.