Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia
N.Y. TIMES
The United States and Russia reached a sweeping agreement on Saturday that called for Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be removed or destroyed by the middle of 2014 and indefinitely stalled the prospect of American airstrikes.
The joint announcement, on the third day of intensive talks in Geneva, also set the stage for one of the most challenging undertakings in the history of arms control.
“This situation has no precedent,” said Amy E. Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are cramming what would probably be five or six years’ worth of work into a period of several months, and they are undertaking this in an extremely difficult security environment due to the ongoing civil war.”
George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, emphasized that the possibility of unilateral American military force was still on the table. “We haven’t made any changes to our force posture to this point,” Mr. Little said. “The credible threat of military force has been key to driving diplomatic progress, and it’s important that the Assad regime lives up to its obligations under the framework agreement.”
In Syria, the state news agency, SANA, voiced cautious approval of the Russian and American deal, calling it “a starting point,” though the government issued no immediate statement about its willingness to implement the agreement.
In any case, the deal was at least a temporary reprieve for President Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian government, and it formally placed international decision-making about Syria into the purview of Russia, one of Mr. Assad’s staunchest supporters and military suppliers.
That reality was bitterly seized on by the fractured Syrian rebel forces, most of which have pleaded for American airstrikes. Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the Western-backed rebels’ nominal military command, the Supreme Military Council, denounced the initiative.
An immediate test of the viability of the accord will come within a week, when the Syrian government is to provide a “comprehensive listing” of its chemical arsenal. That list is to include the types and quantities of Syria’s poison gas, the chemical munitions it possesses, and the location of its storage, production and research sites.
If Mr. Assad fails to comply with the agreement, the issue would be referred to the United Nations Security Council, where the violations would be taken up under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes punitive action, Mr. Kerry said.
Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia made clear that his country, which wields a veto in the Security Council, had not withdrawn its objections to the use of force.
Satan himself could not devise a revenge for those who kill infants.
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Obama has described the proposed airstrikes as “a limited, proportional” response. But it’s worth recalling the words of the great Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik. Writing about another massacre that lifted eyebrows in the West — a government-tolerated pogrom against Jews in 1903 in the Russian city of Kishinev — he said Satan himself could not devise a revenge appropriate for those who deliberately slaughter infants.
Conceivably, cruise missiles could be used to target the children of Assad, his senior military commanders and the crews that load rockets and artillery shells with sarin. That would be a form of retribution, albeit one more suited to the most vicious of street gangs than the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.
The slaying of 400 children with sarin, and thousands of others by less exotic but no less brutal means, poses a moral as well as a political problem. It might call for justice; it might call for exemplary punishment (which handing over a fraction of one’s arsenal is not). Or it might be a tragedy best lamented and then ignored. In any event, cruise missiles are no magical solution to a horror.
Proportionality, in other words, has nothing to do with it.