Quote:
Originally Posted by Orruar
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Can anyone explain what makes chemical weapons so special? Is there really a big difference between being killed by sarin gas and being killed by little pieces of metal tearing through your body?
I suspect our aversion to chemical weapons is due to similar reasons for our aversion to terrorism. It's a way for a relatively poor person/people to exert much greater power than they otherwise could. It would take many millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles to do the same damage done by 19 men on 9/11 for a fraction of that. 19 box cutters + 19 plane tickets = ~6k. We want other countries to follow certain rules of war because those rules benefit us. You may be saying that terrorism is qualitatively different because it targets civilians. If you are thinking this, please consider the massive amounts of collateral damage that our bombs cause. We have avenged 9/11 many times over in terms of civilian body count.
Put another way, I wonder if the following is true: The British hated the colonial soldiers that used guerrilla warfare in the same way we hate those that use chemical weapons, and for the same reasons.
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overstating your point. and you're conflating chemical weapons with terrorism.
the difference is that chemical weapons are inherently uncontrollable and unusually cruel. you can control the damage a bomb does by using it responsibly and ethically. obviously bombs are often misused, and that becomes a new debate. but they are controllable. you can't control a chemical weapon. it's untargeted and harms civilians as readily as combatants. a shift in wind can mean thousands of extra civilian deaths. the other side of the coin is cruelty. it may seem unnecessary to differentiate death from death, but it's something human civilization has done for millennia now. dying by metal or fire is typical of war. dying by unthinkably horrific illness is not, and most nations agreed that they didn't want to see that expansion of the norms of war.
terrorism is another matter entirely. terrorism, as it's come to be understood, is decried because it intentionally targets civilians, often in as large numbers as possible. that is flatly unacceptable from a moral standpoint. there is a significant difference between collateral damage and intentionally targeting civilians. your 9/11 comparison is disingenuous. the US has far greater capabilities. american civilian casualties are limited by the capabilities of al qaeda, et al. civilian casualties in iraq/afghanistan are limited only by american restraint. consider an alternate reality where terrorism and, more generally, intentionally targeting civilians is not internationally unacceptable. which side of this conflict would benefit more? the moral and international implications of civilian casualties are the only reasons the US didn't decisively end this conflict a decade ago.