The US cruise missile attack on al-Shayrat airbase on Thursday, involving 59 cruise missiles launched from warships in the Eastern Mediterranean, has been framed variously by members of the Trump administration.
The chemical attack earlier in the week, supposedly launched from the airbase in question, had left over 70 dead, producing a sequence of terrifying images of foaming bodies of all ages.
Sources connected with the Assad regime denied that Russian or government forces had deliberately deployed the nerve agent against the civilian population, citing the explosion of an al-Qaeda chemical weapons factory in Khan Sheikhoun as the source of the calamity.
Absent a Security Council resolution on this issue, the US had operated independently, adopting a policing and punitive stance against the Assad regime. 'This action,' Speaker of the House Paul Ryan insisted, 'was appropriate and just.'
In his 8 April letter to the Speaker to the House, Trump explained the action had been undertaken 'in order to degrade the Syrian military's ability to conduct further chemical weapons attacks and to dissuade the Syrian regime from using or proliferating chemical weapons, thereby promoting the stability of the region and averting a worsening of the region's current humanitarian catastrophe'.
Several elements are discernible: the national security concept of instability caused by chemical weapons proliferation; the humanitarian rationale of civilian protection, averring to the idea of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine that suffered considerably after the 2011 strikes on Libya; and plain speaking power.
International lawyer Harold Hongju Koh last year outlined a series of tests in the Houston Law Review, all of which are merely capitulations of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in modern, post-Libya dress. Humanitarian intervention would, for instance, be lawful to halt 'consequences significantly disruptive to international order — including proliferation of chemical weapons, massive refugee outflows, and events destabilising to regional peace and stability'.
The grounds for this would be further hardened in the face of an indifferent UN Security Council, and would have to be 'limited force for genuinely humanitarian purposes' and 'necessary and proportionate to address the imminent threat'.
"In any final analysis, there can be no humanitarianism on the tips of missiles."
Various insurmountable problems are thrown up by these formulations. If humanitarian intervention is supposedly engineered to punish a regime in breach of obligations to protect the civilian population, it starts looking, all too often, like an act of regime change. At what point is the distinction on such matters as