Syria and The Dangers of Empathy
The English language is not equipped to describe what it feels like to watch a child choking to death from a poison gas attack. The videos and images that have circulated across the internet since the bombings in a rebel-held area of Syria have rightly mortified the globe, with millions demanding a response. There were immediate calls for a statement of condemnation from the UN Security Council, as well as investigative action.
Whatever the UN might ultimately do, the response from the US has been swift and forceful. Acting on his own authority, President Trump ordered an attack on a Syrian airbase on Thursday night. More than 50 Tomahawk cruise misses were deployed, killing at least 16 people according to the Syrian government.
A redress of this nature sends a message. After Obama’s bluff was called in 2012 over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, the now-infamous “red line”, many people believed that our credibility was permanently damaged. Trump’s actions may help to restore that balance. But there is also an undeniable danger in such a rapid military escalation. After embroiling ourselves in a series of wars that seem destined to continue in perpetuity, we ought to be sure we know what we’re doing before risking another. However painful it might be, watching human beings murdered with neurotoxins does not put anyone in the right frame of mind to make snap decisions with such far-reaching consequences.
What makes empathy so dangerous in a situation like this one is that when we put ourselves in a position of a father weeping over his children, we do not stop to think. And when we have the level of destructive capability that America is capable of, we have an enormous responsibility to think before we act.
Taking as dispassionate a look as possible at the attack on Syrian civilians, there are real questions that ought to be considered. Why would Assad do this? Has he actually gone insane? Maybe he has. Because it is difficult to understand what his rationale could have been if he remains the ruthless but lucid leader who has successfully remained in power despite years of civil war with the majority of the world’s nations demanding his ouster.
Assad’s government, by any measure, has been headed for victory. Rebel-held areas have been shrinking. The US has been largely marginalized. ISIS, due to Syria’s coordination with both Russia and America, has been dramatically scaled back in the country. Assad was winning. Why, after all of that, would he deliberately provoke international outrage at this level in order to murder civilians? Why? It doesn’t seem to make sense.
Alternate explanations have been offered, some more dubious than others. Russia claims, for example, that the airstrikes were performed with conventional weapons and that they hit a rebel-operated weapons depot where chemical weapons were stored. Maybe this has some truth to it, and maybe not. But the point is that the level of uncertainty is too high to be sure.
Bashar al-Assad is not Kim Jong Un. He is a brutal dictator, not an unpredictable madman. The notion that he would upend the stability of his position in this way is, at a minimum, surprising. And actions that are this out of character ought to be carefully examined. Not responded to with a knee-jerk reaction.
But that, of course, requires a level head. And a level head is something that empathy takes away from us. The level of anger felt by anyone who watched what happened in Syria a few days ago is well beyond the pale of cold analysis. Donald Trump himself seemed stricken. “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies”, he said, “that crosses many, many lines.” Most people would agree.
The consequences of what we do now, however, are hard to overstate. After US launched its missile strike on the Syrian airfield, Russia suspended a 2015 air agreement that was aimed at minimizing the risk of inflight incidents between American and Russian aircraft while in Syrian airspace. Putin has come out and said that he believes the US violated international law, and his spokesman declared that the dangers of confrontation between the two major powers has been “significantly increased” because of the incident.
This is objectively terrifying. We may have lost our sense of ever-present foreboding with the end of the Cold War, but the United States and Russia are still fully capable of destroying each other. A proxy war over Syria would be a step we do not want to take unless we are confident in our facts. As of right now, we are not.
If Assad did order the strike on civilians, then surely a response was required. You don’t get to use chemical weapons on children with impunity. That is a value that most Americans would share. But we aren’t operating on facts right now, we are running on anger. We are reacting based on empathy. Not reason. Not even compassion. Blind outrage. When our actions risk igniting another world war, this one in the nuclear age, that is a very dangerous thing to do.
