Letters: A moral dilemma on chemical attacks

Re “Ranking global atrocities,” Opinion, Sept. 12

Meghan Daum comes across as nonplused by the chemical weapons attacks in Syria allegedly carried out by the government of President Bashar Assad. What if a government shoots a small tactical nuclear warhead out of an artillery tube against a real or perceived enemy? Will we be nonplused, war weary, apathetic?

Using poison gas crosses a line and requires a sanctioning response. Why? Because it’s a reborn atrocity long thought dead and abandoned. That’s why using sarin gas doesn’t fit into a hierarchical discussion of today’s atrocities.

As Daum points out, we currently have enough atrocities. We need to attempt to close the door once again on the use of poison gas.

Frank E. Roberts

Temecula

The atrocities that cause pain to innocents should not be ranked, as pain is a monstrous equalizer that hurts all of its victims regardless of age, gender, class or race.

But those images of stricken children in Syria remind us of the innocence and powerlessness of the victims, and therefore they have been used to emphasize the cruelty of the perpetrator. Not surprisingly, President Obama has appealed to parents in his attempt to justify military intervention in Syria.

Although it is difficult to predict the outcome in Syria, those images of children suffering are now forever in our public archive.

As Susan Sontag wrote in her book, “Regarding the Pain of Others”: “Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens and cannot possibly encompass all the reality of a people’s agony, they still perform an immensely positive function. The image says: keep these events in your memory.”

Berta Graciano-Buchman

Beverly Hills

Daum ponders the basis for ranking atrocities. Obama, desperately striving to take the moral high ground, has studiously avoided that question.

The answer is starkly impolitic: A kind of geographic and political calculus underlies the ranking of atrocities.

Syria occupies part of an oil-rich region on which the U.S. and other economic powers depend. War there poses an enormous threat to international commerce. The use of poison gas, difficult to counter with conventional arms, invites escalation to nuclear warfare, especially by Israel.

The unspoken truth is that unleashing poison gas in the Middle East may adversely impact the global economy. By contrast, genocidal warfare in remote corners of Africa barely affects international commerce, hence the ignoble discounting of lives lost there.

Gene Martinez

Orcutt, Calif.

Ranking atrocities may, as Daum writes, be difficult. But when it comes to killing women and children, the U.S. is a leader.

In Hiroshima, one U.S. atomic bomb killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and wounded many more. The bombing of Dresden by the Allies incinerated at least 20,000 German civilians. But war is hell, and we did what we had to do.

In Syria, about 100,000 people have died in its civil war. We did nothing. But today we are talking about going to war because more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in poison gas attacks.

Is it any wonder the public is voting no?

Arthur O. Armstrong

Manhattan Beach

I completely concur with Daum. Ranking atrocities results mainly in legitimizing most of them and does nothing to diminish or eradicate them.

On the contrary, such ranking affirms the degradation of whole classes of people and makes future degradations more likely.

Marta Vago

Santa Monica

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