How I learned to love the Tomahawk missile

There are five points I considered when determining my stance on Syria.

1. War                              

War is horrific. We’ve forgotten that, somehow. Because they won’t show coffins on TV anymore, or maybe because we’ve stopped calling it “war.”

We’ve become “war weary.” We’ve gotten sick of it.

War is too vivid, too real, too important and too devastating to just become detached from.

We can’t afford to “get sick of” war.

We must hate violence against other humans.

Because when we’re sick of war, we call in sick.

When we hate war, we make peace.

2. Sarin

Sarin is an illegal nerve agent — a chemical weapon — that causes asphyxia. You choke to death when exposed to sarin. No matter how desperately you gasp for air, you suffocate.

Its mechanism — denying the body the ability to process oxygen — is identical in method to insecticides.

Bashir al-Assad used sarin gas last month to kill 1,429 Syrians, including 426 children.

He choked 426 children to death.

3. Me

I hate war, a lot. I wanted American soldiers to leave Afghanistan long before we started to depart. Same with Iraq.

I hated President Bush and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., because I thought they were going to push us into war with Iran, North Korea, Russia — you name it.

Obama’s been disappointing. Drones everywhere. Assassinations. Libya.

For the last decade there has been constant war, even if they stopped calling it that.
I hate war.

We need to make war on Bashar al-Assad.

4. Syria

This is not about regime change in Syria. This is not about helping the “good rebels” or whether or not we also help the “bad rebels.” It’s not about picking sides in the Syrian
Civil War or trying to resolve it.  

This isn’t even about Syria. Syria is just the background music. And although our hearts ache for the Syrian people, for the innocent men and women and children who were brutally suffocated by a man they once hoped would bring freedom to Syria, they too, are bit players.

This moment is about one nation, its might, its promise and its responsibility.

5. America

This moment is about human dignity and about America.

We must strive to be the world’s moral beacon, even if we sometimes fall short of that goal.

Chemical weapons are a red line. They might be the reddest line out there.

And if there isn’t a repercussion to crossing the red line, we’ve failed.

We’ve failed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. We’ve failed our founding promise: that all lives are equally worthy and endowed with inherent dignity. We’ve failed everyone who will live in a future where the official policy of the United States is to not care about chemical weapons attacks because “we’re sick of war.”

We need to hate war, and we need to bomb Bashar al-Assad.

— shlumorg@indiana.edu
Follow columnist
Luke Morgan on Twitter @flukemorgan.