People used to always say, as an example of why Saddam Hussein was a horrible, must-be-removed creature, "He used chemical weapons on his own people." Now, the bad rap on Bashar al-Assad of Syria is the same thing: "He used chemical weapons on his own people."
I get why the chemical weapons are a bad thing. I always wonder about the "his own people" part mattering. Would either of these actions be okay if the dictator in question had used chemical weapons on, say, someone other than his own people? Aren't we concerned about the mass murder, not with who is getting mass murdered?
I asked a question not unlike this during the Iraq mess and someone wrote me to say, "What you don't get is that if a man was willing to use chemical weapons on his own people, he wouldn't hesitate to use them on his enemies." Uh, how about this? A man who was willing to murder any hundred thousand people wouldn't hesitate a whole lot to murder any other hundred thousand people. It's not like these guys work on the quota system. For that matter, murdering a hundred thousand people by any means makes you a pretty miserable excuse for a human being even if you don't do it with chemical weapons.
I understand chemical weapons are in many ways more dangerous than some (not all) conventional weapons because you don't really aim them at enemy soldiers. You just take out a whole section of the population, including women and children. I don't mean to trivialize that threat. But you could watch a lot of politicians on the news the last few days and get the feeling we wouldn't be talking about "punishing him" — by killing some of his people who escaped the chemical weapons — if all he'd done was shoot 100,000+ non-Syrians. That, we could overlook.