So what is your red line? If Iran used a nuke and killed 1 million of it's own people

[Posteritatis]

147. The idiotic responses to this OP aside, thinking about where the red line is is a Good Thing

Last edited Tue Sep 3, 2013, 10:31 PM - Edit history (1)

It's a question worth thinking about, save for people who don't recognize any such line at all (which I don't agree with but at least give them points for consistency when they apply it properly).

The situation you set up there is a bit of a straw man, sure, but I also think that's useful for this sort of discussion. We've got one end of the spectrum, which is somewhere between "actual peace" and "conventional war with conventional weapons and a basic respect for the surviving human decencies in combat," and at the other end we've got "uses actual nukes on their own population" or "kills and eats enemy POWs for rations" or somesuch bad-movie scenario. One end is, well, not okay, but one of the accepted results of failed conflict resolution, and the other end is almost universally considered the "time for the rolled up newspaper" interventionist approach.

So if I have a scenario where I believe that yes, it's time for other powers to intervene, with armed force, to compel one party to Stop Doing That, it doesn't matter too much for the sake of the argument if that scenario is absurd, which Iran dropping a nuclear weapon on, say, Tabriz obviously would be. What matters is that the line exists: if a country did that I think it would be time for the world community to compel them to fix their behaviour. (This is one reason the Chechen wars made me really nervous at the time, since there were mixed signals that Russia was going to nuke, or at least deliberately destroy, Grozny at one point.)

So I've got a position which I consider to be on the wrong side of that line, which means that there is such a line somewhere in my head. If I recognize that, then it means I ought to be putting some effort into figuring out where that line is, or how far I can get away from our Maximally Silly Scenario while still feeling sure I'm on the other side of it. What if they nuked Yazd, which is only a quarter or so the size, or Dorood, which is only a hundred thousand, or if it was a rebel (or invading) force that was in the field in a conventional war where a few villages happened to be in the zone?

Maybe I decide in that case that the size of the target doesn't matter as much as the use of the weapon, and put "anything nuclear" on the "dude, no" side of the line. Time to start thinking about whether it's only those, or if there's other things like biological or chemical weapons, or if there's extenuating circumstances, or if context is significant (or not), or if the precedent of action or inaction shifts the line at all. Where's a few things I consider firmly on that side of it; use of nukes would count, and similar huge-scale things like active genocide (according to the legal definition of same, mind; people love throwing the term around to stick it to everything).

The further away I get from that extreme, straw-man point, though, the more important it is that I think increasingly hard about what other situations I'm letting land on the interventionist side of the line. At least up until the last few years the bulk of the world's consensus was that deploying chemical weapons against noncombatants - people certainly ignored enough tossing-around of mustard gas in wars in the eighties - was on the bad side of that line. (Or, I might suggest somewhat cynically, the consensus was there until the situation fucking came up.) Do I agree there? I lean in that direction, though I also recognize that there's already an extraordinarily ugly situation going on. If Assad had reacted to the initial protests before the war by nerve-gassing the demonstrators, that would be about as over-the-red-line as I can think of in a feasible situation, but things have managed to get a lot less fuzzy since.

All of that's before getting into the range of possible responses once an actor goes over the line, wherever the line may be drawn, of course.

So yeah. I just don't know. Short of the most absolute sovereigntists and the most absolute pacifists, this kind of thing is more complex and more consequential than a lot of the discussion about it has been by an embarrassingly long shot. I'd like to know for sure which side of the line things fall on in my own head. I'd like to know where the line as a whole is as well.

Those are both important questions, which I think everyone who has any interest in the world as a whole needs to be asking themselves. For now I've got an inclination for one, and far less certainty than I'm comfortable with on the other.