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The United States and some allies are considering military strikes against Syrian government
targets in response to that government's large-scale use of chemical weapons in its civil war.
Even if the United States and some willing coalition partners are satisfied themselves
that military force is justified, they will face tough questions about the legality of
these armed strikes. Here are three things to know about international law in this context.
First, the only legal grounds for using significant military force that are clear and universally
agreed upon are a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing force or self-defense against
an armed attack.
In this case, though, there's no realistic chance for a Security Council approval to
use force, because Russia and perhaps China would block that. And, there's no strong legal
argument that the United States or its allies are defending themselves, at least not in
a traditional sense. Although they may try to construct an argument that chemical weapons
pose a regional or global threat, they're really defending the Syrian people in an internal
civil war.
Second, the fact that chemical weapons and their use are outlawed under international
law will likely feature heavily in the public justification for any strike against Syria,
but there isn't strong precedent -- at least not yet -- for the notion that military intervention
is an appropriate response to violations of those bans.
The United States and its allies want to reinforce the strong taboo against using chemical weapons,
but they'd really be stretching existing law to do so this way.
The third point, however, is that even without a clear and widely-accepted legal justification,
the United States and its allies could argue that their intervention is nevertheless legitimate
and justified under the circumstances, especially as necessary to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.
As the Kosovo example showed in 1999, many states and international actors are willing
to accept military intervention as necessary, in certain narrow contexts, to deal with certain
emergency situations when other diplomatic options have been exhausted.
Depending on how persuasive such arguments are to the international community, and how
successful any military action is, such actions that lack clear legal basis in past interpretation
could contribute ultimately to some evolution in the international law regulating military
intervention.