Syria—it’s time to launch a diplomatic war

Last week, the United States, French and UK governments justified their limited attacks on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities on the grounds that the Assad regime had breached an internationally accepted barrier—he had used chemical weapons.

Efforts have been made to outlaw chemical weapons for over a century, starting with the 1925 Geneva Protocol and culminating in the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1997 when the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was established. Today,…