The title of this post is intentionally provocative, but hear me out. The recent chemical attack by Syria is interesting for a number of reasons, but there's a meta-narrative that stands out for me. During the last several years of this civil war, many thousands of Syrian civilians have been brutally killed by all sides, with the Assad regime chief among the perpetrators. The regime methods of killing have involved conventional (but inaccurate) munitions delivery by aircraft or artillery, attacks by ground forces, and widespread torture and execution by regime security forces. A tiny fraction of these deaths have come about from chemical attacks - likely no more than a few thousand - but these attacks have caused by far the greatest consternation internationally and have been the impetus for actual or planned strikes against the regime.
The obvious explanation for this seeming incongruity is that the world doesn't really care about Syrian children so much as they care about the norms prohibiting the use of chemical weapons in war. Though I have no doubt that the uproar might have been a bit more muted if the chemical weapons had been deployed only against rebel fighters and not civilians, it seems clear that the concern is focused on the weapon and not the target.
There is a long history of the revulsion attached to the use of chemical weapons; successive agreements from the Hague Convention in 1899 to the modern Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993 have all outlawed the use of said weapons, and current agreements also outlaw their production or stockpiling. This has not kept countries from using them; obviously they were used quite a bit in WWI, and the only thing that limited their use in WWII appears to have been deterrence and German concerns about damage to their horse-based logistics system. The US has used defoliants extensively in Southeast Asia, which may or may not constitute technical violations of existing agreements but certainly appear to be chemical warfare.
My question, however, is why these weapons are seen as beyond the pale. Other so-called WMDs make sense for why they are not used: biological weapons have the very real issue of potentially causing a pandemic (e.g. a weaponized super-flu or hemorrhagic fever or whatever), and nuclear weapons have the associated concern with fallout and long-term radiological hazard. Yet there are chemical weapons that have limited dispersal and relatively modest long-term environmental effects (e.g. sarin), so peripheral concerns about their use seem unwarranted. (Some weapons, such as VX, can indeed persist in the environment for a long time, and a strong case can be made for banning them on environmental grounds.)
The only logic I can see for banning them is more psychological than logical: we somehow think it's not sporting to kill enemy troops with chemical weapons. This smacks of hypocrisy; is a thermobaric weapon really any more humane than a nerve agent? What about incendiary weapons, both big and small? For that matter, I'm not really convinced that the person dying has a preference for being blown up or shot even by more standard conventional weapons like high explosive munitions or bullets.
It is not clear to me that chemical weapons are particularly good weapons - modern NBC protections mean most troops in a sophisticated military would not be terribly inconvenienced by a chemical attack. So there's reason to argue that chemical weapons nowadays are primarily intended to be employed against civilians, and as such should be illegal. But it's not at all obvious to me that this makes sense from a historical perspective - the revulsion attached to chemical weapons goes back quite far, even when substantial military advantage was seen with their deployment, and stockpiles appeared to be maintained until recently specifically as deterrents against other military forces.
So, what do you think? Does this specific ban make any sense? It seems to me that we should be spending more time worrying about the targets of attacks rather than the method involved in killing them, presuming that said methods do not have long term consequences to e.g. the environment.