Joe Biden has chimed in: “”There is no doubt that an essential international norm has been violated.” Reading from the same script, Jay Carney, also speaking for the White House, said “We cannot allow this kind of violation of an international norm, with all the attendant grave consequences that it represents, to go unanswered.” (They used the term “international norm” because Syria is not a signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention.)

Of course, we all know that these words cannot be taken seriously as justifications. But if we do take these words seriously, then Americans can expect to be attacked in the future by those seeking to “punish” them for a very long list of their own manifest violations of not only international norms, which are fuzzy and ill-defined, but more importantly international laws that their government has signed on to and then brazenly broken.

In other words, the White House is digging the graves of Americans and lowering their security by lowering the bar for what it takes to attack another country. Why can’t some other country claim that the Kent State massacre, or the Waco massacre, or the attack on Iraq, or bombing Libya, or bombing Serbia, or killing innocents by drones, or the sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, or removing the government in Afghanistan, and so on violate norms of human rights or international laws? (I might add the U.S. support of Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons.) Why can’t they then claim that it’s now open season to punish America or Americans wherever they might be? The American policy of violence against Syrians as so-called punishment, another rationale that holds no water, will, if these words are actually believed and accepted, provide forces hostile to America with the tools to recruit fighters against America and Americans. This policy will provide them with ready rationales to justify violence.

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52, King James Version).

The Best of Michael S. Rozeff