“The United States has never stood by and seen innocent people slaughtered to the extent that’s happening in Syria.”
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., during an interview June 13 on CNN’s “The Situation Room”
Last week, the United States announced that it was convinced that the Syrian regime led by Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons, thus crossing a line set by President Barack Obama that would trigger U.S. involvement in the three-year rebellion and resulting civil war.
On CNN’s “The Situation Room,” U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., made the case for U.S. involvement in Syria. Chambliss serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“The United States has never stood by and seen innocent people slaughtered to the extent that’s happening in Syria,” Chambliss said. “The United States does not need to be the world’s policeman, but the United States does need to step in when tyrants like this, really, in a very militant way, kill innocent people on a regular basis.”
We wondered: Is there a precedent for the United States failing to intervene in the slaughter of innocents on a scale as large as, or larger than, the conflict in Syria?
The first part of answering this question is to determine how many people have been killed in Syria. As in the case of most conflicts, estimating the number of deaths tends to be imprecise. An office of the United Nations, however, reported this month that the death toll in Syria reached at least 93,000 by the end of April.
Of course, the United States has combated, in one way or another, cases of mass civilian deaths, including Japan during World War II, North Korea during the Korean War and the Bosnian war in the former Yugoslavia.
A spokeswoman for Chambliss said the senator was referring to “tragedies like Bosnia, where the United States had full knowledge of the abuses occurring, and had the ability and resources to intervene.”
But there are numerous examples in which the U.S. had intelligence about mass killings and chose not to intervene.
The most obvious example of a genocide not directly challenged by the United States, of course, is the Holocaust. “You need search no further” to debunk Chambliss’ comment than the genocide of European Jewry, said Debórah Dwork, director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. All told, Nazi Germany “deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written.
The United States fought Nazi Germany in World War II, of course. The U.S. government had a pretty good idea what was going on by at least April 1943, when the U.S. and the United Kingdom called a conference in Bermuda to discuss refugees amid growing public urgings to save Jewish populations in Europe, Dwork said. But the parties to the conference essentially sidestepped the question, and diverting military assets to directly challenge the infrastructure of the Holocaust remained off the Allies’ agenda until the war ended in 1945.
There are other examples — lots of them. While politics and historical uncertainty makes it impossible to create a perfect list, there are quite a few examples that would seem to undercut Chambliss’ claim.
- Communist China. While the United States was hardly friendly toward Mao Zedong's China prior to President Richard Nixon's rapprochement in the 1970s, the U.S. didn't directly intervene when millions in China were killed in such government programs as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
- The Soviet Union. Snyder estimates that a variety of policies under Josef Stalin resulted in the deliberate killing of 6 million noncombatants and the preventable deaths of an additional 3 million.
- Cambodia. Dictator Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, is believed to have killed about 2 million people between 1975 and 1979.
Other examples include conflicts in Armenia, Bangladesh, Biafra, Burundi, Darfur, Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda and Uganda that led to the deaths of between 200,000 and 1.5 million people.
University of Hawaii political scientist R.J. Rummel lists no fewer than 219 cases between 1900 and 1987.
“While I definitely do not endorse Rummel’s entire catalog, his basic point is surely sound: Government-led or government-caused slaughter has been a good deal more lethal than traditional state-on-state war,” said Ted R. Bromund, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “I would therefore not be able to agree with Senator Chambliss’ statement.”
Our ruling
Chambliss said, “The United States has never stood by and seen innocent people slaughtered to the extent that’s happening in Syria.” That claim is undercut by myriad examples in which more than 100,000 civilians were killed yet the United States did not take direct and significant action. We rate the claim Pants On Fire.
