I don’t often read Letters columns in magazines, but for some reason I looked at the New Yorker‘s most recent letters last night, and found three quite good ones about Syria. Lines in bold below = emphasis mine:

Steve Coll’s piece about the Obama Administration’s proposal to retaliate against the Bashar al-Assad regime misperceives the most difficult issue in formulating American policy (Comment, September 9th). It is not about the quantum of proof needed to justify military action. That is part of the discussion in Congress, as it was in Britain’s Parliament. The more serious concern is the efficacy of the proposed response. Proponents of military action assert that it will both express the moral outrage of the American people and deter Assad and his henchmen from further violations of the international social contract. Does recent history provide a reasonable expectation that this tactic will work—especially as a deterrent to further transgressions? Absent broader international consensus, expressing vehement disapproval might be the best option.

Steven S. Berizzi

Norwalk, Conn.

Coll does not mention that since the Second World War the biggest user of lethal chemicals in warfare has been the United States. During the Vietnam War, more than ten million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed across Vietnam, causing untold numbers of people (including U.S. troops) to die or become sick, and hundreds of thousands of birth defects, which continue to this day. Hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm were also used in Vietnam. More recently, the U.S. used depleted uranium munitions in both the Gulf and Iraq Wars, leaving a legacy of death, cancer, and birth defects; white phosphorus was used as a weapon in Fallujah. The U.S. government can deny these facts, and Coll can fail to mention them, but they are there for those who care to look.

Jan Henle

New York City

Coll makes a distinction between chemical weapons and conventional ones, saying that gases “travel unpredictably” and that they can cripple survivors. These qualifications can be made about conventional weapons, too. Estimates of the civilian-death toll of American drone strikes in Pakistan range from dozens (the U.S. government’s claim) to hundreds. One Pakistani report places the number at more than a thousand, a significant portion of the total casualty count. None of this suggests that we should look the other way when dictators commit atrocities, but the West’s insistence that chemical weapons are uniquely horrible downplays the moral costs of our own military action, and lowers the political barriers to foreign intervention. If we are to intervene in Syria in defense of innocent civilians, we should do so regardless of how those atrocities were committed, and we must acknowledge that, in the process, we will certainly be contributing to “collateral damage” as well.

Daniel Margolis

Zurich, Switzerland

Coll mentions that the Reagan Administration looked the other way when Saddam gassed the Kurds. In the interest of furthering democratic deliberation, it would be appropriate to mention, as Foreign Policy did last month, that the C.I.A. gave Saddam coördinates so that his gas rockets could strike Iranian troops more accurately.

Robert Shetterly

Brooksville, Me.

The points raised by these letters highlight why foreigners may see the US’s position here in a rather less morally pure light than many of us Americans do. The “American exceptionalism” on display in this discussion is certainly about America holding itself to a different standard than the rest of the world, only not necessarily a higher one.