The United Nations Mission charged with investigating the alleged use of chemical weapons in the conflict in Syria issued its final report last week. The report clarified the following :

1. It confirmed that chemical weapons were used against civilians, including children, in the Ghouta area of Damascus on August 21, 2013.

2.It established that chemical weapons were used against soldiers and civilians on March 19, 2013 in Khan Al Asal area.

3. In some areas and regarding other allegations, the inspectors wrote that there were signs of ‘probable use’; in other areas that the evidence was inconclusive.

It is reasonable to conclude from the above that chemical weapons were indeed used against soldiers as well as against civilians, and that the perpetrators of the attacks were probably the rebels. Charges against other perpetrators could not be established with clear and convincing evidence;

This tentative conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the Syrian regime welcomed the UN investigation, probably because it believed that such an investigation would vindicate its claim that the chemical attacks were carried out by the rebels.

The same conclusion is also reinforced by the following observations made by the UN inspectors: “Some of the devices,” they wrote, “appear to have been improvised, as was their delivery.”

Contrast if you will the tenor of the UN Report and its conclusions, with the sweep and self-righteousness of the US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent speech at the State Department, Kerry said the chemical attack, which he generally attributed to the Syrian regime, should “shock the conscience of the world.” He accused the perpetrators of “indiscriminate slaughter of civilians”, which he described as “moral obscenity.”

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But is it not true that the same moral indignation can equally describe our feelings about similar atrocities committed by democratic states? Or does democracy absolve its adherents from responsibility for outrageous disregard for the sanctity of human life?

The sanctity of human life is not diminished because it is violated by a democracy. But our rulers would have us believe otherwise to stifle criticisms, and, as the legendary public intellectual Noam Chomsky would put it, to manufacture consent.

A few weeks ago, the Obama administration seemed to completely devote its propagandistic energies to preparing the American public to a war with Syria that seemed all but certain. Remarkably, there were few voices that were raised from among the law makers on the hill or from the ranks of the pundits and the opinion makers to demand that the president, whose academic background is constitutional law, provide legal justification for the war he was publicly asking the American people to support. There were few dissenters among the Democrats; among the Republicans a few lawmakers questioned the objectives of the war, but not its legitimacy or its raison d’etre.

President Obama followed in the path of his predecessors: to explain that the projection of American power was necessary to defend vital national interests. The task of foreign policy is to embody and explain these vital national interests and secure public support for the defence of these vital interests. For example president Woodrow Wilson explained his decision to take the country to First World War by saying that it was necessary to make the world safe for democracy. Another enduring foreign policy objective is to make the world safe for free trade, an objective conveniently embodied in the elegant formulation articulated by the American State Department at the beginning of the 20th century as the Open Door Policy — a deceptively innocent way of explaining commitment to free trade as an enduring pursuit of American foreign policy or American military enterprises.

As Second World War was drawing to an end the American army and the Soviet army raced to Germany as it lay in ruins — leaving a vacuum of power, economic and political institutions which Americans and Russians wanted to mould to their own ideological images. It was precisely in pursuit of that objective that the American Marshall Plan provided massive economic assistance for the reconstruction of capitalist Europe. It was also precisely because that reconstruction of Europe was contingent upon the fundamental principle of Open Door Policy that the Marshall Plan was offered to and rejected by the Soviet Union. Had Stalin accepted the capitalist principles underlying the Open Door Policy he would have committed the closed economies of communism to extension.

In addition to the economic factor that characterises and underpins American foreign policy, American exceptionalism is often invoked to justify policies and actions denied to lesser powers. For example, military interventions in the Middle East are justified in the name of defence of vital national interests, geostrategic goals, and the security of allies — Israel and to a lesser extent the Gulf states. In this regard, a few examples will suffice: The Gulf War in 1991, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the unconditional support of the repeated Israeli assaults on the Palestinian people. Lesser powers are unlikely to be able to behave imperially and project power in defence of geostrategic interests.

Thus American foreign policy is multifaceted: commitment to a globalised economic world order driven by the principle of Open Door Policy; unilateralism and the ability to enforce it militarily in defence of vital national interests; and a historic sense of exceptionalism. To these factors we must add the emergence in the post- Second World War of a set of universal human rights consistent with American values of democratic governance and rule of law. Here again, the promotion of these human rights has suffered from the erratic standards applied.

Consider how Kerry waxes righteous as he invites us to share his outrage. And I am indeed outraged but not only by the atrocities in Syria but wherever they may occur, and whoever maybe the perpetrators.

Apply double standards and the sense of outrage is diminished, its credibility compromised, its substance contaminated.

Adel Safty is distinguished visiting professor and special adviser to the rector at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His book, Might Over Right, is endorsed by Noam Chomsky and published in England by Garnet, 2009.