Obama's Dilemma and Assad's Opportunity

 'Why did Obama say "a whole bunch of chemical weapons?" What exactly is a whole bunch of chemical weapons? Such fuzzy language has no place in laws, let alone ultimatums. Can one imagine schools that prohibit "a whole bunch" of drugs or weapons on campus? How could you enforce such a rule?

 And yet this is exactly the road map that Assad has used to introduce chemical weapons into the arsenal of weapons he is using to suppress his own people. In a whole series of chemical attacks since December, he has stayed safely to this side of "a whole bunch of chemical weapons" until this most recent attack on 21 August 2013.

 The first use was on 22 Dec 2012 in the rebel-held al-Bayyada neighborhood of hotly contested Homs. While this use by the regime was documented by video tapes, witness and doctor testimony and confirmed by a general who defected from the chemical weapons division days later, only seven people died so it could hardly be considered that "a whole bunch of chemical weapons" were used.

 Then there were two attacks on 19 March 2013. In one of them, Khan al-Assal, 31 people were killed. Both Britain and France conducted investigations and found the Assad regime responsible but the Assad regime blamed the opposition, which denied responsibility and nothing was done. Apparently, "a whole bunch" involved more than three dozen deaths.
There was no question of who was responsible for the gas attack on 13 April 2013 in Sheik Maqsoud, Aleppo because the gas canisters were dropped from helicopters and only the regime flies those. Using that delivery method was very much "in your face" but since only two women and two children were killed and another 16 made sick, there was no question of it passing the "whole bunch of" test.

 And this has been the pattern of chemical attacks up until now. Almost certainly, the Assad regime has been behind all of them. Jihadists have not used sarin gas missile attacks anywhere in the world and there has been nothing indicating that anyone in the opposition has this type of capability. The videos of so-called rebel labs making chemical weapons with lye have all been debunked. These chemical weapons attacks have all been small scale attacks, very tentative in nature, in the beginning. This has been Assad's pattern with the introduction of every new weapons system into the conflict. There has been the suspicious on the part of some observers that the poisons were being deliberately watered down or mixed with non-lethal agents to throw investigators off the scent. All of these gas bombs fell through the "whole bunch of" loophole Obama included in his chemical weapons prohibition and all of them have been given a pass by Obama.'