Politics The Syrian uprising: Will the Assad regime resort to chemical warfare?

Morsi will likely win the referendum on 12/15. People want to be free but their concept of freedom is different from y0urs. And, like the Iranians, they will probably come to regret their choice of who will lead them to freedom. But history swings back and forth, pendulum-like. And like Foucault's, the pendulum knocks things over as it swings.

 

Not to revive a dying thread, but I don't see Assad using chemical weapons. There is no strategic upside. Any immediate military gains made through deploying them would be quickly negated by the weight of a multinational Army responding. The world has made it abundantly clear that using chemical weapons will invoke a rapid and devastating response. The world has, however, made it abundantly clear that they will sit by and more or less allow Assad to use conventional weapons to grind out a violent campaign against the Syrian people. It seems that the key issues, to the UN and everyone else, are method and scale. Especially if the government/country in question is of little economic or strategic value (like in much of Africa and now in Syria).

If the scale of the violence is increased, the outside world will intervene. Nobody gave a shit about Bosnia until reports came out of ethnic cleansing. Nobody gave a shit about Somalia until tens of thousands died from famine that was due to militants blocking relief efforts. Nobody gave a shit about Libya until Ghaddafi threatened to go door-to-door and kill everyone in Benghazi. Nobody seems to care if a government uses its conventional military to kill a few dozen people each day. If the method of violence escalates from conventional to chemical, the lethality of the attacks increases, and the outside world will intervene.

The real concern isn't that Assad will use chemical weapons. It is that the chemical weapons are no longer in a secure and centralized location. Now that they out and mobile, they are much more susceptible to being lost, stolen or bought by folks who are more than willing to use them.