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Published: 8/21/2012 | Updated: 6/17/2013
EVEN THOUGH it has been an open secret for 40 years, Syria has always been ambiguous about whether it has chemical weapons. But the Syrian government has said it would deploy chemical weapons against any foreign intervention in its civil war. It was an acknowledgement for the first time that it has what is believed to be among the biggest chemical and biological weapons programs in the world. President Barack Obama said this week the U.S. would reconsider its opposition to military involvement in Syria if President Bashar Assad's regime deploys or uses chemical or biological weapons, calling such action a "red line" for the United States. Syria's Foreign Ministry was at pains to make clear that the weapons would never, under any circumstances, be used against the Syrian people. This comes from a regime that has waged a bloody war against its own people for a year-and-a-half, leaving about 20,000 people dead. The weapons are said to include mustard and sarin gases, as well as cyanide, and to be capable of being delivered by aircraft, surface-to-air missiles and rockets. Such weapons generally are most effective against massed formations in open country, not the kind of hit-and-run, urban-guerrilla warfare Damascus is fighting. Randa Slim, a Syria expert for a Washington think tank, told The New York Times, "The chemical weapons remain one of the Syrian regime's strongest few trump cards, and they are threatening to use it in order to improve their rapidly weakening negotiating position." If any foreign power, Western or Arab, is planning to intervene militarily in Syria, word of it has not leaked out. The countries capable of intervention all deny any such plans, especially now that the rebels seem more than able to hold their own. Obama stopped short of saying this week that WMD use would necessarily prompt an American military response. How to secure those weapons remains a worrisome problem if the regime starts to crumble. Slim may be on to something when she suggests the chemical weapons are a bargaining chip. Turning over the keys to the WMD arsenals would certainly get the Assad family safe passage to any one of the few countries that would have it.
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