The search for Syria’s chemical weapons

What happened

The clock began ticking on a chemical weapons handover in Syria this week after the Obama administration and Russia agreed to an ambitious plan that would strip the Syrian regime of its poison gas arsenal. Secretary of State John Kerry said Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had one week to provide a comprehensive list of his chemical weapons as well as the locations of the regime’s storage, production, and research sites, and must allow international inspectors into the country by November. “There can be no games, no room for avoidance,” said Kerry. Under the deal, Assad’s estimated stockpile of 1,100 tons of mustard, VX, and sarin gases have to be removed or destroyed by the middle of next year. “Should diplomacy fail,” said Kerry, “the military option is still on the table.” Russia, however, refused to let the United Nations threaten force.

U.N. weapons inspectors released a report confirming that rockets loaded with sarin gas were used in last month’s devastating attack on rebel-held neighborhoods in Damascus, killing more than 1,400 civilians. “This is a war crime,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The report didn’t name who was responsible for the attack, but did detail the trajectory of the poison artillery shells, which led back to Assad’s stronghold in Mount Qasioun, where his army’s powerful 4th Division and the Republican Guard protect his presidential palace and inner circle.

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What the editorials said

This deal will be difficult to enforce, but it serves America’s strategic interests, said the Tampa Bay Times. The original aim of threatening Assad with airstrikes “was to make the continued use of chemical weapons too costly to the Syrian regime.” The agreement “goes further by removing the arsenal entirely,” and without entangling the U.S. in Syria’s sectarian civil war.

Only a fool would believe that Assad will honor his promises, said The Wall Street Journal. His military has spent the past few months hiding poison gas stocks at as many as 50 sites, precisely because it didn’t want the West to track and destroy them. Our new partners in finding those sites, the Russians, have spent the past two years protecting Assad from “international sanction and still insist he didn’t use chemical weapons.” And both Russia and Syria know Obama’s unpopular threat to use force is hollow, since he “won’t take that political risk again.”

What the columnists said

Obama got to avoid a war “he desperately did not want,” but the real winner is Assad, said Shadi Hamid in TheAtlantic.com. Rather than being punished for gassing 1,400 of his own people to death, he’s being rewarded for his war crime. The threat of military strikes has been removed, and America needs him in power to implement the agreement. Good luck finding and destroying all his chemical weapons, said Lewis MacKenzie in The Globe and Mail (Canada). In 1997, the U.S. promised to destroy its own chemical weapons stockpile by 2007. But it’s proved so difficult to transport and incinerate the toxins that the deadline has been pushed back to 2023. The idea that Syria’s chemical armaments can be secured and eliminated in under a year “stretches the imagination.”

Still, Assad will “come out of this deal weaker than before,” said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. First, he has had to admit that he has chemical weapons, after strenuously denying it. Second, he has submitted to a deal struck by two outside powers. “He can no longer present himself—to his people, his enemies, or perhaps most fatefully, to his military officers—as a strong, independent ruler.” Assad now looks like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “lackey” and “Obama’s manservant.”

Both Putin and Obama benefit from this deal, said Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg.com. Putin has emerged as a power player in the Middle East, while Obama “is no longer compelled to launch military strikes that the American people clearly didn’t support.” The big losers are the Syrian people, who’ve suffered 100,000 casualties and will “continue to be raped, tortured, and slaughtered in their homes.” As long as they’re not murdered with chemical weapons, “no one will pay their deaths much mind at all.”