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Why Obama’s Chemical Weapons ‘Red Line’ in Syria Is Bogus
After months of being reluctant to address it, the White House today announced it now believes the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons in its bloody, two-year civil war.
“Our intelligence community does asses with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent Sarin,” the administration said in a letter.
This seems to violate President Obama’s “red line,” triggering some unspecified action presumed to be military in nature. Commentators are now saying the likelihood of a direct US military intervention is greater than ever. While it’s not clear whether that’s true, this talk about a “red line” is bogus.
Obama’s ‘Red Line’ Has Shifted Before
Last year, President Obama outlined what would be a “red line” for his administration, beyond which arguments against going to war in Syria would lose their weight. In August 2012 he said, “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”
And then in December when reports came out about the Assad regime “moving around” stockpiles of chemicals, with some analysts saying they were being mixed and possibly weaponized, the Obama administration stayed silent.
“Mr. Obama’s ‘red line’ appears to have shifted,” The New York Times reported. “His warning against ‘moving’ weapons has disappeared from his public pronouncements,” being replaced with a “new warning” that “if Mr. Assad makes use of those weapons, presumably against his own people or his neighbors, he will face unspecified consequences.”
The Obama administration has consistently noted the overwhelming costs of military action in Syria. The “red line” is just an obligatory warning meant to make them seem concerned about humanitarian suffering and to maintain the credibility of their threats of war. It has proven malleable before, and the administration could just as easily back out of it again.
More: http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/04/25/why-o…-is-bogus/
2013-04-26 14:45:18
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