even his retreat here requires a US commitment to ENFORCING some basically unenforceable agreement on WMDs.
We all remember what happened with WMDs in Iraq, yes?
Us: "Oh! You haven't destroyed them all! We are going to ratchet up sanctions, we're not gonna let you sell oil, we are going to bomb your palaces!"
Them: "but we did destroy all of the ones we had, we destroyed them as fast as we could. We just didn't keep records on it all like you say now you must see to be satisfied"
Us: OH NO! YOU STILL HAVE FORBIDDEN WEAPONS! FOUL! WE'RE GONNA KILL YOU ALL UNLESS YOU HAND OVER ALL THE WEAPONS WE SAY YOU HAVE! WARRR! WAAAARR!!
It was a sickening soap opera for 12 years, which finally broke out into a full on nightmare of epic slaughter that continues to this day.
If someone should be hauled up on genocide charges, if somebody needs to be placed under international supervision, it should be the leaders of the United States. We killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, before the 2003 war even began.
Now they're talking about creating THE SAME SET UP WITH SYRIA with which they strangled Iraq for 12 years and which eventually was used as a legal pretext to start the war. What happens when some asshole in the House or Senate starts braying that Syria isn't IN FULL COMPLIANCE WITH ITS OBLIGATIONS!!!11! ? Remember how impossible it is to prove a negative? People who wanted to put the brakes on a slide to war ran into a wall of unreason - and likely will again. Warmongers said Saddam's weapons could be here, the weapons could be there. The weapons were constantly on the move probably, they said. Or they were lurking in unknown tunnel complexes, that we knew must exist since we didn't know where the weapons were. They were disguised - camouflaged as ice cream trucks, puppet theaters and dog parks. The fact that the UN inspectors could not find them anywhere was not permitted to stand as "evidence of their absence."
The chaos in Syria means that even the government likely does not know where all of its assets including chemical weapons are. How much less likely is it that the UN can find them and act as custodian in the middle of a hot civil war. How much less likely is that the remorseless blowhards of US politics will be satisfied with the proposed arrangement when they can make hay attacking the administration for "letting Assad keep most of his WMDs!" It doesn't have to be true for them to allege it. There doesn't really need to be a scintilla of evidence for them to try to use this as a bludgeon. Rhetorical attack follows attack, and next thing you know, maybe eight years later, you're bombing Syria or sending in the Marines to "go get those WMDs!"
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