Chemical Assad : New claims of poison-gas attacks by the Damascus regime are falling on deaf ears.

MESOP : Western basically principle – listen away ! (IF NOT SEYMOUR HERSH SPEAKS)

By Daniel Nisman – April 10, 2014 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL – Nearly eight months after the Assad regime gassed more than 1,400 people to death in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, claims of chemical attacks in Syria’s capital are once again falling on deaf ears in the international community.

On March 28, the rebels’ Damascus Military Council reported a nerve-gas attack in the capital’s Harasta area the previous night. These reports were echoed by several generally credible opposition news outlets. The number of reported casualties ranged from several dozen injured, to up to three dead from asphyxiation. Days later, on April 3, the opposition’s Local Coordination Committees reported another chemical attack in the Jobar district, just as Bashar al-Assad’s forces commenced an anticipated offensive to wrest the area from rebel hands.

Videos claiming to depict alleged deaths from the Harasta attack, and at least one injury from the Jobar attack, have since been circulating on social media. The Syrian opposition sent a letter to the United Nations demanding an inquiry, citing what they said to be credible evidence that chemical weapons had been used, to no avail. Most disconcertingly, an Israeli official told the Haaretz newspaper on April 7 that Jerusalem had “strong evidence pointing to the use of chemical materials in the Harasta neighborhood of eastern Damascus on March 27.”

While the evidence is lacking to fully confirm whether chemical weapons were used in recent days, several conclusions can be drawn from the accusations themselves. The most worrying conclusion is certainly being drawn by the Assad regime—that of the international community’s lack of interest to call for investigations in Harasta and Jobar.

The U.N.’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has an established presence in Syria to carry out the September 2013 disarmament agreement sponsored by Russia and the United States. Whether an inspection falls under the OPCW mission’s mandate or not, how the Assad regime reacts to demands to allow access to Jobar and Harasta would serve as an indicator of its culpability.

There is no credible evidence to suggest that rebel groups in the Damascus area have acquired the materials or know-how to mount chemical weapons on conventional artillery pieces in their possession. It can therefore be concluded that unless the rebels theatrically fabricated the effects of a chemical attack, the Assad regime was likely responsible for carrying them out. Notably, on March 25, Syria’s U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari distributed a letter specifically warning that rebels would use chemical weapons in Jobar in order to blame the government. But if any party in the conflict would be prone to such conspiracy, it would be the Assad regime, whose decades of tutelage under the Russian KGB made their Mukhabarat (secret service) frighteningly efficient at false-flag tactics meant to smear the opposition.

Even with the majority of its chemical production and mixing facilities destroyed by the OPCW, and more than half of its chemical agents shipped out of the country, the Assad regime still has the ability to carry out localized attacks. Remember that last year, the Assad regime was accused of launching very limited attacks to dislodge rebels from frontline positions in major cities. These attacks, which employed agents such as sarin or mustard (or variants of the two), were carried out on a small enough scale to avoid drawing much international attention, while simultaneously deterring local populations from hosting rebel positions. The attacks were carried out using crudely modified short-range artillery rounds used by rebels, which would have allowed the Assad regime to blame the Syrian opposition and confuse the international community.

Between March and August 2013, the Assad regime was blamed for carrying out anywhere from six to eight of these attacks in Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs. Only when the large-scale attack in Eastern Ghouta on Aug. 21 produced overwhelming and undeniable evidence of the Assad regime’s use of sarin, did the international community mobilize. As evidenced by leaked cables between Iran and Hezbollah regarding the attack, even the Assad regime and its allies understood they had pushed their luck too far.

Fast-forward to April 2014 and it is quite reasonable to assume that Assad believes he may once again have a free hand to use the world’s most deadly weapons against his own people. The American naval destroyers that threatened to send hundreds of tomahawk missiles into Syria last September have long since departed the Mediterranean, and the eyes of the world’s policy makers, including those in Moscow and Washington, are intently focused on the crisis in Ukraine. Despite missing several crucial deadlines in the chemical-weapons disarmament process, the U.S. has been careful to avoid accusing the Assad regime of specifically violating its international agreements, lest Washington be forced to resort to an unpopular military intervention.

With tweets, blogs, and videos of gassed Syrians resurfacing online, the same voices who vowed “never again” on the opinion pages and podiums of Washington, London, and Paris in August 2013 are now eerily silent. The international community must demonstrate its willingness to investigate every accusation of chemical-weapons usage. If not, Assad will interpret the world’s silence as permission to use these most brutal weapons in the same escalatory fashion that eventually killed hundreds in Eastern Ghouta.

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