Syria

[pomtzu]

AMEN to that!

[phesina]

Would that they would actually listen to you here. Sigh....

[Karen]

It isn't like we need to be involved in yet another war ... Our prayers for the people and pets of Syria!

[smokey the elder]

IMO Syria is a no-win proposition. Arm the rebels? How do we know which faction is which? We tried that in Afghanistan 30+ years ago, which contributed to the birth of Al Qaeda. But the President said that chemical warfare would "cross a red line" and put himself between a rock and a hard place.

[RICHARD]

An aside from the topic? I don't want to hijack the thread and have one thought about the whole situation?

One thing that puzzles the eff out of me is the question "Are chemical weapons being used?"

When you see people dead in the streets that have no visible wounds or injuries what else would the die from?

I know there is a question of how and of what they died from, but what other weapon/system kills with out any obvious physical signs?

[smokey the elder]

It sure looks like chemical weapons are being used. The USA, unfortunately, has a poor track record dealing with possible CW usage (looked the other way while Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988) and took off after false-positives in 2003.

[Lady's Human]

I have no doubt chem weaps are being used.

The question is who is controlling them. It appears BOTH sides have used them, so attacking the Assad government for using them when previous attacks may have been made by the rebels is fairly absurd.

To compare what Hussein did in the '80s to what is going on in Syria now doesn't quite fit. Hussein eliminated close to an entire population. In Syria they are evidently being used in very small amounts, and they're using non-persistent agents where Hussein used persistent agents. As an illustration of how small the amounts they're using in Syria, a golf-ball sized dose of sarin dispersed in a crowd could kill thousands. (I'm assuming Sarin, seems to be the nerve agent of choice in the area, I'm not volunteering to go over with an M-256 kit and find out)

As to false positives in 2003, I'm yet to be convinced that the positives were false, too many dispersed incidents from soldiers in theater where agent monitors went off.