NEW YORK: President Barack Obama’s former Middle East adviser said this week that he believes the US should have bombed Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians in 2013.

In remarks made to The Atlantic, Philip Gordon discussed the events that followed Obama’s “red line” warning to the Syrian regime following the deadly chemical attack on the town of Ghouta, which killed as many as 1,300 people.

“When the United States says you can’t use chemical weapons, you can’t use chemical weapons,” Gordon told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

He added: “I accept that there was some risk of a slippery slope if he used CW again. But Assad would also have had to run that risk, and that’s just the dynamic that you’re in, so we needed to plant in his mind that if he tested our resolve, well, he was running a pretty big risk, too.

“And that might not be in either of our interests, but it certainly wouldn’t be in his. ... This was a more limited and therefore more achievable objective than regime change. What he would be saying is, ‘I’m going to try to stop them from gassing people because if I don’t, we are essentially saying, you can use chemical weapons as much as you like.’”

Gordon had held the Middle East portfolio at the National Security Council from 2013 to 2015.