No moral high ground for Assad

Chemical weapons have one drawback for those who are evil enough to use them. Though the poisonous gases may kill and cripple, as they spread silently and insidiously in a harmless-looking cloud, they leave behind them considerable evidence that they have been deployed.
Tissue from the victims, samples from the soil, even scrapings from surrounding buildings, will allow investigators to confirm that poison has been used, and to identify the gas itself and sometimes even where it has been manufactured.
The Assad regime in Syria now stands accused of using poison gas dropped in canisters from helicopters during an attack on the northern town of Saraqeb. Damascus has denied the reports but it is known that the regime has built up considerable stockpiles of mustard gas and the deadly nerve agent Sarin. It is also thought to have tried to develop a more devastating nerve gas known as VX.
Tissue and soil samples from the Saraqeb attack have been collected and sent off to America, France, Turkey and the UK for analysis. They ought to prove conclusively whether Assad’s forces are indeed using poison gas, as has been alleged on more than one occasion. Damascus of course will protest that the analysis is biased and unreliable, in that it comes from countries that have all declared their support for the fighters. Maybe samples ought also to have been sent to Russia and China, as well as to clearly neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden, neither of which could not be accused of having any political axe to grind.
Intelligence reports suggest that before the revolution, the regime had up to 1,000 tons of chemical weapons stored in some 50 depots around the country. It may be wondered if the regime moved these deadly arsenals out of towns before they fell to victorious forces of the Free Syrian Army. Or have the fighters captured any? It is clearly a major concern of Washington that the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front, may have laid hands on some of these munitions. The key worry will be that terrorists will be able to equip themselves with stocks of the devastating Sarin, an odorless and virtually invisible nerve agent that kills its victims within minutes.
In suggesting that their own forces and supporters have been exposed to poison gas attack, Assad’s people would seem to be admitting that some of their chemical stockpile has been captured. However unlike the Saraqeb attack, where details have been clear and evidence gathered, Damascus has given little information on its chemical attack claims.
There is however a compelling analysis that has not yet been embraced by many commentators. For the Assad regime to be resorting to chemical assault, demonstrates just how close it is to reaching the end of its resources.
Rather like the Israelis, Bashar Assad has always tried to look as if he is occupying the moral high ground. He wanted to negotiate with the fighters but there was no one to talk to. He wanted to honor the cease-fire brokered by the Arab League and overseen by its monitors, but he claimed the fighters continued to attack, when in reality it was his forces that continued their onslaught on locations such as Homs, when the League’s monitors had been guided off to another part of the battlefield. He has insisted that it was the fighters, not his professional soldiers who committed atrocities, ignoring completely the summary killings and savage massacres of whole communities, carried out by his loathsome shabiha militia. He has branded the fighters as foreign terrorists and seized on the presence of Al-Nusra Front fighting, nominally as part of the Free Syria Army, to justify this blanket condemnation.
Yet once he resorts to the use of chemical weapons, he has thrown himself from the moral high ground. Syria may not be a signatory to international treaties banning the use of poison gases, but the world will be angry and disgusted when proof positive emerges that Assad has been guilty of this crime. Washington has indicated that poison gas deployment is the red line, the crossing of which will be a game-changer in terms of US support for the revolt.
Moreover, the deployment of these horrific weapons may sow terror, but unless used in a tightly controlled tactical attack — for example to kill troops holding a key battlefield objective — they are not particularly effective. Lobbing a few poison gas canisters out of a helicopter down onto a town, against which no ground assault is planned, is utterly futile and in fact, in propaganda terms, far more damaging to the Assad regime than the loss of innocent life is to the opposition cause.