This is not the first time Assad (or someone in Syria) has perpetrated such an attack and the media is rife with moral condemnations of the malignant demon of Damascus, but there are two questions that have received little attention, as far as I can tell, from folks on the left. Whoever is gassing people with chemicals, whether it's Assad's military, ISIS, or some other group (Since the sarin was dropped from a helicopter via barrel bomb it's doubtful that it was anyone outside of Syrian military), why do they still have these poisons and where did they get them in the first place?
The first question is prompted by the fact that back in 2014, President Obama assured us that the Syrians had disposed of almost all of their chemical weapons and would soon be completely rid of them.
“Eighty-seven percent of Syria’s chemical weapons have already been removed, ” Obama said. “That is a consequence of U.S. leadership. The fact that we didn’t have to fire a missile to get that accomplished is not a failure to uphold international norms, it’s a success,” [but] “it's not a complete success until we have the last 13% out.”
The last of the chemicals was expected to be removed within a couple of months, but if that was so, why is the toxic gas that keeps killing people in Syria still there? It seems that someone in Syria has pretty substantial supplies of poison gas and it also seems that, like his repeated promises that Americans would be able to keep their doctors under Obamacare, Mr. Obama's assurance that Syria had emptied their arsenals of WMD was little more than an expedient falsehood.
The second question arises from the fact that when President Bush, relying on intelligence from every intelligence service in the free world, claimed that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons and that this justified invading and deposing Hussein, his opponents on the left were adamant that Mr. Bush had fabricated the evidence and that there were no such weapons in Iraq.
"Bush lied, people died" became the chant (Why, one wonders, did we never hear "Obama lied, people died" over Syria, or Benghazi? Perhaps the chanters cared less about the deaths and more about scoring points against a Republican president.), and, indeed, those chemical stockpiles were never found. Nevertheless, there were numerous reports at the time that Hussein had secretly shipped his weapons to Syria so as to remove the pretext for an American invasion.
Here's an excerpt from a piece in The Atlantic in 2012:
Although the story [of a secret transfer of chemical weapons to Syria] was met with general neglect or scorn from the U.S. media, the present director of national intelligence, James Clapper, long ago asserted his belief in such a weapons transfer," he writes. That's true. As director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Clapper said in 2003 that satellite images showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq to Syria "unquestionably" show that illicit weapons were moved out of Iraq.If this is indeed what happened, it would account for the strong consensus among the world's intelligence agencies that Hussein did in fact possess such weapons as well as why they were never found. It would also explain how Syria came to have the caustic chemicals that are today being rained down upon women and children in Syrian cities and towns.
Another frequently cited believer in a Saddam smuggling effort is former Iraqi general George Sada, an adviser to the late dictator. "They were moved by air and by ground, 56 sorties by jumbo, 747, and 27 were moved, after they were converted to cargo aircraft, they were moved to Syria," he told Fox News in 2006.
Of course, don't except the leftists and media progressives who were so dogmatically certain that Bush was a liar to reconsider their judgment, and don't expect them to blame Obama for misleading the world about the fate of these weapons in Syria. Those would be naive expectations.
When the left has ideological enemies to punish and friends to support whatever must be said to accomplish their goals, whether it's objectively true or false, is in their minds completely justified.
