HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031932.jpg

20

Article 5.
Foreign Policy
Assad's Chemical Romance
Leonard Spector

AUGUST 23, 2011 -- The continued unrest in Syria, coupled with President Barack Obama's call for President Bashar al-Assad to leave power, has thrown the future of the country into flux. Among the most troubling uncertainties is the fate of Syria's chemical weapons arsenal, which, if not protected properly, could fall into the wrong hands, with catastrophic results. Syria is one of a handful of states that the U.S. government believes possess large stocks of chemical agents in militarized form -- that is, ready for use in artillery shells and bombs. The arsenal is thought to be massive, involving thousands of munitions and many tons of chemical agent, which range, according to CIA annual reports to Congress, from the blister gases of World War I -- such as mustard gas -- to advanced nerve agents such as sarin and possibly persistent nerve agents, such as VX gas.
In the hands of Assad -- and his father Hafez before him -- these weapons have been an ace-in-the-hole deterrent against Israel's nuclear capability. The Assad regime, however, has never openly brandished this capability: It did not employ chemical weapons in the 1982 Lebanon War against Israel, even after Israeli warplanes decimated the Syrian Air Force. Nor have they been deployed, or their use threatened, in attempting to bring Assad's current domestic antagonists to heel. And although Syria is accused of providing powerful missiles to Hezbollah, including some of a type that carried chemical warfare agents in the Soviet arsenal, Assad has not reportedly transferred lethal chemical capabilities to the Lebanon-based Shiite organization.

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031932