As Syrian opposition fighters close in on the capital of Damascus, Hillary Clinton once again warned the Assad regime that it better not defend itself with chemical weapons, or else the United States will … well, it will do something. “This is a red line for the United States,” Clinton said in Prague today. “I am not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people. But suffice it to say we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”
Previously, President Obama has said that the use of chemical or biological weapons in Syria might elicit a military response from the United States. “That would change my calculus,” he warned in August. “That would change my equation.”
The United States has become alarmed in recent days owing to signs that Syria is moving its chemical weapons. The AP reports that officials are “trying to figure out what the Syrians are doing,” while the Times has been told that “‘the activity we are seeing suggests some potential chemical weapon preparation,’ which goes beyond the mere movement of stockpiles.” Hopefully this is all just a big misunderstanding and Syria is simply rearranging the positions of its chemical weapons in a feng shui kind of way.
