Interesting article. Thanks for posting. One other theory would be that the Syrian military had chemical weapons as a just in case, though they planned to use them only as an absolute last resort, because the repercussions would likely be fatal to the regime.
They obviously didn’t want anyone to know that they were keeping them at all.
If you were the rebels and you had access to the internet, you would know that your best chance of becoming the new power in Syria would be to somehow get the government to use the weapons.
So you try to force a small unit that you know has the weapons into a no-win situation where they will use them, but you fail repeatedly.
Then you go for plan B:
The next time a Syrian army officer offers to defect (and there have been plenty of army defections) , you say: stay right where you are, get access to the chemical weapons, fire off a few rounds into a civilian area, and THEN defect. By doing so you will bring the same coalition that toppled Ghaddafi to topple Assad.
Now imagine you are the Syrian regime reacting to this scenario. The situation on the ground is a mess, the defector (or defectors) has deliberately muddled your understanding of what actually happened there, and so you think a rogue commander or two used your ‘final resort’ weapon because his unit was being overrun, even though you had given them explicit orders not to.
You don’t want the UN to find out that you were even keeping the last resort weapons, and you definitely don’t want them to discover what the rogue unit has done (because you know how the UN/NATO will react) so you close off the area until you can figure out what happened. A few days later, you still don’t really know what happened but your continued blockage of the inspectors is becoming the equivalent of a guilty plea, so you let them in.
Regardless, the question that Obama does not answer is what specifically does this have to do with US interests?
Obama funded the rebels, has publicly cheered the rebels efforts and called for regime change. AND NOW claims that the instability he helped create is one reason to go in?
This is just another Egypt & Libya, an effort to support the spread of Islam. Obama isn't fooling me.
This new article completely supports my theory that this was a very sick plan by a rebel-aligned army officer:
“Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned”
This is exactly how the regime would have reacted tot he Plan B i described above.