President Obama last August declared that any use or transport of Syria's chemical weapons would constitute a 'red line' for US policy toward the country. Now Israel, Britain, and France say they have evidence that Syria has crossed that line.
A man with a chemical mask on his head searches for survivors from the rubble of a damaged area, which activists said was a result of an airstrike by the Syrian regime, in Al-Sukkari neighborhood in Aleppo, Syria, in early April.
Haleem Al-Halabi/Reuters/File
EnlargePresident Obama may soon have to come to grips with what it means to issue a "red line" to a foreign government.
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On Tuesday, Israeli military officials said they have evidence and are "nearly 100 percent certain" that forces of Syria's Bashar al-Assad regime have used chemical weapons ? a step Mr. Obama said would be a game changer for the US in its policies toward Syria and the civil war raging there.?Last August, Obama declared that any use or even "moving around" of Syria's substantial chemical weapons stockpile would constitute a "red line" for the US ? any crossing of which "would change my calculus ? change my equation."
With the closest US ally in the region now asserting that chemical weapons have been used, Obama will come under more pressure to demonstrate ?possibly through the use of American force ? that his "red line" was not a hallow threat, US foreign policy analysts say.
"If you make a flat statement like that and you don't follow it up, then you undermine your credibility," says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who is now a national security analyst at the Center for American Progress (CAP) in Washington.
Obama has been reluctant to deepen US involvement in the Syria war, limiting US assistance to food and supplies for refugees and internally displaced Syrian civilians, and to nonlethal material for the rebel fighters the US supports. But use of chemical weapons by Mr. Assad's forces could prompt a more interventionist approach, some analysts say: for example, direct measures by US forces to destroy or safeguard Assad's chemical weapons. Obama could also cite a crossed red line as justification for arming the rebels or taking other, more robust measures to protect Syrian civilians.
Such measures might include establishing a no-fly zone over northern Syria, a step that already has bipartisan support in Congress, or creating "humanitarian corridors" for refugees to move along and for getting food and other supplies to the civilian population.
Probably a last resort, Mr. Korb says, would be "to send in special forces to grab the chemical weapons."
Pentagon officials said last month they were preparing a list of calibrated measures that the president could order in the event that chemical weapons are used. In response to the Israeli claims Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman George Little said the US "continues to assess reports of chemical weapons use in Syria."
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