And what about
our client state Israel? We can't have it both ways and yet that is in some respects what we are trying to get. Funny how we speak of Syria as bad for having deadly nerve agents but ANY STATE IMO who has such weapons are suspect of being in that class. Yet we have those same things too and as Sober rightly pointed out, we are behind in eliminating them and if one looks honestly, one can see some serious foot dragging towards those ends.
Russia is by no means a saint but then neither are we.
Israel has never
used chemical or nuclear weapons, even during the opening days of the Yom Kippur war when they were getting their asses kicked by the Syrians in the Golan Heights and their population centers were in danger of being overrun by Syrian armored columns. Im not saying the Israelis are saints, but they do go to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties during military operations, up to the point of putting their own pilots at risk by warning civilians to flee ahead of time in areas about to be bombed. Israel signed
and has honored its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and has made numerous overtures to the Syrian government that have been rejected. While reasonable people can certainly disagree with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, it is intellectually dishonest to compare the humanitarian policies of Israel to those of the Syrian regime.
And as far as chemical weapons go....yes we are behind on our commitment to destroy our own chemical weapon stockpiles (as are the Russians), but this is solely due to enviornmental and technical difficulties. The key issue here is
transparency. We have signed the treaty, we have inventoried and declared our stockpile to the UN, and we are working
in good faith to eliminate it. The same holds true for the Russians. The reality is that chemical weapons are universally reviled by the military, they are dirty and dangerous weapons that pose almost as much risk to those deploying them as they do to their intended targets. This is the reason why chemical weapons were
never used on the battlefield during WWII even though both sides posessed huge stockpiles of them. In the modern era, as nations with vast arsenals of precision-guided
nuclear weapons at our disposal, neither we or the Russians have any
need for chemical weapons and it is both of our nations best interests to see that the Syrian regime is never able to use them again.