Bashar al-Assad

Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes released the following statement on Syrian use of chemical weapons, resulting in 100-150 deaths: 

A news report published today says that North Korean officers are in Syria helping Bashar al-Assad wage war against his own people.

Caroline Alexander, at Bloomberg, delivers some bad news about Syria and its civil war:

Israel’s air campaign this past weekend, its two strikes Friday and Sunday on Syrian targets, shows where the Obama administration has gotten Syria wrong. Over the last few weeks, the White House has framed its Syria policy, or its lack of one, in terms of Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal and the growing strength of the Islamist opposition, including al Qaeda affiliates. With these talking points, the administration has managed to tie up its critics on two fronts.

Last week the White House celebrated the first anniversary of its Atrocities Prevention Board.

There was one moment in President Obama’s world-weary press conference last Tuesday when he seemed genuinely interested and engaged. At the very end, when Obama had already begun to depart the podium, a reporter shouted a question about the previously obscure but now famously gay NBA center, Jason Collins.

Jonathan Spyer explains how Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have the upper hand right now in Syria’s two-year-old conflict. “Regime forces have clawed back areas of recent rebel advance,” Spyer writes in the Jerusalem Post. “The government side, evidently under Iranian tutelage, has showed an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt itself to the changing demands of the war.”

The Obama administration now believes that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have used chemical weapons. Today the White House released a letter explaining that the American “intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specially the chemical agent sarin.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with senior editor Lee Smith on the new revelations about the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime.

Chemical weapons have been used by the Assad regime in Syria, according to an Israeli official. The Associated Press reports:

Yesterday Syrian president Bashar al-Assad commemorated Syria’s independence day with a television interview where he described the Syrian civil war as a colonial plot. Western powers, said Assad, “never accepted the idea of other nations having their independence. They want those nations to submit to them.”

Today NOW Lebanon publishes an article, with charts and graphics, explaining how the war in Syria pitting Sunni-majority rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite regime has spread to Lebanon, affecting the delicate sectarian balance there. The fighting in Lebanon so far has been contained mostly to Tripoli, a city in the northern part of the country that has long reflected Lebanon’s own internal divides as well as those of neighboring Syria.