Anyone know the difference between ammonium nitrate and sarin? Geez.
Yeah, Tom I do. Ammonium Nitrate is fertilizer, but also a component of ANFO, a fairly common minimg explosive. Sarin is a Nerve Agent, also known as GB. Whatever WMDs were present in Iraq left for the Bekaa Valley in Syria on Russian Trucks before/during our invasion when we went after Saddam (that is, what wasn't left behind). The media covered up both, as a general rule. IIRC, sarin containing artillery shells were found in Iraq, among other nasty stuff.
Bashar Assad didn't take over as President there until 2000, so blaming this on him, or the Marine Barracks bombing in Beiruit is hardly accurate, not that I am defending his actions as President there.
https://www.biography.com/people/bashar-al-assad-20878575#!Hafez al-Assad died on June 10, 2000. In the days following his death, Syria's parliament quickly voted to lower the minimum age for presidential candidates from 40 to 34, so that Bashar could be eligible for the office. Ten days after Hafez's death, Bashar al-Assad was chosen for a seven-year term as president of Syria. In a public referendum, running unopposed, he received 97 percent of the vote. He was also selected leader of the Ba'ath Party and commander in chief of the military.
Dynasty or not, he is another person, and was not the one in his family who would have been first pick for the job. Read the bio.
The question exists of whether terrorists would use whatever means they had at hand to bring the US in to fight a proxy war for them and eliminate an enemy. Would ISIS backed rebels use Sarin and blame Assad? Could conventional munitions have dispersed chemical weapons the rebels were intending on using? Certainly. With the media pushing for the ouster of Assad, and the Obama Administration's push to emplace Muslim Brotherhood affiliated governments in the region (which is what the "Arab Spring" was, and led to the strengthening of ISIS), anything which the media could use to push for US involvement would have been a plus for the Caliphate.
The situation in Syria was a civil war, an uprising, but not our business unless we were called in to assist a duly empowered government--in other words, not our circus. We were not bound by treaty or otherwise to be involved--unless WMDs were used by Assad, and that was not established, despite the MSM's howling. Without knowing who used them or if the release was inadvertent, we had no business there.
