The Syrian regime suddenly announced its recanting of a sovereign decision by welcoming the placement of its chemical weapons arsenal under international monitoring, in preparation for its destruction. By doing so, it recognized the existence of such an arsenal, after a denial heard throughout many years and repeated on a quasi-daily basis for the last two and a half years. But what about the biological weapons arsenal? Does the regime have any such arsenal and does the chemical weapons offer apply to it? In addition, why does the regime have to relinquish this arsenal, as long as the chemical massacre in the two Ghoutas was perpetrated by the terrorists who kidnapped the children of the Syrian coast to burn them with chemical weapons in Rif Dimashq? Before proclaiming his offer to place the chemical arsenal under international supervision, did Minister Sergei Lavrov ask Minister and Media Adviser Boutheina Chaaban, who participated alongside Minister Walid al-Muallem in the talks in Moscow, about the evidence she held to announce the terrorists' burning of the coast's children in Rif Dimashq with chemical weapons? And did her answer play any role at the level of the offer? This is unlikely, not because the minister/adviser lost her sense of direction and the meaning of the word evidence since the eruption of the protests, but because the Russian minister does not care about who was killed in the two Ghoutas and only wants to protect the regime. In any case, the Syrian welcoming of the offer shed light on a series of lies which the regime in Damascus kept promoting and inserting in its "neutral" media outlets, to confirm its subjection of a Zionist-Takfiri conspiracy. Hence, the chemicals in the two Ghoutas became Israeli weapons, provided by Arab and Gulf intelligence apparatuses to the Takfiri terrorists, who used it to burn the Syrian civilians. But why did the regime not ask that the Israeli and Gulf chemical arsenal be placed under international supervision instead of its own? Furthermore, why did it not request an investigation into the armed opposition's possession of such an arsenal, so that it is confiscated, placed under international control and destroyed? It did not do so because it knows that everything it leaked was a lie, that the accurate information about the use of chemical weapons has become known and documented, and that it cannot elude the responsibility for the use of these weapons. Hence, it became necessary to eliminate any pretext related to the possession of such an arsenal to complicate the issuance of a decision to launch a Western military strike against the regime troops, which resulted in the offer to relinquish these weapons despite what it means in terms of a setback affecting a sovereign issue. This development exposed another great lie about sovereignty, which the regime always claimed it could not handle lightly before "offering" it to the international community to preserve its existence. In any case, the Russian offer and its welcoming by Syria, by Damascus' allies and in Washington, launched a diplomatic process featuring a lot of ambiguity and details. Consequently, it might take months before an international-Syrian agreement is reached over the surrender of sovereignty over this arsenal, its collection and destruction, and by then, the process would have been stripped of its purposes, at the head of which being the political solution. Nevertheless, this political solution cannot be reached unless those who committed genocide and are responsible for the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction are exposed and presented to justice, to confirm that the perpetrators of crimes against humanity will not remain hidden and unsanctioned, and subsequently, not part of any political solution. In that sense, the surrender of the chemical arsenal – in case it is conducted fast – will not replace the exposure and prosecution of those responsible for the massacre in the two Ghoutas. These two processes should even be carried out concomitantly, regardless of the military strike which appears to have become an internal issue in the United States and France.
