For many people, Washington's praise of Bashar Assad for cooperating with UN chemical weapons inspectors is sticking in the craw. It is, indeed, entirely inappropriate. This is a savage regime that has used poison gas on its own people, most recently in a suburb of the capital Damascus where up to 1,400 victims many of them women and children were gassed to death. Nor was this the first time that this awful armament has been deployed. Chemical-filled shells have been fired at fighters in rural locations. What made the murderous Damascus attack so terrible was that it was used in a densely inhabited metropolitan area in full view of rebel bloggers and photographers. Within hours, the news of the brutal event was flashed to an unbelieving world. How could the Assad regime be so brutal and vicious in so public a manner? This of course was one of the questions Assad's spin doctors themselves asked as they set about trying to deny their master's crime. Would anyone with poison gas at their disposal be so foolish as to use it so blatantly in front of a watching world? It was of course a double bluff which caused a few governments to hesitate. That poison gas had been used was quickly established. But the Assad regime sought to throw the blame on to the Free Syrian Army, alleging that it had used captured chemical weapons and fired them at their own people. Despite immediate analysis that concluded that the rebel forces did not have the technology nor the resources to mix the chemical agents to form deadly poison gasses, the clever Assad smear has stuck. The regime has also sought to present itself in the very best of lights by agreeing immediately to the inspection and destruction of its poison gas arsenal. With sickening hypocrisy, it has sought to make a virtue out of its bowing to international demands. It does not matter that Assad and his people knew perfectly well that had they not complied, the United States would have unleashed an aerial bombardment that would very probably have crippled the regime's armed forces and opened the way for a victory by the Free Syrian Army. Yet here we have US Secretary of State John Kerry saying that Assad deserves credit for sticking to the chemical weapons deal so far. Did not Kerry realize with what disgust his words would be greeted? Assad is a man with the blood of 100,000 corpses on his hands, responsible for the creation of four million refugees and for the destruction of any community whose citizens have had the temerity to resist his wicked rule. Here is a dictator that deserves no praise whatsoever. Here is a tyrant who is only doing what he is doing because he has been obliged to do it by the only threat that he understands - main force. There will be many who suspect that something completely different may have prompted the Secretary of State's unwise words. What in fact he was really praising was the fact that Assad by bending to international opinion had got the Obama administration off a very difficult political hook. Obama simply did not want to start a shooting war with Syria. If Assad had not blinked first, the United States would by now have destroyed Assad's war machine. For reasons which still require precise explanation, Washington was reluctant to use its power in a just cause. Kerry's praise of Assad could, therefore, be read as a note of thanks for getting the Obama White House off a nasty hook.
