A LITTLE REALITY – AT 11:23 A.M. ET:  The hype out of Washington says that the Syrian regime is shedding its chemical weapons, in accordance with the agreement reached late last year.  In fact, they're practically Boy Scouts.  The truth may be very different.  From the Daily Beast: 

Concerns are growing among Western intelligence services that Syria still has a significant and undeclared arsenal of chemical weapons, including crude chlorine-filled bombs, secret stockpiles of sophisticated nerve gasses or their components—and the scientific know-how to rebuild a larger-scale, higher-grade chemical weapons effort once the Bashar al-Assad regime has escaped the international spotlight.

“A ghost of CW [chemical weapons] program in a place riven with conflict—that’s a real concern,” one American intelligence official tells The Daily Beast.

But it’s not the only worry. Within the U.S. intelligence community, there’s also lingering unease about the Assad regime’s biological weapons program that has never been the focus of international inspections and that American officials confess they just don’t have the resources to track down.

To be sure, the deadly and publicly-declared chemical arsenal that Assad had a year ago, that allegedly was used to kill hundreds of people in August, and that he agreed to destroy in September under threat of an American attack is “no longer in existence,” according to the inspectors on the ground in Damascus. Only 7.5 percent of the 1,300 metric tons of chemical agents and precursors that the regime declared remain in the country, and the means of combining those elements to make sophisticated weapons of mass destruction like vx and sarin gas has been destroyed.

But the inspectors are only commenting on the chemical arsenal Assad admitted he had. There’s mounting concern that the Syrian regime may have a second unconventional weapons program—one Assad never told the international community about.

COMMENT:  Hmm.  More chemical weapons.  Probable biological weapons.  Before the Iraq war there were credible, well-sourced reports of long convoys going from Iraq to Syria.  The informed opinion was that these convoys contained some of the Iraqi WMD that we failed to find.  Of course, these reports were scoffed at when they first came out.  I'm not so sure they're being scoffed at now. 

It was always childlike to think that Assad, a mass murderer, would declare all the WMD that he actually has.  We must assume that a stockpile still exists in Syria, but we'll just pretend that it isn't there.  Just as we'll pretend that Iran's nuclear program is under control after we reach some full-of-holes agreement with the Iranians in Geneva.

May 2, 2014