The horrific images coming out of the Syrian town of Douma showing men, women and children being gassed to death have led to angry rhetoric and some threats in the West, but that is about it.
French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to attack only if there is proof "beyond any doubt" that the prohibited chemical weapons were used. But Macron knows full well that when it comes to Syrian President Bashar Assad, there is no need for proof. Assad is a war criminal and a serial chemical monster. The use of chemicals to bomb civilians, including those that killed a thousand people some five years ago, resulted in the Russians mediating a deal to dismantle Syrian's chemical weapons stockpile.
For then-U.S. President Barack Obama, who wanted to avoid a strike on Syria, the deal offered an easy way out. He fooled himself into believing that Assad would fully dismantle all of his chemical agents.
In fact, monitoring groups have documented more than 85 chemical attacks in Syria since 2014, most of which were perpetrated by regime elements.
The most severe attack was in April 2017, when about 100 people died from sarin gas, and Assad's planes have dropped dozens of barrels of chlorine gas over the past several month as part of the campaign to crush the anti-regime elements east of Damascus.
There is zero ground to believe Assad when he says he could not have perpetrated the latest attack because "he no longer has such weapons and doesn't need them." Rebel-controlled eastern Ghouta and Douma have been a source of annoyance for the regime by threatening the capital.
Assad has deployed daily bombing sorties and chemical weapons, apparently with success – to terrorize the residents and to make the rebels leave. And now, with the fall of Douma, the threat on Damascus has been neutralized and the area of the capital has been purged of rebels. Now Assad will turn to the last rebel enclave, the province of Idlib in northern Syria.
Assad would never have dared to continue with the chemical attacks had the Russians not turned a blind eye. Russia has been the one to torpedo the international community's effort to investigate the use of chemical weapons on the part of the regime. On Sunday it once again stood by Assad and said that he was being falsely accused.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown the world that he knows a thing or two on nerve agents, and just recently he was accused using it against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. He is not one to be moved by the calls in the West to be "on the right side of history."
As far as Putin is concerned, it is more important that he have his proper place when the new history of Syria is complete, a history of the winners. He couldn't care less if that history is written with the help of a bloodbath.
