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| French FM Laurent Fabius: Military option on the table. |
Syria missed a deadline to hand over all chemical weapons, citing extreme weather and security issues--vulnerability to rebel assaults--as reasons for the delay.
Renewing threats to intervene militarily, the United States and France insist Syria has had plenty of time to comply with the accord (actually hard to believe given the civil war and real risk of rebel capture of weapons).
Meanwhile, Syria, as a result of the conflict instigated and inflamed by the West, has become a magnet for foreign jihadists supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. The "rebels," hailed as freedom fighters by the likes of U.S. Senator John McCain, are divided between Sunni Islamist factions bent on replacing the Russia-alied secular Syrian dictatorship that is backed by Shiite Islamist Iran and Hezbollah with a Sunni Islamic state. Moscow fears such an outcome for good reasons--a Sunni Islamic regime in Damascus would support Islamist separatist terrorism in the Caucasus--and is therefore standing by its Syrian ally while trying to use diplomacy to prevent a Western attack.
Public opinion in the West remains solidly opposed to armed intervention in Syria.
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