Assad had staged the largest massacre of the war, and he had carried out a chemical attack beyond anything the world had seen in a quarter century.26 While I wished President Obama would consider confronting Assad’s other instruments of death, I agreed with him that chemical weapons warranted a specific red line. They were weapons of mass destruction, capable of killing vast numbers of people at once. The nations of the world had come together after World War I to ban these weapons, and if the international consensus against their use were to break down, the lapse would almost certainly come
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