Quote:
Originally Posted by gnadfly
I usually don't read Vox articles especially by Ezra and Iglesias. They are just a front for the DNC, like Media Matters.
Cut and paste what you think is relevant, Mr Little BigKotex.
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Q: Is the red line for this White House chemical warfare? Is conventional warfare enough to get the president to go further than this White House is going?
SPICER: I think the president has been very clear that there are a number of lines that were crossed last week. He’s not going to sit down — you saw this with the last administration, they drew these red lines, and then the red lines were run over. ...
The answer is that if you gas a baby, if you put a barrel bomb into innocent people, I think you will see a response from this president. That is unacceptable.
Barrel bombs are containers filled with explosives and sometimes metal, dropped from helicopters, often on civilian areas. Assad’s air force uses them extremely frequently — his forces dropped 13,000 of them in 2016 alone, according to the
Syrian Network for Human Rights. That’s roughly 36 barrel bombs a day.
By comparison, the chemical weapons attack last week was the first use of banned nerve agents by the Syrian government since 2013. Given the rarity of such attacks, threatening US retaliation for each one makes a certain kind of sense — especially if your goal is only to send a signal that chemical weapons use is unacceptable without getting more deeply involved in the civil war.
