Syria Chemical Weapons

[lightbulb247]

What would actually happen if, say, The west gets involved and find out that it was the rebels who fired the chemical weapons after all. What would the world reaction be, and could that possibly be even a bigger mess up for the West than Iraq was.

[Old_Geezer]

One is usually damned whatever one does. Those countries that disapproved of action would take the high ground and rail against those who took action for a while. Then it'd all settle down. The result of these conflicts always do after a bit. Governments are pragmatic and do what they think helps them in the present or near future, citizens have no power anyway. Besides if the rebels had taken over by then there'd be even more reason not to react too excessively.

[LazyGun]

Well whoever from "The West" had got involved in a military strike to punish Assad and degrade his military facilities would be pretty embarassed, politically and diplomatically speaking, one would imagine.

The Russians and the Chinese would no doubt lead the way and try to marshall and international response to capitalise on that embarassment to create whatever political, diplomatic and economic advantages they could, and it would further undermine the USA's authority as the flag-bearer for democracy on the world stage.

Not sure that it would be "an even bigger mess up for the West than Iraq though". Iraq remains a special case so far. An invasion with the objective of regime change, justified by the use of false intelligence, resulting in the deaths of 100s of thousands of civilians and a country in ruins with little or no plan on how to manage the reconstruction is much much worse in my opinion than the current notions being circulated of some kind of limited missile strike on Syria

[lightbulb247]

yes, i agree Lazygun, What i meant by being worse than Iraq was the lasting damage on all the countries involved, and how it would affect diplomatic affairs in years to come. Iraq was a mess up, but that has not seemed to stop the USA going ahead with actions, even when the United Nations have not made it clear yet if it was actually Assad forces who fired the weapon.

If it did happen to be the rebels, that would probably be a huge if not catastrophic damage to the USA and its place in the world as a "superpower". I believe it would help Russia to maybe boost its image due to it supporting Assad.

[keyplus90]

If that happens then no one would ever hear about that. It would be as it never happened. Seeeeeeeeeemple.

[naomi24]

Keyplus, despite your conspiracy theories, we would.

[modeller]

The suppliers of the weapons and chemicals would be held far more responsible than they are at the moment.