AND IN THE REAL WORLD – AT 9:09 A.M. ET:   We again note the importance of not averting our eyes from foreign challenges during our election season.  International thugs aren't giving us a vacation. 

American forces are building in the Persian Gulf, in part to try to convince Israel not to attack Iran before the election, and in part to insure that the Strait of Hormuz stays open in case Iran tries to blockade it.

And in Syria, more die as the world, unled by the president of the United States, does very little.  The death count, according to some commonly used estimates, is up to 23,000.  And there is renewed concern about Syria's chemical weapons.  From the Washington Post:

Western spy agencies suspect Syria’s government has several hundred tons of chemical weapons and precursor components scattered among as many as 20 sites throughout the country, heightening anxieties about the ability to secure the arsenals in the event of a complete breakdown of authority in the war-torn nation, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials say.

Officials are monitoring the storage sites, but they expressed growing fear that they have not identified every location and that some of the deadly weapons could be stolen or used by Syrian troops against civilians.

“We think we know everything, but we felt the same way about Libya,” said a former American intelligence official who was briefed on U.S. preparations for both conflicts. “We had been on the ground in Libya, yet there were big surprises, both in terms of quantities and locations.” The former official was one of several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

The collapse of government control in several Syrian provinces has prompted heightened scrutiny of the weapons depots by the United States and its allies in the region. It also has hastened preparations for securing the sites with foreign troops, the U.S. and Middle Eastern officials said.

Drawing from recent intelligence assessments, the officials believe that the Syrian arsenal contains several hundred tons of chemical weapons and precursors, including sizable quantities of battlefield-ready sarin, the deadly nerve agent.

The stockpile appears to be larger and more widely distributed than originally suspected, according to two officials who have seen the intelligence reports.

COMMENT:  The reference to Libya is telling.  There are many, many Libyan weapons still unaccounted for.  There is special concern about shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles that are small enough to be shipped easily across some borders, and could be used in terrorist attacks against airliners. 

One intriguing question about the Syrian arsenal, studiously avoided by the "Bush lied about Iraqi WMD" crowd, is whether some of the Iraq weapons of mass destruction were smuggled into Syria before the Iraq War.  There are credible, experienced authorities who claim that they were, and we know that long convoys of trucks were seen entering Syria from Iraq before the war.  This is a critical question, for Syria could easily transfer these weapons to Hezbollah, which operates from Lebanon, and which has the missile capacity to threaten both American bases and our allies in the Middle East.

There will be no rest in foreign policy.

September 7, 2012