The New York Times has the story Syria Asserts Claim of New Strikes as U.N. Impasse Looms. The previous link is to the supposedly unhacked version of the web site.  In this age of internet chicanery, there is no guarantee of anything.

Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, added a new level of complexity to the issue on Wednesday, announcing that he had submitted evidence of three previously unreported instances of chemical weapons use in Syria, which he asserted had been carried out by Syrian insurgents. Mr. Jaafari said the Syrian government had requested that the United Nations investigators expand their inquiry to include those events as well, which could lengthen their stay in the country.

Mr. Jaafari said the new instances occurred on Aug. 22, 24 and 25, and were also in the Damascus suburbs. He said Syrian soldiers were the targets. The ambassador did not explain why he was only now bringing forth the allegations, which critics were likely to view as a stalling exercise.

Mr. Jaafari repeated the Syrian government’s denials that it had ever used chemical weapons in the conflict and said the accusations were a conspiracy by Western nations acting on Israel’s behalf. He rejected assertions by the United States, Britain and other Western allies that there was persuasive evidence of Syrian government culpability in the use of the banned weapons.

The natural reaction to this might be, well of course Syria is going to deny this.  Why should we believe anything they say to avoid the consequences of their actions?  Yes, but what if in this case they are right.

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the Syrian government was actually not responsible for the chemical weapons attack. What could they say that would convince us that they were telling the truth?  If the answer is that there is nothing they could say, then we have a problem.

Haven’t we seen this movie before?  The UN inspectors couldn’t find any WMD in Iraq before we invaded.  So we said, well of course, Saddam Hussein is hiding them.  I thought at the time that he was caught between a rock and a hard place.  He had to convince his local adversaries that he did have WMD to scare them away form attacking him.  He had to convince the US that he did not have WMD to keep us from attacking him.  Not that I have any sympathy for Saddam Hussein, but what our misguided propaganda war cost us in US soldiers’ lives is what distrubs me.