By Daniel Larison

Jeffrey Lewis reviews the evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria and finds it lacking:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Syria used “small scale” chemical agents to test Western resolve. This is the sort of thing that sounds great over coffee at the Brookings Institution — you can be a sober voice for restraint without giving Bashar al-Assad the benefit of the doubt. But without more evidence than has been made public, the correct judgment is that we do not know whether chemical weapons have been used or not [bold mine-DL].

I actually think the Obama administration has handled restating the red line reasonably well — though no one reported it correctly.

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