And let’s just for a moment try to imagine their perspective, because that red line, if you will, I think in some ways has backfired in terms of having the Syrians look up to and admire and support the West. Because let’s say you live in one of these villages, let’s say your family and your extended family live in the village in the area immediately around it. You know, in 2011 the village may have been occupied, if you will, by the Syrian army, there may have been checkpoints around it, and the Syrian army and security forces were in the eyes of local people preying upon the local people and taking some of the young men, and from your extended family maybe a few young men were arrested. Gradually, as the war deepened, there is fighting. And as the fighting intensified, your village started to get shelled. And the shelling then led with time to the occasional airstrike, and the shelling continues to this day. And in your extended family you’ve had several losses, several people have been killed - not just fighters, not just people inclined to be fighters, but women, children, the elderly. Several, a few - but it’s enough. And then you’re listening to this argument that says, ‘Now if chemical weapons are used, the world would be so concerned and so outraged that they would take action.’ And you start to think, ‘So my life isn’t what you care about. It’s the nature of my death.’ So if I die by high explosives, if I die by a bullet, if I die by disappearance because I’m rolled up at the checkpoint, never seen again, that’s OK. That’s a green line? And a SCUD missile’s OK? An airstrike’s OK? But chemical weapons, that’s not OK. I mean there are, according to, you know, the most recent estimates as many as 70,000, maybe more than 70,000, people who have been killed in this conflict. And to the Syrians, they say those don’t count? But if someone, you know, takes the cork off some chemical weapons - even a few - that suddenly does count?
