Here’s the text of Professor Jerry Meldon’s Letter to the Editor, September 12, 2016
Indira A.R. Lakshmanan understandably laments President Obama’s limited response to Syria’s endless humanitarian crisis (“The only change in Syria is for the worse,” Opinion, Sept. 2). But she’s on shaky ground when she reprises the 2013 neocon war-hawk allegation that the Bashar al-Assad regime “used sarin gas in Ghouta, killing . . . hundreds of civilians.”
Assad did possess chemical weapons, and Obama had ominously warned that deploying them would cross a “red line.” Fortunately, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian President Vladimir Putin brokered a deal whereby Assad relinquished his deadly arsenal, which helped dissuade Obama from bombing Syria in retaliation for Assad’s purported authorization of the sarin attack.
In retrospect, it defied logic for Assad to deploy chemical weapons just when UN inspectors were in the Ghouta region. To former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, writing last month in Consortiumnews.com, “the evidence suggested instead a . . . Syrian rebel false-flag operation aimed at fabricating a pretext for direct US intervention.”
Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh might well agree. In a recent interview in Truthout, Hersh stated that at the time of the August 2013 sarin attack, “the US and its allies knew from highly classified . . . intelligence reporting . . . that the jihadist opposition to Assad . . . had the ability to manufacture a crude form of sarin.”
Rather than criticism, Obama deserves great credit for defying the war hawks.
Jerry Meldon
Hopkinton
The writer is an associate professor in the chemical and biological engineering department at Tufts University.