and you hear” that the White House has drawn a red line on the use of nerve agents, then “you have an interest in giving the impression that some chemical weapons have been used,” says Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish scientist who headed up the UN weapons inspections in Iraq. Carla Del Ponte, of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, says it was the insurgents who used poison gas, not the Syrian government.

The French and the British are hardly neutral bystanders, with long and sordid track records in the region. It was Paris and London that secretly divvied up the Middle East in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, and who used divisions between Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians to keep their subject populations at one another’s throats. Both countries justsuccessfully lobbied the European Union to end its arms embargo on the Syrian combatants and are considering supplying weapons to the insurgents.

Besides the growing butcher bill in Syria—according to the UN the death toll is now over 93,000, with a million and a half refugees—the war is going regional, particularly in Iraq and Lebanon. Turkey and Jordan are also being pulled into the maelstrom.

Fighting between Shiites and Saudi-sponsored Sunni extremists in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli is drawing in the Lebanese Army, which recently issued a warning that sectarian violence was getting out of control. There is fighting between Assad loyalists, Sunni insurgents, and the Shiite-based organization Hezbollah on both sides of Lebanon’s border with Syria.

In the meantime, Sunni extremists are waging a car-bombing offensive against the central