Today is the seventh anniversary of the 2013 Ghouta chemical weapons massacre, where Syrian government forces prepared and fired barrages of nerve gas-laden missiles into mostly residential suburbs of Damascus, indiscriminately killing at least 1,400 and injuring thousands more.

It was the single deadliest day of the hecatomb of the Syrian war. The horrifying images still haunt us. But more importantly, they still follow the tens of thousands who survived that day, knowing now that there was no evil the Assad regime would not unleash to hold on to power.

A lot has been made about the so-called "red line" moment. It was neither the first nor the last time the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own civilians. But the Ghouta massacre was of a scale and quality that it could not be ignored by Western governments.

So it became a crucible moment of the Syrian war, not because it violated some norm - that same month the defector "Caesar" smuggled pictures out of the country showing the emaciated remains of at least 11,000 murdered prisoners - but because it *embarrassed* our sense of self.

To our policymaker's relief, the Russians came to our aid, offering a face-saving agreement that would have the Assad regime declare and surrender a significant share of its chemical weapons stockpile in return for us stepping out from the corner we had painted ourselves into.

You see conspiracy theorists like to frame the chemical weapons issue as an on-ramp for Western regime change. The Iraq corollary is obvious to them. In reality, The 2012 statement was a means of *downgrading* US interests in the conflict and reducing foreign policy liabilities.

This is why I consider it a crucible moment for the administration. A moment when the presidency believed it was shaking itself free from what it thought were imposed or inherited "equations" of foreign policy making - something Obama had struggled with throughout his first term.

It took the Syrian government about half a year to recover from the scare and start tip-toeing back towards the red line. And so in the spring of 2014, they launched a massive wave of dozens of chemical attacks involving Chlorine-filled barrel bombs all across northwest Syria.

In response, the international community squirmed and then shunted the political weight of these violations onto the fig-leaf of an UN-led investigative body. Over the following 3 years, that Mechanism would diligently review and attribute chemical attack after chemical attack.

Our own research finds that, over the course of the war, the Syrian government likely committed more than 334 chemical weapons attacks, including at least three more uses of Sarin in March and April 2017. It's most recent confirmed use was barely over a year ago, on 19 May 2019.

You might ask: Why haven't I heard about that?! Because, contrary to Russian propaganda, the US was not interested in further embroiling itself in the war. CW was a fixture of the Syrian regime's war strategy, built around collective punishment and mass displacement of civilians.

And so a *consistent* policy, rather than a sporadic face-saving policy, would have accepted the premise of civilian protection. And we could not have that. The investigative bodies and dead-ended multilateral formats provided a neat off-ramp for our egos (on so many levels!).

Just to reiterate: The United States and her allies *knew* the Syrian government had used chemical weapons multiple times prior to August 2013, it *knew* Syria had retained a residual stockpile after the supposed disarmament, it *knew* Assad continued to employ chemical weapons.

Even in the two instances where it militarily responded, in the aftermath of the high-fatality attacks in Khan Sheykhoun in 2017 and Douma in 2018, the chosen strike package was sized in proportion to the injury of the US public position, not to deter or attrite the Syrian army.

This was most evident in 2017, when intelligence services had watched Syria conduct two Sarin attacks just days prior and knew where it had stored its surviving stockpile. Yet the retributive strikes only focused on the airbase that had launched the attacks, leaving the store.

A year later, Syrian miltiary helicopters dropped chlorine-filled barrels onto the bombed-out civilians of Douma, killing dozens, forcing the surrender and displacement of tens of thousands. This time, the US included the stores in the strikes but spared the responsible units.

Why? Because keeping the focus narrowly on the chemical weapons program again minimized risk of being dragged into the war. The unit responsible for Douma quickly advanced on south, where it led the battle that recaptured much of Daraa province and displaced tens of thousands.

Another year later, despite warnings of "fire and brimstone" from the White House and State Department, the Syrian 4th Armored Division, which had previously used chemical weapons in Damascus, launched Chlorine-filled rockets onto a position of Islamist rebels in the northwest.

The response? A dollar donation to the global chemical watchdog. The unit responsible would go on to lead the next government offensive against rebel-held northwest Syria, which displaced more than a million civilians, triggered Turkish intervention and a minor refugee crisis.

Again, as important as the norm against chemical weapons is (and our history here is very spotty), this was never just about poison gas - neither for the proponents of action nor the opposition. It was always about whether or not to disrupt the Syrian government war machinery.

And 2013 remains a crucible moment in that debate, the moment a small number of men and women resolved where *they* stood. But it was not the end-all of history, which is written anew every day and with every Syrian child living in terror of the sound of helicopter blades today.

This is getting a bit rambly. If you'd like to learn more, check out our analysis and incident database on our dedicated @GPPi minisite. We will be releasing more and more content, including analysis and database expansions, in the weeks to come. https://chemicalweapons.gppi.net/