SyriaExperts question ambitious Syria chemical weapons agreement

The announcements in Geneva by Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were bold: President Bashar al-Assad has a week to provide detailed, accurate, and comprehensive information about Syria’s entire chemical weapons program: research labs, production facilities, test sites, chemical storage depots, and munitions kept by every military unit.

This report will be an early – and dramatic – indication of whether Syria intends to cooperate with the international effort to disarm the regime of its vast chemical weapons arsenal, or whether the regime has no intention to cooperate, but instead is bent on dragging the process for the purpose of relieving international pressure and buying itself time.

The agreement reached between Kerry and Lavrov contains a tight timetable:

• An accurate and comprehensive report within a week
• An “immediate and unfettered” access to chemical weapons sites by international inspectors within days after the Syria submits the report
• The destruction of chemical agent mixing equipment by November
• Complete removal of Syria’s control of its chemical weapons – and complete destruction of chemical weapons and production facilities — in less than a year

The New York Times reports that experts say this timetable would not only set a speed record, but that that it cannot be accomplished even with Syria’s full cooperation.

“You have a very limited time to do as much as you can with maximum political support,” David Kay, who led major efforts in the 1990s to find and destroy Iraq’s unconventional arms, told the Times. “The political support will start to erode. The people you’re inspecting will get tired. So you want to do as much as you can, as quickly as you can.”

Experts note that if done safely and securely, the destruction of chemical agents is a painstaking process that can take decades.

Robert Joseph, a former top national security official under President George W. Bush who was involved in helping formulate the requirements for Libya’s chemical weapons destruction program, told the Times that Libya complied because “the Libyan leadership believed that it would be attacked” if it did not abandon its program.

“I doubt Assad has that worry now,” he said, though administration official said the threat of a U.S. military strike has not been called off.