President Obama has given the green light to the shipping of weapons from the United States to opposition forces in Syria. In a statement released by Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, the White House claims that “our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin.” The Syrian government’s purported use of a chemical weapon, the president’s national security statement said, “crosses clear red lines” for the United States and the international community. On April 26, President Obama invoked very historic words when asked about where precisely the...