President Barack Obama said Friday that reports of Syria's reported use of chemical weapons will be a "game changer" that will affect his administration's response to the country's two-year civil war.
"To use weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line in terms of international norms and laws," Obama told reporters in the Oval Office, according to a White House pool report.
"That's going to be a game changer."
Asked whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had crossed a "red line" by using chemical weapons, however, Obama hedged carefully:
"Knowing that there's chemical weapons in Syria doesn't tell us when they were used or how they were used. We ourselves will be putting a lot of resources on this," he said, according to the pool report. "A line has been crossed when we are seeing tens of thousands killed by the regime."
"For the Syrian Government to use chemical weapons on its people will change my calculus," Obama added. "This is not an on and off switch, it's an on going challenge that all of us have to work with."
Earlier Friday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney also took steps to hedge the administration's claim that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against the opposition.
"We are continuing to work to build on the assessments made by the intelligence community, that the degrees of confidence here are varying, that this is not an airtight case,"Carney told reporters.
Still, it seems unlikely that the chemical weapons reports are false. Three other countries — the United Kingdom, France, and Israel — have all reported that Syria has used chemical weapons, and on Thursday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that the administration has "varying degrees of confidence" in reports that Syria has engaged in "small scale" use of sarin gas,
Back in August, Obama warned the Assad regime that using chemical weapons would cross a "red line," but his administration has never said exactly what it would do if that line is crossed.
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