The killings of Syria's Defense Minister and other key officials last week by opposition forces threaten to shatter Bashir al-Assad's regime.  Without a devastating response, his days are numbered.  Sergei Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia, Syria's closest ally, warned darkly that "the battle for the capital, the decisive fight" for the country, was underway.

Final collapse of the Ba'ath Party dictatorship will have profound, if still unpredictable, consequences.  One absolutely critical issue is Assad's weapons of mass destruction ("WMD").  Even before the deadly bomb attack, the regime, for unknown reasons, had begun moving stockpiles of chemical weapons from secure storage locations.

The most immediate question is whether Damascus will use chemical weapons ("CW") against the opposition, as Amnesty International reported his father did during the 1982 Hama massacre. If Bashar concludes his regime will collapse and expose his fellow Alawites and other supporters to a bloodbath, he may calculate that resorting to CW is his only hope.