President Obama said Wednesday the credibility of the international community and the U.S. Congress is at stake on the issue of Bashar Assad's use of chemical weapons:
BARACK OBAMA: When those videos first broke and you saw images of over 400 children subjected to gas, everybody expressed outrage. 'How can this happen in this modern world?' Well, it happened because a government chose to deploy these deadly weapons on civilian populations. And so the question is: How credible is the international community when it says this is an international norm that has to be observed? The question is: How credible is Congress when it passes a treaty saying we have to forbid the use of chemical weapons? I do think that we have to act, because if we don't, we are effectively saying that, even though we may condemn it and issue resolutions and so forth and so on, somebody who is not shamed by resolutions can continue to act with impunity.
