"the amount of chemical weapons Assad accumulated. What did he plan to do with 'em all?" - Ed T

I know this runs counter to what most believe on this forum but most of the larger "Arab" countries in the region got their weaponry from the Soviet Union - Jordan and Saudi Arabia being the exceptions.

With Soviet weaponry came Soviet tactics and military thinking and the Soviets opted to retain Chemical and Biological weapons after the Second World War.

Chemical and Biological agents have a shelf life - they go off, so you have to constantly renew your stock of agents and amounts just build up if you do not have the facilities to safely dispose of them. The USA have such facilities and that is why the USA has become the repository for thousands of tons of this stuff as it awaits destruction.

Another facet of the region that differs from the west is that the armed forces in these countries main purpose is not to protect the country from foreign aggression but to protect the Government in power, they are used as a tool of repression.

Bashar Al-Assad's plans for those weapons were exactly the same as those of his father and the same as Saddam Hussein, a means of terrorizing your own population, a means of deterring your enemies and/or threatening your neighbours.

The threat of using chemical weapons against say NATO forces does not work as all their equipment and all their soldiers are protected against such weapons and they are all well practiced in operating in a chemical environment. No-one in their right mind would threaten NATO with a chemical attack because NATO's automatic response to such an attack is to use tactical nuclear weapons. UK unilaterally abandoned chemical weapons in 1956, the USA did the same about 9/10 years later.