And today, as the U.N. Security Council gets ready to debate the establishment of a new U.N.-authorized chemical weapons monitoring regime in Syria, it is counting on the Syrian government to form a new partnership to achieve that goal. “We have been delegitimizing the Syrian regime and suddenly by virtue of this initiative the Assad regime is now a partner of the international community,” said a senior Arab diplomat. “Of course it’s a good thing that these weapons and stockpiles be kept under safe control, but are we not inadvertently undoing what we have been trying to do for two years?”

Najib Ghadbian, the U.S. spokesman for the opposition Syrian National Coalition, is worried that the new inspection initiative, which was first proposed by Russia, Syria’s most powerful ally, will shift the international community’s focus away from holding the Bashar al-Assad regime accountable for mass murder — and toward maintaining the security of its chemical weapons stockpile.

“The concern we have is whether Assad is allowed to stay because he is willing to give up his weapons of mass destruction,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “I think this was tried before with a person called [Libyan dictator Muammar] Qaddafi. It didn’t turn out so well.”