See, and I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Yes, plenty of groups could produce Sarin, and a few have. But it's on the other side of a bright white line - very few organizations have resorted to NBC since WWI. It's not so much "can you make Sarin" it's "WILL you make Sarin." It's the kind of move that takes you out of the "armed dissident" column and places you squarely in the "DR. EVIL" column. Nobody outside the lunatic fringe has tried to justify chemical weapons since… ever.

So when you're painting Assad as a Very Bad Man who will do Very Bad Things and the guys he's arrayed against are, you know, cooking up nerve gas, it comes across as disingenuously simplistic to say "there's a good side and a bad side in Syria."

It's sloppy, in my opinion. What the whole of the middle east comes down to is "we don't want the Muslim Brotherhood to catch on anywhere, ever, because it's the IRA to Al Qaeda's Sinn Fein." But since the Muslim Brotherhood is popular, well-funded and supported by broad swaths of South Asia, you can't say "we prefer secular regimes even when they're genocidal because at least they don't take their orders from Allah."

'cuz really, that's what the Soviets said about Afghanistan.