On Monday, the US officials were all set for Syria to miss the seven day “deadline” to deliver its lists official accounting of chemical weapons, but Syria took them by surprise, delivering the complete list a day early.

It is, of course, but that’s not the narrative the US has been pushing, and they’ve been so eager to dub Syria in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in the days since they signed it and so desperate to get international authorization for a war when that first inevitable hiccup comes, that an admission of progress is really surprising.

Beyond the US, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad affirmed his government’s willingness to let international experts access the sites, saying they’d be fine with doing so more or less immediately, but warning that some of the sites might not be easy to reach because of fighting with foreign-backed militants.

That concern is very real, with Syria in the middle of an enormous conflict. Though officials see this as a process to be wrapped up by mid-2014, the reality is that it has been a multi-decade problem in other nations, and those nations didn’t have wars to complicate matters.

Syria’s cooperation with the United Nations over its chemical weapons has turned attention of some Western and Arab diplomats on Israel's WMDs considering regime's history and role in regional wars and tensions.

A frequent complaint among Arab countries in the region -- that Israel has an undeclared but presumed nuclear-weapons program -- has already resurfaced.

Syria's government has hinted that it could raise Israel's suspected arsenal of nuclear and other weapons as an international issue and potentially a precondition for Damascus moving ahead on the destruction of its chemical agents.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly stated that Syria's program was only necessary as a defense against Israel's vastly superior firepower.

NTJ/BA