The Obama administration now believes that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may have used chemical weapons. Today the White House released a letter explaining that the American “intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specially the chemical agent sarin.”

Now that Assad has crossed an Obama redline, will the administration’s Syria policy get tougher? Don’t count on it. Obama announced last summer that the use of chemical weapons “would change my calculations significantly.” Britain, France and Israel have all reported within the last two weeks that Assad used chemical weapons as recently as March and likely more than once. But the administration still wanted more proof.