The world is watching Syria very closely, worried that a desperate Bashir al-Assad might use his chemical weapons against his own people or his neighbors. The U.S. and other nations have warned Assad against launching a chemical attack, but they consider a preemptive strike against Assad's weapons to be high-risk. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News chief Pentagon correspondentU.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Thursday that intelligence about Syrian chemical weapons "raises serious concerns" that the regime of Bashar Assad may use them against the country's own citizens.
Follow @NBCNewsWorld (https://twitter.com/NBCNewsWorld) "The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching very closely," Panetta said. "And the president of the United States has made it very clear, there will be consequences — there will be consequences if the Assad regime makes the terrible mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people."
His comments came a day after U.S. officials told NBC News (http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/05/15706380-syria-loads-chemical-weapons-into-bombs-military-awaits-assads-order?lite) that the Syrian military had loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped from dozens of fighter-bombers. The defense chief, who was speaking at a news conference at the Department of Veterans Affairs, would not elaborate on what the potential consequences would be.
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