Thursday 23 October 2014  How Kerry's off-hand remark put a deal
on Syria  Dubai, September 10, 2013  By Matt Spetalnick and
Arshad Mohammed  Whether deft diplomacy or a rhetorical stumble,
US Secretary of State John Kerry has managed to crack open the
door to a possible solution to the Syrian crisis that could get
President Barack Obama and US lawmakers out of a bind, save
Syria from a bombing and cast Russia as peacemaker.  Kerry's
seemingly off-hand suggestion on Monday that Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad might avert a US military strike if he
surrendered all of his chemical weapons offered a potential
escape hatch that no one had seriously proposed before - and
that could end up leading nowhere.  But in a sign of how
desperate the US, Russia, Syria and the United Nations are to
defuse the international standoff over Assad's alleged use of
chemical weapons in Syria's civil war last month, momentum for
Kerry's suggestion seemed to build instantly.   Positive to
lukewarm reaction flowed in from the White H