J.R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, wrote that “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
The current live dragon is Syria and its dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Despite two years in which he killed over a hundred thousand Syrians and made a million more refugees, no one anticipated that he would use also poison gas against them, but that’s what dictators do.