The Obama administration has accused the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad of carrying out a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus that killed nearly 1,500 people.

But maybe it’s a frame job, and Obama actually conspired with al Qaeda to gas innocent Syrians as a pretext for going to war against Assad. That’s what right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh wondered aloud on his radio show Tuesday. (Limbaugh’s theorizing was first noted by Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum).

“Now, if this is right—and I say “IF” in capital letters—if this is right, this is the setup of all time,” Limbaugh told his listeners Tuesday, pointing his listeners to an opinion piece titled “Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?” Limbaugh then said, “At any rate, it looks like there was US intel involvement dating a week before the alleged chemical weapons attack in meetings that were anticipating a war-changing event. So we could be looking here at a frame job, a pretty big setup.”

The opinion piece, written by Yossef Bodansky, a former Republican congressional aide, suggests that the attack was “a pre-meditated provocation by the Syrian opposition,” part of a pretext for U.S. military action in Syria that could bolster the rebels and defeat Assad. Limbaugh found it convincing, offering that Obama’s (inconsistent) support for popular uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East was part of a grand strategy to empower al Qaeda. “The regime’s agenda appears to be eliminating dictators in favor of Muslim radicals,” Limbaugh said. (When Limbaugh says “regime” he is referring to the Obama administration, not the Syrian dictatorship).

Limbaugh continued:

He got rid of Mubarak. He’s a dictator. He might have been a horrible guy, but he was stable. Khadafy may have been a horrible guy, but he was stable. We’re getting rid of all of these dictators—which, of course, sounds great—but they’re being replaced with Muslim radicals, i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al Qaeda is basically who’s in Syria. If they get rid of Bashar in Syria, it will be al Qaeda. Muslim radicals. Sharia is on the march in the Middle East is what’s taking place here.

Some conservative websites have also latched onto Bodansky’s theory.

Limbaugh later appeared to deny or blame the genocide that occurred against Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, by way of explaining how the chemical weapons attack near Damascus could all be a ruse. “We were tricked into launching air strikes against the Serbs because we’d been convinced that the Serbs were wreaking havoc against the poor Bosnian Muslims,” Limbaugh said, citing Bodansky, “when in fact the attacks had been provoked by forces sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims to create this reaction of ours.”

More than 100,000 people were killed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, most of them Muslims. Dozens of former military and political officials have been convicted of war crimes by an international tribunal set up by the United Nations. A month before the disputed incident Bodansky accuses Bosnian Muslims of staging to provoke NATO intervention, 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica, an incident for which former Bosnian Serb officials have been convicted of genocide. There is no “stand your ground” defense to crimes against humanity.

“In both cases, Muslims are involved. In both cases, Democrat Party presidents are involved,” Limbaugh said. “In both cases, Muslims conduct a deception, an operation of deception that we either are party to, lured into, or we are fooled by, one of the three.”

Perhaps it sounds far-fetched to you that Obama, the entire US intelligence apparatus, and the intelligence communities of France and Germany would conspire with extremists to stage a brutal chemical weapons attack, then frame Assad in order to deliberately enable al Qaeda and advance the cause of Islamist radicals seeking to impose a strict interpretation of religious law on the world. If so, you probably haven’t been listening to Limbaugh much these past few years.