The British Parliament voted down the option of taking military action against Syria by 13 votes on Thursday. Lawmakers voted 285 to 272 against a limited strike on Syrian targets as a response to the chemical-weapons attack the Syrian government [allegedly--Esco] unleashed on its own people last week. The motion was backed by Prime Minister David Cameron, and while it is nonbinding, Cameron acknowledged that the British public was against military support and admitted defeat. "I get it," he told Parliament.
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With a thin legal rationale for bombing and ghosts of bad Iraq intelligence in their minds, Western leaders are signaling some measure of caution about intervening in Syria. President Obama said Wednesday he “hasn’t made a decision,” Obama plans to release detailed proof of the chemical attack Thursday. [ He did not--Esco-- See below] Meanwhile, top newspapers from both countries have begun to question a potential intervention; The New York Times’s editorial board wrote Thursday that Obama “has yet to make a convincing legal or strategic case,” and The Telegraph called for “complete transparency” in the decisionmaking process.
A United Nations team on Thursday with a sample from one of the sites in the Damascus area.
N.Y. TIMES
The vote was...a setback for Mr. Obama, who, having given up hope of getting United Nations Security Council authorization for the strike, is struggling to assemble a coalition of allies against Syria.
But administration officials made clear that the eroding support would not deter Mr. Obama in deciding to go ahead with a strike. Pentagon officials said that the Navy had now moved a fifth destroyer into the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Each ship carries dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles that would probably be the centerpiece of any attack on Syria.
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Although administration officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not made a final decision, all indications suggest that a strike could occur soon after United Nations investigators charged with scrutinizing the Aug. 21 attack leave the country. They are scheduled to depart Damascus on Saturday. ----
The White House presented its case for military action to Congressional leaders on Thursday evening, trying to head off growing pressure from Democrats and Republicans to provide more information about the administration’s military planning and seek Congressional approval for any action.
....While the intelligence does not tie Mr. Assad directly to the attack, these officials said, the administration said the United States had both the evidence and legal justification to carry out a strike aimed at deterring the Syrian leader from using such weapons again.
A critical piece of the intelligence, officials said, is an intercepted telephone call between Syrian military officials, one of whom seems to suggest that the chemical weapons attack was more devastating than was intended. “It sounds like he thinks this was a small operation that got out of control,” one intelligence official said.
But Republican lawmakers said White House officials dismissed suggestions that the scale of the attack was a miscalculation, indicating that the officials believe Syria intended to inflict the widespread damage.
| The situation should be resolved in a peaceful way through dialogue." BAN KI-MOON, UN Secretary-General |  |
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Several officials said that the intelligence dossier about the attack also includes evidence of Syrian military units moving chemical munitions into place before the attack was carried out.
Mr. Obama, officials said, is basing his case for action both on safeguarding international standards against the use of chemical weapons and on the threat to America’s national interest.
That threat, they said, is both to allies in the region, like Turkey, Jordan and Israel, and to the United States itself, if Syria’s weapons were to fall into the wrong hands or if other leaders were to take American inaction as an invitation to use unconventional weapons.
Mr. Obama has referred, somewhat vaguely, to reinforcing “international norms,” or standards, against the use of chemical weapons, which are categorized as “weapons of mass destruction” even though they are far less powerful than nuclear or biological weapons.
I'm comfortable that the things the president told Assad not to do he did."
LINDSEY GRAHAM Republican senator from South CarolinaN.Y. TIMES
The evidence of a massacre is undeniable: the bodies of the dead lined up on hospital floors, those of the living convulsing and writhing in pain and a declaration from a respected international aid group that thousands of Syrians were gassed with chemical weapons last week.
And yet the White House faces steep hurdles as it prepares to make the most important public intelligence presentation since February 2003, when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made a dramatic and detailed case for war to the United Nations Security Council using intelligence — later discredited — about Iraq’s weapons programs.
More than a decade later, the Obama administration says the information it will make public, most likely by [the weekend, according to The Guardian] will show proof of a large-scale chemical attack perpetrated by Syrian forces, bolstering its case for a retaliatory military strike on Syria.
Anti war protesters carry the Syrian flag as they stand near the US Armed Forces Recruiting Center in New York.....the White House faces an American public deeply skeptical about being drawn into the Syrian conflict and a growing chorus of lawmakers from both parties angry about the prospect of an American president once again going to war without Congressional consultation or approval.
American officials said Wednesday there was no “smoking gun” that directly links President Bashar al-Assad to the attack, and they tried to lower expectations about the public intelligence presentation. They said it will not contain specific electronic intercepts of communications between Syrian commanders or detailed reporting from spies and sources on the ground.
But even without hard evidence tying Mr. Assad to the attack, administration officials asserted, the Syrian leader bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of his troops and should be held accountable.
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The bellicose talk coming from the administration is unnerving some lawmakers from Mr. Obama’s party, who are angry that the White House seems to have no inclination to seek Congress’s approval before launching a strike in Syria.
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As the White House now considers direct military action in Syria, something it has resisted for two years, Speaker John A. Boehner wrote a letter on Wednesday to Mr. Obama asking the president to provide a “clear, unambiguous explanation of how military action — which is a means, not a policy — will secure U.S. objectives and how it fits into your overall policy.”
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Even as he now contemplates getting deeper into a war he had long resisted, Mr. Obama appears to be mindful that the opposition remains. “We can take limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict,” he said Wednesday on “NewsHour.” He added, “Not another repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about.”