Secretary of State John Kerry, in an off-the-cuff remark, said Assad could prevent military action if he gives up his chemical weapons.
N.Y. TIMES
President Obama on Monday tentatively embraced a Russian diplomatic proposal to avert a United States military strike on Syria by having international monitors take control of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons. The move added new uncertainty to Mr. Obama’s push to win support among allies, the American public and members of Congress for an attack.
DAILY MAIL
Last night the US government said it would take a ‘hard look’ at the Russian proposal but had ‘serious scepticism’ about putting Syria’s chemical weapons under international protection.
Mr Kerry’s intervention, made as he concluded a tour of Western nations, risked complicating a crunch vote in the US Senate over whether to back Barack Obama’s plans to use force against Syria.
N.Y. TIMES (Cont'd)
Mr. Obama’s statements about the haphazardly constructed plan appeared to offer him an exit strategy for a military strike he had been reluctant to order, and it came as support on Capitol Hill for a resolution authorizing force was slipping. Even some lawmakers who had announced support for it reversed course.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Monday evening that he would not force an initial vote on the resolution on Wednesday, slowing Senate consideration until at least next week. If President Obama fears losing the vote, some suspect he may yet use Mr Kerry’s intervention as a device to delay. Democrats said they had enough votes to overcome a filibuster but possibly not enough to pass it.
[ Reuters: President Obama is going to have a steep climb to convince Americans it's worth attacking Syria. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted at the beginning of September, shows that 63 percent oppose intervening in the civil war. That's up from 53 percent who thought it was a bad idea at the end of August.]
DAILY MAIL (Cont'd)
Within hours, Russia seized on the idea. The country’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, following talks in Moscow with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Moallem, said: ‘If the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in that country would allow avoiding strikes, we will immediately start working with Damascus.
‘We are calling on the Syrian leadership to not only agree on placing chemical weapons storage sites under international control, but also on its subsequent destruction and fully joining the treaty on prohibition of chemical weapons.’
N.Y. TIMES (Cont'd)
But to some, the offhand nature of Mr. Kerry’s comment and Moscow’s hurried response raised suspicions that the Russians and Syrians were making plans to control the chemical stockpile or were, at the least, using the proposal as a delaying tactic that could undermine Mr. Obama’s efforts for a military strike.
Either way, the proposal did not appear to be one that Mr. Kerry or the Obama administration had intended.
The effort to police such a proposal, even if Syria agreed, would be a laborious and prolonged effort, especially since Mr. Assad’s government has shrouded its arsenal in secrecy for decades. As United Nations inspectors discovered in Iraq after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, even an invasive inspection program can take years to account for chemical stockpiles and never be certain of complete compliance, something that President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, who was in Moscow, welcomed Russia’s proposal, though he stopped short of pledging that Mr. Assad would comply. His remarks, however, tacitly acknowledged that Syria possessed a chemical arsenal, something it had never publicly done.
...Syria has maintained [the weapons] in large part as a deterrent to Israel, which is widely assumed to have a nuclear arsenal that it has never officially acknowledged.
Mr. Obama ...promised that his administration would engage with the Russians to see if the world could “arrive at something that is enforceable and serious.” But he said that “if we don’t maintain and move forward with a credible threat of military pressure, I do not think we will actually get the kind of agreement I would like to see.” ....He said that if Syrian officials accepted the Russian proposal, “then this could potentially be a significant breakthrough.”
[The Guardian: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that a strike in Syria may be postponed until after a discussion by the United Nations Security Council next week. His comments come on the heels of key ally France saying that the nation will not act until after a report from the weapons inspectors—who were in Syria during the attack.]
AND THE OTHE OTHER IMPORTANT NEWS OF THE DAY: ZIMMERMAN ARRESTED AND THEN RELEASED:
Shellie Zimmerman (center) called police at 2pm on Monday, claiming George Zimmerman (left with a police officer) was at the Lake Mary, Florida home (right) belonging to her parents. The altercation was sparked by claims he had been having an affair with a former fiancee, friends told MailOnline. On a 911 call, Shellie is heard sobbing, claiming that her estranged husband punched her father in the nose and threatened to shoot them as he sat in his car. But she has not pressed charges and Zimmerman has been released. According to an Associated Press report, ...officers on Monday "didn't find anything that indicated he [Zimmerman] had a gun on his person." It comes just days after Shellie filed for divorce, claiming that their marriage was 'irretrievably broken' following the Trayvon Martin murder trial.
N.Y. DAILY NEWS
In an interview with ABC News shown Friday, Shellie Zimmerman called her husband of six years “selfish” and said he believes he’s “invincible” after being found not guilty in the racially charged Trayvon Martin case. A friend of the feuding couple told the N.Y. Daily News that tempers flew when Shellie Zimmerman accused George of having an affair.That’s probably what’s going on,” the friend, John Donnelly, who was called as a character witness for Zimmerman during his trial, told The News. “Shellie hasn’t even hardly seen him. Three or four days after the trial ended, he was gone.” Zimmerman [Donnelly said] has left those closest to him feeling 'angry and used' and how his affair with a former fiancee was the final straw for Shellie.