SUPPORT FOR SYRIA BOMBING DROPPING, OBAMA MAY GO IT ALONE

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.
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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

 

 

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 Carolina

N.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.”

 

SYRIA: THE GUNS OF AUGUST?

A Syrian Army soldier walks on a street in the Jobar neighborhood of Damascus on August 24. Syrian state media accused rebels of using chemical arms in Damascus, forcing them to resort to such weapons “as their last card.” (AP)


MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST

Ay yi yi. Suddenly we’re about to bomb Syria? How did this happen? Just last week, Barack Obama was sounding very circumspect about the whole business. Then we started moving naval forces closer to Syria. Then, on Saturday, President Obama met for three hours with his national-security principals to discuss the situation. Sunday morning, the Syrian regime, evidently taking note of developments, said it would allow U.N. weapons inspectors in to the site of a suspected chemical-weapons attack. Shortly thereafter, a “senior administration official” was deputized to say the offer was “too late to be credible.” It’s a horrible situation with nothing but bad options, and it right now it looks as if the United States is going to choose the bad option of bombing strikes. There are good reasons to do it, but also good reasons to be terrified of what it might unleash.

Why would Obama act now, after two years of letting Bashar al-Assad massacre 10,000 of his people? Slate’s Fred Kaplan laid out the rationale insightfully over the weekend. If—we’ll return to this “if”—Assad used chemical weapons, he crossed Obama’s famous/infamous “red line.” In addition, Obama, Kaplan noted, is big on international norms, and one of the biggest international norms going is taking action to prevent the spread of chemical weapons, which has been in place since right after World War I. A failure to act “would erode, perhaps obliterate” the taboo against such weapons. That’s something Obama is absolutely right to take very seriously.

But now, that “if.” We don’t know for sure that it was the regime that used these weapons. We assume it was the regime. But the opposition isn’t exactly a concert of Boy Scout troops. It’s split into many factions, some very anti-American. Maybe the administration has private intelligence fingering the regime. But publicly, it looks pretty strange on its face for the United States to turn down Syria’s offer on inspectors. How could we be moving toward military action without at least going through this motion? The rest of the senior official’s Sunday statement gives a specific reason why it’s too late: because “the evidence available has been significantly corrupted as a result of the regime’s persistent shelling and other international actions over the last five days.”

Americans, as usual, are either paying no attention to this crisis, or if they are, they’re concluding that we should just let them kill one another. The first poll out on the matter since things really heated up, released over the weekend by Reuters/Ipsos, finds that 60 percent oppose any U.S. military action, and just 9 percent would support it. Even sending arms to some opposition groups is opposed 47 percent to 27 percent. If Obama is going to take action, he’s going to have to shift those numbers. Proof would be a start.


Bodies of alleged victims of a chemical attack on Ghouta, Syria lie on the ground on August 21. Opposition forces said the regime had killed more than 100 people in a chemical-weapons attack; the government has denied the claims. (Shaam News Network/AP)

Kaplan outlines a possible Kosovo-style action, similarly sanctioned by NATO. It was an air campaign that was on the whole quite successful. We removed a murdering dictator, Slobodan Milosevic; Kosovars gained autonomy; no Americans died in battle. We did kill 1,200 civilians (by the way, at least 1,000 more than have been killed by all drone strikes) [italics by Esco]. And we made some pretty bad targeting errors (remember the Chinese embassy fiasco?). But on balance, it was a limited campaign that achieved its aims. If that’s possible in Syria—and that’s another big question: what exactly the aims of a limited campaign would be—it could well be the right thing to do.

Assad has now pretty clearly established himself as a monstrous butcher (although his death toll is only about half his father’s, who—I remind neocons now hectoring Obama—was butchering his people while the great Ronald Reagan did precisely nothing). Putting all other questions and complications temporarily to the side, his actions totally justify an international force seeing to his ouster. There is also the question of U.S. credibility. I shuddered the instant I heard Obama use the phrase “red line” however many months ago, because I knew instantly, as many did, what the potential implications were. But my shuddering is beside the point. He used it, and the ineluctable logic of these situations holds that, at some point, he’s going to have to show he meant it.

So there are reasons to act. But there’s one massive difference between Kosovo and Syria: Milosevic didn’t have a major regional power watching his back. Syria does. Iran complicates this immeasurably. Also over the weekend, the Iranian armed forces’ deputy chief of staff said the following: “If the United States crosses this red line [of intervention], there will be harsh consequences for the White House.” And this: “The terrorist war underway in Syria was planned by the United States and reactionary countries in the region against the resistance front (against Israel).

Despite this, the government and people of Syria have achieved huge successes. Those who add fire to the oil will not escape the vengeance of the people.” Getting sucked into a situation that could lead to war with Iran is unthinkable. Of all the bad options, that is without question the most bad.

We may have reached a point in history where it’s no longer possible for any president to serve eight years and not be drawn into some kind of conflagration. The emergence of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine has probably mooted Reagan-style inaction. So then the question becomes, can the action be strictly limited to a narrow set of goals? And then the next question is, what if the campaign doesn’t achieve them? Can the United States walk away from a dire humanitarian crisis and say, “Hey, we tried, but we’re just not going any further?” Looks like we may be getting our answers.