U.S. and Russia Reach Deal to Destroy Syria’s Chemical Arms

Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia


N.Y. TIMES

The United States and Russia reached a sweeping agreement on Saturday that called for Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be removed or destroyed by the middle of 2014 and indefinitely stalled the prospect of American airstrikes.

The joint announcement, on the third day of intensive talks in Geneva, also set the stage for one of the most challenging undertakings in the history of arms control.

“This situation has no precedent,” said Amy E. Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are cramming what would probably be five or six years’ worth of work into a period of several months, and they are undertaking this in an extremely difficult security environment due to the ongoing civil war.”

 

George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, emphasized that the possibility of unilateral American military force was still on the table. “We haven’t made any changes to our force posture to this point,” Mr. Little said. “The credible threat of military force has been key to driving diplomatic progress, and it’s important that the Assad regime lives up to its obligations under the framework agreement.”

In Syria, the state news agency, SANA, voiced cautious approval of the Russian and American deal, calling it “a starting point,” though the government issued no immediate statement about its willingness to implement the agreement.

In any case, the deal was at least a temporary reprieve for President Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian government, and it formally placed international decision-making about Syria into the purview of Russia, one of Mr. Assad’s staunchest supporters and military suppliers.

That reality was bitterly seized on by the fractured Syrian rebel forces, most of which have pleaded for American airstrikes. Gen. Salim Idris, the head of the Western-backed rebels’ nominal military command, the Supreme Military Council, denounced the initiative.

 

An immediate test of the viability of the accord will come within a week, when the Syrian government is to provide a “comprehensive listing” of its chemical arsenal. That list is to include the types and quantities of Syria’s poison gas, the chemical munitions it possesses, and the location of its storage, production and research sites.

 

If Mr. Assad fails to comply with the agreement, the issue would be referred to the United Nations Security Council, where the violations would be taken up under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes punitive action, Mr. Kerry said.

Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia made clear that his country, which wields a veto in the Security Council, had not withdrawn its objections to the use of force.

 

 

 

ELIOT COHEN WASHINGTON POST

 

Satan himself could not devise a revenge for those who kill infants.

 

 

It was clear before the president’s speech Tuesday that the resolutions to authorize the use of force were going to be defeated in Congress, perhaps spectacularly so. It was equally clear that President Obama was desperate to climb down from the tree up which he had chased himself by loosely using terms such as “red line.” A deal for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons gives Russia influence in the region and a claim on Obama’s gratitude. And it gives Syria an implicit go-ahead to continue using bombs, knives, rockets, mortar shells, power tools, electric irons and anything else to murder or torture civilians, including children. To make that point, on the day of the president’s speech, the Syrian air force bombed Damascus.
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Obama has described the proposed airstrikes as “a limited, proportional” response. But it’s worth recalling the words of the great Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik. Writing about another massacre that lifted eyebrows in the West — a government-tolerated pogrom against Jews in 1903 in the Russian city of Kishinev — he said Satan himself could not devise a revenge appropriate for those who deliberately slaughter infants.
Conceivably, cruise missiles could be used to target the children of Assad, his senior military commanders and the crews that load rockets and artillery shells with sarin. That would be a form of retribution, albeit one more suited to the most vicious of street gangs than the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.
The slaying of 400 children with sarin, and thousands of others by less exotic but no less brutal means, poses a moral as well as a political problem. It might call for justice; it might call for exemplary punishment (which handing over a fraction of one’s arsenal is not). Or it might be a tragedy best lamented and then ignored. In any event, cruise missiles are no magical solution to a horror.
Proportionality, in other words, has nothing to do with it.

 

OBAMA OPTS FOR DIPLOMACY IN SYRIA

N.Y. TIMES

 President Obama, facing implacable opposition to a strike against Syria in Congress and throughout the country, said he would hold off on military action for now and pursue a Russian proposal for international monitors to take over and destroy Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons. Speaking to the nation from the White House, Mr. Obama laid out his most extensive and detailed case for an attack to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons.  In the absence of a peaceful solution, [Obama stated] military strikes are the best way to deliver the message that President Assad has crossed an inviolable line.

Obama acknowledged that America is weary of war and a potential “slippery slope” but said he'd take pains to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. “I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria,” he said. “I will not pursue an open-ended war like Iraq or Afghanistan.”

[But] Mr. Obama instead offered a qualified endorsement of a proposal that his own advisers conceded was rife with risk, given Russia’s steadfast refusal to agree to any previous measures to pressure Syria, its longtime ally.

“It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments,” Mr. Obama said. “But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force.”

 

The president said he had asked Congressional leaders to postpone a vote authorizing military action — a vote he was almost certain to lose — even while making the moral case for punishing Syria for its deadly use of chemical weapons. What Mr. Obama did not say was how long he was willing to wait, what would convince him that the Russian proposal was credible, and what he would do if it was not.

 

For now at least, the debate will focus on the language of diplomacy — and particularly a Russian plan that has stirred doubt among administration officials, lawmakers and diplomats. Some of them said it would allow Syria to play for time and was calculated to undermine the drive for Congressional and international support for a strike. Others said the idea of securing chemical weapons stockpiles in the midst of a brutal civil war was fanciful.

Moreover, the diplomatic efforts — which began after Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, announced his proposal on Monday — quickly ran into trouble. A meeting of the United Nations Security Council was canceled Tuesday afternoon after Russia clashed with the United States and France over whether to make its proposal binding and back it up with the threat of force.

 

 

 

BLOOMBERG NEWS PETER BEINART

The emotional meat of his speech was....about the horrors of using chemical weapons against anyone. “View the videos of the attack,” he implored, before quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt as saying that America must act “when ideas and principles that we have cherished are challenged.” Presidents have taken America to war on this basis before. George H.W. Bush did it in Somalia; Bill Clinton did it in Bosnia and Kosovo; Obama did it in Libya. But they’ve done so on their own authority, cognizant that the best they could hope from Americans was quiet acquiescence. Generally, presidents don’t ask Congress to vote on humanitarian wars. When Congress finally voted on a measure authorizing Clinton to bomb Kosovo in April 1999—after he had been doing so for a month—the measure failed.

Politically, Obama could have gotten away with striking Syria for a couple of days without asking for congressional approval, assuming no Americans had died. But in seeking that approval, he took on a burden that purveyors of humanitarian war cannot sustain. Instead of settling for the public’s passive acceptance, he asked for an affirmative statement of support. There was little sign before last night’s speech that he would get it. There’s little sign now.

However Russia’s plan for securing Syria’s chemical weapons plays out, the lesson of the last few days is clear: Americans can be convinced to support wars, but only against enemies they believe threaten their own safety. They may look the other way while presidents wage wars to defend things like “international norms.” But whether idealistically or foolishly, Obama wouldn’t let them look the other way. Now he’s paying the price.




GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

....the White House has failed to focus directly enough on making a detailed case for why and how strikes will deter further chemical attacks.
But Obama’s appearance of being conflicted over various aspects of the Syria crisis — and changing course midstream as circumstances changed — is not one of the things about all this that deserves criticism. Indeed, it’s a good thing....Obama is making a case for an unpopular military adventure while simultaneously looking for an escape hatch in a diplomatic solution.

As Michael Cohen points out, it’s still unclear why strikes would deter other nihilistic actors from using chemical weapons, and the claim that acting now to protect American troops later strains credulity in a big way.

But the internal contradictions in Obama’s speech actually reflect the fact that he spoke to the moral and political complexities of a difficult situation in an unvarnished way. First, he argued he has the authority to strike alone but that going to Congress will ultimately make American stronger. Second, he argued strikes were a moral necessity to deter further action while simultaneously acknowledging public wariness of acting as “the world’s policeman.” Third, he made the case for war while simultaneously arguing a diplomatic solution would be preferable.
It’s hard to see why these contradictions and conflicts, in and of themselves, are problematic. First, whatever the motive, going to Congress was the right thing to do. If being “conflicted” on this led to the right outcome, that’s a good thing. If it results in a “defeat,” I don’t care what airhead pundits say about it showing “weakness.” If Obama heeds Congress, the public will applaud it as a show of what’s known as democracy. Second, the question of what role America should play in such situations is a difficult one, and the public itself is conflicted over it. As Stephanie Gaskill points out, offering a black-and-white answer to this question — as opposed to acknowledging its case-by-case complexity — is not something Americans would accept. Other lawmakers don’t have an easy answer either. As Gaskill notes, it’s a question that can’t be ducked, as America defines its role amid winding down the foreign entanglements of the Bush era.

Third, if the goal of getting involved in Syria in the first place was to halt the use of chemical weapons — and the possibility of a diplomatic solution that could realize that goal has arisen — why shouldn’t Obama adapt as he goes along and try to make that happen? Some will argue Obama wouldn’t be doing this if Congress were willing to authorize force, but I don’t buy it. What’s more, the unstated premise underlying the idea that this is an unacceptable or mock-worthy contradiction is that Obama should declare his intention to use force and stick to it no matter what changing circumstances dictate. Why would that be seen as a good thing? Have folks already forgotten what happened the last time a president approached foreign policy that way?

 

BACKGROUNDER: SYRIA

MAX FISHER WASHINGTON POST

 What is Syria?
Syria is a country in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about the same size as Washington state with a population a little over three times as large – 22 million.  Syria is very diverse, ethnically and religiously, but most Syrians are ethnic Arab and follow the Sunni branch of Islam. Civilization in Syria goes back thousands of years, but the country as it exists today is very young. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers in the 1920s.
Syria is in the middle of an extremely violent civil war. Fighting between government forces and rebels has killed more 100,000 and created 2 million refugees, half of them children.


Syrian refugees cross into Iraq


Why are people in Syria killing each other?
The killing started in April 2011, when peaceful protests inspired by earlier revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia rose up to challenge the dictatorship running the country. The government responded — there is no getting around this — like monsters. First, security forces quietly killed activists. Then they started kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing activists and their family members, including a lot of children, dumping their mutilated bodies by the sides of roads. Then troops began simply opening fire on protests. Eventually, civilians started shooting back.



Fighting escalated from there until it was a civil war. Armed civilians organized into rebel groups. The army deployed across the country, shelling and bombing whole neighborhoods and towns, trying to terrorize people into submission. They’ve also allegedly used chemical weapons, which is a big deal for reasons I’ll address below. Volunteers from other countries joined the rebels, either because they wanted freedom and democracy for Syria or, more likely, because they are jihadists who hate Syria’s secular government. The rebels were gaining ground for a while and now it looks like Assad is coming back. There is no end in sight.

[                       CHRISTOPHER DICKEY DAILY BEAST:
     Among the most effective fighters are those affiliated with the Nusra Front, a component of al Qaeda. They are intimately allied with jihadists in Iraq who fought against the United States for most of the last decade. They have declared this a jihad against the Assad regime and called on would-be holy warriors from around the world to join their cause. Many have. One nightmare scenario in this war is that the Assads fall and al Qaeda gets hold of their chemical arsenal.]

That’s horrible. But there are protests lots of places. How did it all go so wrong in Syria? And, please, just give me the short version.
...Syria has been a powder keg waiting to explode for decades and that it was set off, maybe inevitably, by the 2011 protests ...you have to understand that the Syrian government really overreacted when peaceful protests started in mid-2011, slaughtering civilians unapologetically, ... Assad learned this from his father. In 1982, Assad’s father and then-dictator Hafez al-Assad responded to a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the city of Hama by leveling entire neighborhoods. He killed thousands of civilians, many of whom had nothing to do with the uprising. But it worked, and it looks like the younger Assad tried to reproduce it. His failure made the descent into chaos much worse.


armored vehicles in Hama. Government forces attacked the city.

Most Syrians are Sunni Arabs, but the country is run by members of a minority sect known as Alawites (they’re ethnic Arab but follow a smaller branch of Islam). The Alawite government rules through a repressive dictatorship and gives Alawites special privileges, which makes some Sunnis and other groups hate Alawites in general, which in turn makes Alawites fear that they’ll be slaughtered en masse if Assad loses the war. [Dickey, above; Bashar al-Assad, could not make any deal that cut out his family and the clans that support it, even if he wanted to.]

 I hear a lot about how Russia still loves Syria, though. And Iran, too. What’s their deal?
Yeah, Russia is Syria’s most important ally. Moscow blocks the United Nations Security Council from passing anything that might hurt the Assad regime, which is why the United States has to go around the United Nations if it wants to do anything. Russia sends lots of weapons to Syria that make it easier for Assad to keep killing civilians and will make it much harder if the outside world ever wants to intervene.



 Russia has a naval installation in Syria, which is strategically important and Russia’s last foreign military base outside the former Soviet Union; Russia also hates the idea of “international intervention” against countries like Syria because it sees this as Cold War-style Western imperialism and ultimately a threat to Russia; and Syria buys a lot of Russian military exports, and Russia needs the money. [Russia has backed them since the Cold War and is betting that it can restore some of its lost influence in the region and the world if they hold on to power.--Dickey]

Iran’s thinking in supporting Assad is more straightforward. It perceives Israel and the United States as existential threats and uses Syria to protect itself, shipping arms through Syria to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. Iran is already feeling isolated and insecure; it worries that if Assad falls it will lose a major ally and be cut off from its militant proxies, leaving it very vulnerable. So far, it looks like Iran is actually coming out ahead: Assad is even more reliant on Tehran than he was before the war started.

[ Dickey: The alliance between the Assad regime and Iran goes back 30 years. The powerful Hezbollah militia in neighboring Lebanon, originally created by Iran and Syria, is another key ally of the Assads. ]

[Dickey, cont'd: On the opposition side, the Saudis see Iran as their greatest strategic threat and Hezbollah as a terrorist problem....The Saudis also want to undermine the Muslim Brotherhood and its operatives.

Israel, meanwhile, does not have any major faction to support in the war. As long as the Syrian conflict does not cross its border, it is content to let its old enemy bleed. But Israel has to worry whether, if Obama draws a red line against chemical weapons in Syria and doesn't enforce it, he can be trusted when he says he has drawn a red line against nuclear weapons in Iran.]




Why hasn’t the United States fixed this yet?

[Dickey: The Obama administration’s objective, horrible as it sounds, is basically to help maintain a stalemate. Unfortunately, as we saw during the 15-year civil war in Lebanon, long after the people want to give up fighting, outside forces keep pushing them to kill and to die. The Bosnian war in the mid-1990s is another example. More than 200,000 died there before a peace accord could be hammered out.]

The military options are all bad. Shipping arms to rebels, even if it helps them topple Assad, would ultimately empower jihadists and worsen rebel in-fighting, probably leading to lots of chaos and possibly a second civil war (the United States made this mistake during Afghanistan’s early 1990s civil war, which helped the Taliban take power in 1996). Taking out Assad somehow would probably do the same, opening up a dangerous power vacuum.

Launching airstrikes or a “no-fly zone” could suck us in, possibly for years, and probably wouldn’t make much difference on the ground. An Iraq-style ground invasion would, in the very best outcome, accelerate the killing, cost a lot of U.S. lives, wildly exacerbate anti-Americanism in a boon to jihadists and nationalist dictators alike, and would require the United States to impose order for years across a country full of people trying to kill each other. Nope.

The one political option, which the Obama administration has been pushing for, would be for the Assad regime and the rebels to strike a peace deal. But there’s no indication that either side is interested in that, or that there’s even a viable unified rebel movement with which to negotiate.



 So why would Obama bother with strikes that no one expects to actually solve anything?
Okay, you’re asking here about the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle signals that it wants to launch some cruise missiles at Syria, which would be punishment for what it says is Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.
It’s true that basically no one believes that this will turn the tide of the Syrian war. But this is important: it’s not supposed to. The strikes wouldn’t be meant to shape the course of the war or to topple Assad, which Obama thinks would just make things worse anyway. They would be meant to punish Assad for (allegedly) using chemical weapons and to deter him, or any future military leader in any future war, from using them again.

Come on, what’s the big deal with chemical weapons? Assad kills 100,000 people with bullets and bombs but we’re freaked out over 1,000 who maybe died from poisonous gas? That seems silly.
You’re definitely not the only one who thinks the distinction is arbitrary and artificial. But there’s a good case to be made that this is a rare opportunity, at least in theory, for the United States to make the war a little bit less terrible — and to make future wars less terrible.

The whole idea that there are rules of war is a pretty new one: the practice of war is thousands of years old, but the idea that we can regulate war to make it less terrible has been around for less than a century. The institutions that do this are weak and inconsistent; the rules are frail and not very well observed. But one of the world’s few quasi-successes is the “norm” (a fancy way of saying a rule we all agree to follow) against chemical weapons. This norm is frail enough that Syria could drastically weaken it if we ignore Assad’s use of them, but it’s also strong enough that it’s worth protecting. So it’s sort of a low-hanging fruit: firing a few cruise missiles doesn’t cost us much and can maybe help preserve this really hard-won and valuable norm against chemical weapons.



[Esco: Be Advised: the photos Esco used below to illustrate the analysis are gruesome. ]

You didn’t answer my question. That just tells me that we can maybe preserve the norm against chemical weapons, not why we should.

Fair point. Here’s the deal: war is going to happen. It just is. But the reason that the world got together in 1925 for the Geneva Convention to ban chemical weapons is because this stuff is really, really good at killing civilians but not actually very good at the conventional aim of warfare, which is to defeat the other side. You might say that they’re maybe 30 percent a battlefield weapon and 70 percent a tool of terror. In a world without that norm against chemical weapons, a military might fire off some sarin gas because it wants that battlefield advantage, even if it ends up causing unintended and massive suffering among civilians, maybe including its own. And if a military believes its adversary is probably going to use chemical weapons, it has a strong incentive to use them itself. After all, they’re fighting to the death.

So both sides of any conflict, not to mention civilians everywhere, are better off if neither of them uses chemical weapons. But that requires believing that your opponent will never use them, no matter what. And the only way to do that, short of removing them from the planet entirely, is for everyone to just agree in advance to never use them and to really mean it. That becomes much harder if the norm is weakened because someone like Assad got away with it. It becomes a bit easier if everyone believes using chemical weapons will cost you a few inbound U.S. cruise missiles.
That’s why the Obama administration apparently wants to fire cruise missiles at Syria, even though it won’t end the suffering, end the war or even really hurt Assad that much.

[Dickey: Chemical weapons are a game changer. Here the example of Iraq is highly instructive. In 1988 Saddam Hussein used gas to slaughter thousands of men, women, and children in the Kurdish city of Halabja. Three years later, at the end of the Gulf War, when he had been defeated in Kuwait, but his helicopters were still flying over Iraq, hundreds of thousands of panicked Kurds fled their homes and froze on mountainsides near the Turkish border. He had not used gas against them again. He didn’t have to. They knew its effects, and they were simply terrified.

In an increasingly sectarian war, Assad could use gas as the ultimate tool for ethnic cleansing—unless he is convinced that doing so will endanger him and his regime.]



 

What happens to Syria?

...these things seem pretty certain in the long-term:

• The killing will continue, probably for years. There’s no one to sign a peace treaty on the rebel side, even if the regime side were interested, and there’s no foreseeable victory for either. Refugees will continue fleeing into neighboring countries, causing instability and an entire other humanitarian crisis as conditions in the camps worsen.

• Syria as we know it, an ancient place with a rich and celebrated culture and history, will be a broken, failed society, probably for a generation or more. It’s very hard to see how you rebuild a functioning state after this. Maybe worse, it’s hard to see how you get back to a working social contract where everyone agrees to get along.

• At some point the conflict will cool, either from a partial victory or from exhaustion. The world could maybe send in some peacekeepers or even broker a fragile peace between the various ethnic, religious and political factions. Probably the best model is Lebanon, which fought a brutal civil war that lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990 and has been slowly, slowly recovering ever since. It had some bombings just last week.

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.

----------------------------------------------------

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.