State Department
WH confident on winning Hill support on Syria but uses 'flood the zone' to get votes
The Obama administration, bolstered by evidence the Syrian government used lethal sarin gas on its own people, expressed confidence Sunday that Congress would back President Obama’s decision for a military strike on the Middle East country.
However, the president and his inner circle worked furiously over the weekend to win congressional support, appearing on Sunday shows, holding classified briefings and making calls to Capitol Hill leaders.
A senior administration officials told Fox News that the president, Vice President Joe Biden and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough made phone calls on Sunday to senators and House members urging them to vote in favor of the authorization of military force in Syria.
The official called the lobbying effort a "flood the zone" strategy, in an apparent acknowledgement of just how hard winning Capitol Hill approval will be.
The effort was preceded by Secretary of State John Kerry blanketing the Sunday shows and administration official proceeding with a round of weekend briefings, as Capitol Hill lawmakers said Obama may not have the votes right now.
“I would say if the vote were today, it would probably be a no vote,” New York Rep. Peter King, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told “Fox News Sunday.”
The comment underscored the risk Obama took in deciding over the weekend to seek approval from Congress, a step King argues he didn't need to take.
Kerry told “Fox News Sunday” that he couldn’t imagine Congress would “turn its back” on Israel or other U.S. allies in the region and on the Syrians slaughtered in the Aug. 21 chemical weapon attack, allegedly ordered by President Bashar al-Assad.
“I can't contemplate that Congress would turn its back on all of that responsibility,” Kerry said. “I don’t believe Congress will do that.”
Kerry’s comments and the White House blitz were the latest in a series of dramatic turn of events since the chemical weapon attack two weeks ago outside Damascus that killed more than 1,400 people including hundreds of women and children.
The White House official confirms on Sunday the president called Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain over the weekend to invite him to the White House on Monday, the same day Obama will hold another conference call with House members.
"In all calls and briefings, we will be making the same fundamental case: the failure to take action against Assad unravels the deterrent impact of the international norm against chemical weapons use, and it risks emboldening Assad and his key allies – Hezbollah and Iran – who will see that there are no consequences for such a flagrant violation of an international norm,” the official told Fox News.
On Saturday, with Navy ships in the Mediterranean Sea ready to launch missiles, Obama made the surprising announcement Saturday, saying he had decided on a limited military response but would seek Congress’ approval.
The announcement followed Kerry’s impassioned speech Friday for punishing Assad, whom he called a “thug” and a “criminal.”
However, the largely Republican opposition to the strike had already taken shape and continued Sunday.
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the U.S. getting involved in the roughly 2-year-long Syrian civil war is a mistake and that the president has about a “50-50” chance of getting House approval.
Democrats also expressed reservations.
"I certainly enter this debate as a skeptic, but I'm going to allow the administration to make its case this week," Connecticut Democratic Sen. Christopher Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told NBC.
The administration’s classified briefings Saturday and Sunday included Republicans and Democrats in the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate, where Obama will likely have the strongest support for the biggest foreign policy vote since Congress authorized President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.
More classified meetings are scheduled in the coming days on Capitol Hill, as party leaders consider whether to call members back from their August recess that ends Sept. 9.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee plans to meet Tuesday.
Kerry, who appeared on all five major Sunday talk shows, said support from Capitol Hill and the public will give American the legitimacy a “full-throated” response.
“Our country is much stronger when we act together,” said Kerry, knocking back speculation that Obama’s weekend announcement went against the advice of his national security team.
“No decision is made until the president of the United States makes the decision,” he said.
Kerry also said Obama has the authority to launch retaliatory strikes with or without Congress' approval, but stopped short of saying the president would do so if the House or Senate withholds support.
In an apparent attempt to win congressional support, he said the United States has received hair and blood samples from first responders indicating sarin was used in the attack in the Damascus suburbs.
It was the first piece of specific physiological evidence cited by the administration, which previously cited only an unnamed nerve agent in the killings.
Washington has struggled to rally allies to its cause, with only France firmly on board among major military powers. Britain cannot be counted on after Parliament rejected using force in a vote last week.
A little more than a year ago, Obama declared that Assad's use of chemical weapons would be the "red line" in a conflict that he has steadfastly avoided. But Obama deferred any immediate action Saturday by announcing that he first would seek congressional authorization.
Late Saturday, the White House sent Congress a draft resolution authorizing force against Syria to "deter, disrupt, prevent and degrade" the Assad regime's ability to use chemical weapons. It doesn't lay out a timeline for action or detail Obama's strategy.
Lawmakers told Fox News after a briefing Sunday that Congress will likely revise the resolution before voting on it. Among their concerns was that the words "targeted" and "limited" were not included, though the president has repeatedly said that would be the scope of such an attack.
Kerry reiterated Obama's oft-repeated promise not to send any American troops into Syrian territory, a reflection of the president's own aversion to getting too deeply involved in a conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people and drawn in terrorist organizations on both sides of the battlefield.
Polls also show significant opposition among Americans to involvement after a decade of war in the Muslim world, and several officials have cited the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that led up to the Iraq war as justification of the need for lengthy debate before U.S. military action.
Administration officials said that until late Friday Obama appeared set on ordering a strike without first seeking Congress' approval. After a walk around the White House grounds with Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, the president told his aide he had changed his mind.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Sarah Palin: ‘We’re bombing Syria … and I’m the idiot?’
According to the Washington Times in a Facebook post titled “Let Allah Sort It Out,” former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin condemned President Obama’s decision to get further involved with the ongoing civil war in Syria.
“So we’re bombing Syria because Syria is bombing Syria? And I’m the idiot?” Mrs. Palin asked on Friday. “President Obama wants America involved in Syria’s civil war pitting the antagonistic Assad regime against equally antagonistic Al Qaeda affiliated rebels. But he’s not quite sure which side is doing what, what the ultimate end game is, or even whose side we should be on.”
Mrs. Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, argued that though Americans sympathize with the plight of innocent civilians in the war-torn country, the United States has “no clear mission in Syria,” and the president’s advertised war plan “has given Assad enough of a heads-up that he’s reportedly already placing human shields at targeted sites.”
“Our Nobel Peace Prize winning President needs to seek Congressional approval before taking us to war,” she added.
On Saturday, Mr. Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders and draft legislation on the Authorization for the Use of U.S. Armed Forces (AUMF) in connection to the Syrian conflict. The draft resolution authorizes the president to use the U.S. military “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria[.]”
House Republican leaders said they’ll wait until the end of their summer vacation, which ends a week from today, before returning to Washington to vote on authorizing a strike on President Bashar Assad’s regime.
The GOP leadership said the coming days will give Mr. Obama some time to make a more convincing case than he has laid out so far.
“As I said before,” Mrs. Palin concluded Friday, “if we are dangerously uncertain of the outcome and are led into war by a Commander-in-chief who can’t recognize that this conflict is pitting Islamic extremists against an authoritarian regime with both sides shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ at each other, then let Allah sort it out.”
The Best Of The Internet’s Reaction To Obama’s Plans To Bomb Syria. There were a few posts backing Obama’s war plans:
And suddenly George W. Bush is back:
The VMAs made an appearance, of course:
But many people saw irony in the push to attack Syria:
And some of the anger was … less focused:
Obama's Decision Reverberates as Global Critics Sense Weakness
Monday, 02 Sep 2013 08:41 AM
Syrian deputy foreign minister Fayssal Mekdad told reporters in Damascus yesterday that, “The hesitation and the disappointment is so obvious in the words of President Obama yesterday. The confusion was clear, as well.”
“The regime people are taking great comfort from this,” said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University in Norman, Oklahoma. “They see it as a sign of Obama’s weakness, that he doesn’t really want to hurt them or get involved.”
In 1982, the elder Assad killed as many as 30,000 people in the city of Hama to squelch a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. His brutality gave rise to a Syrian joke about the Angel of Death bringing judgment to Hafez al-Assad, only to have Syria’s secret police return him to God battered, bruised and empty-handed.
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Now one possible immediate, unintended consequence of Obama’s move to Congress is that Assad “retaliates with an even more brutal crackdown in civilian areas where the opposition is operating,” said Sean Kay, director of the international relations program at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. “The red line has been chemical weapons; he might see that as a green light for conventional weapons.”
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Still Kay and Landis were among analysts who defended Obama’s decision, even if it’s perceived as indecisive in the Middle East and among Obama’s domestic critics.
“Critics will say this signals weakness, that America doesn’t have resolve,” Kay said. “It’s a pretty important thing for the U.S. to demonstrate to the region respect for democratic procedures.”
Landis said that, “you’ve got to say this is good for democracy to debate this.”
A delay would serve the U.S. well, Kay said, as Obama and his advisers have to take into account and prepare for the secondary effects of a strike, including even greater refugee flows to U.S. allies, such as Jordan, that neighbor Syria. “A pause gives some time to reflect,” Kay said. “At minimum, there’s time to prepare.”
New Fighting
Heavy clashes erupted yesterday between the Kurdish militias and government forces in the al-Ashrafiya neighborhood in the Province of Aleppo amid intense artillery shelling on the area, the Observatory for Human Rights in Syria said in an e- mailed statement.
There was fighting in Aleppo as well, according to the Observatory, based in Coventry in the U.K. In Daraa, near Syria’s borders with Israel and Jordan, clashes between rebels and regime forces resumed while rebels targeted government forces with mortar rounds.
In a statement yesterday, the Syrian opposition coalition said Assad’s regime also had begun to move troops, weapons and equipment into residential areas and civilian government buildings, including schools, then ordering government workers and students to go to work and school.
The opposition “feels abandoned,” Landis said.
‘More Blood’
Louay Almokdad, a logistical coordinator for the rebel force, said that while he understood the democratic mechanisms in the U.S. and Europe, it was clear the price of delay “will be more blood.”
“We have no confidence in the U.S.’s intention to help rid the Syrians of Assad,” Colonel Ahmad Hijazi of the Free Syrian Army said by phone today from an undisclosed location. “Whatever strike that follows will just be for show.”
That perception is region-wide, said Barry Pavel, director of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group.
“History since 2009 hasn’t been very favorable in the Middle East, in terms of U.S. action, resolve, commitment,” Pavel said. “Friends there think the U.S. has essentially evacuated the region. This is another pretty big data point in that direction.”
Israeli politicians and media slammed the decision for sending a signal of weakness to Iran, though the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t comment officially.
Deterring Iran
Israeli politicians and military analysts said they’d concluded that Israel can’t rely on the U.S. to help defend against the threat of Iran’s nuclear program, which Iran claims is for civilian use and the U.S. and Israel allege is to develop nuclear weapons.
Israeli Minister of Housing and Construction Uri Ariel commented on his Facebook page that, “In Tehran they are opening bottles of champagne, and surely shifting into high gear toward nuclear weaponization.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a similar link in his Aug. 30 remarks arguing for action against Syria, saying that a failure to respond to the attack, which a U.S. intelligence assessment said killed 1,429 men, women and children, would embolden Iran “to obtain nuclear weapons.”
Kay dismissed that linkage. “It’s a tricky argument at best to say one has to go to war in Syria to signal credibility to Iran,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s just as likely Iran would like to see us bogged down in Syria, which could drive a wedge between us and European allies.”
Slim Coalition
Israel, the Syrian opposition, and other critics aren’t taking into account that the U.S. has no partners for an attack on Syria, Landis and Kay said. “No NATO, no Arab League, no British,” said Kay.
“Our partners in Europe are looking spongy.”said Landis in a telephone interview. In France, the only nation ready to join the U.S. on a Syria strike, the parliament reacted to Obama’s decision by demanding its right to weigh in, a step not taken for France’s 2011 intervention in Libya.
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In the U.S., analysts such as Aaron David Miller of the Wilson Center, a Washington policy institute, acknowledged the fallout from Obama’s decision.
“Forget the merits of what the president’s done; the sense of contradiction and confusion has been intensified by his decision, and no amount of reassurance” from Kerry or the president “is going to change that,” Miller said.
“Does that mean it’s a disaster,” Miller said. “Not necessarily. This is about his perception of the national interest as far as Syria goes.”
“Syria is a tragedy, but the president has seen that outside narrowly circumscribed instances, it’s not an American tragedy,” Miller said.
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