WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama faced deep resistance Thursday to plans for a possible military strike against Syria, with U.S. lawmakers demanding more proof that Bashar Assad’s government perpetrated a deadly chemical-weapons attack and Britain’s Parliament rejecting military action in a late-night vote.
Even so, the White House signaled that Obama was willing to move without international partners if it came to that.
“The president of the United States is elected with the duty to protect the national security interests in the United States of America,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday night that Britain would not participate militarily in any strike, after the government motion urging an international response was defeated 285-272.
Cameron made the case earlier Thursday that a military strike would be legal on humanitarian grounds, and his government took the unusual step of publishing an intelligence assessment blaming the Syrian government for the deadly chemical onslaught last week.
Thursday evening’s vote was nonbinding, but in a short statement to Parliament afterward, Cameron said he respected the will of Parliament and that it was clear to him that the British people did not want to see military action over Syria.
“I get it,” he said.
Meanwhile, France announced that its armed forces “have been put in position to respond” if President Francois Hollande commits forces to intervention against Syria. Hollande does not need French parliamentary approval to launch military action that lasts less than four months.
Assad, who has denied using chemical weapons, vowed his country will defend itself against any action.
“Threats to launch a direct aggression against Syria will make it more adherent to its well-established principles and sovereign decisions stemming from the will of its people, and Syria will defend itself against any aggression,” he said Thursday.
Even before the vote in London, the U.S. was preparing to act without formal authorization from the United Nations, where Russia has blocked efforts to seek a resolution authorizing the use of force, or from Capitol Hill.
Still, the White House sought to ease growing concerns among members of Congress by having top administration officials brief lawmakers on U.S. intelligence assessments for more than 90 minutes in a conference call Thursday evening.
The briefers were Obama’s national security adviser and intelligence chief, Susan Rice and James Clapper, alongside Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Adm. James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A number of lawmakers raised questions in the briefing about how the administration would finance a military operation as the Pentagon is grappling with spending cuts and reduced budgets.
Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that the administration presented a “broad range of options” for dealing with Syria but failed to offer a single plan, timeline, strategy or explanation of how it would pay for any military operation.
Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said administration officials are in the process of declassifying the evidence they have of the Syrian government using chemical weapons.
“When they do that, we’ll understand. But it’s up to the president of the United States to present his case, to sell this to the American public. They’re very war-weary. We’ve been at war now for over 10 years,” McKeon said.
Tennessee’s Sen. BobCorker, senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and already a supporter of moving against Syria in a limited way, said after the briefing that “strong evidence of the Assad regime’s continued use of chemical warfare” merited a military response.
Earlier Thursday, Obama discussed the situation in Syria with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who wrote to the president earlier this week seeking a legal justification for a military strike and the objectives of any potential action.
NO 100% CERTAINTY
Some of the U.N. chemical-weapons experts who have been carrying out on-site investigations this week into the chemical-weapons attack will travel directly from Syria on Saturday to different laboratories around Europe to deliver “an extensive amount of material” gathered, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.
Haq said the team’s final report will depend on the lab results and that it could take “more than days,” but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Kimoon expects to receive an initial report on the investigation soon after the experts leave Damascus.
While the mandate of the U.N. team is to determine whether chemical agents were used in the attack, not who was responsible, Haq suggested the evidence - which includes biological samples and witness interviews - might give an indication of who deployed gases.
Obama and other top officials have said Assad’s government is responsible for last week’s attack, which the international aid group Doctors Without Borders said killed at least 355 people and sickened thousands more. Yet the administration has not revealed definitive evidence to back its claims.
But multiple U.S. officials said the intelligence assessments based on intercepted Syrian communications are no “slam-dunk,” a reference to former CIA Director George Tenet’s insistence in 2002 that U.S. intelligence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a “slam-dunk” - intelligence that turned out to be wrong.
A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats - including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime’s chemical weapons are stored, nor does it have proof Assad ordered chemical-weapons use, according to two intelligence officials and two other U.S. officials.
The messages leave open the possibility that a lower-ranking official could have ordered the attack, which the officials said appears to have been launched by the Syrian army’s 4th Armored Division, commanded by Assad’s brother, Maher.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the intelligence publicly.
In Britain, Cameron admitted to lawmakers during the parliamentary debate that there was “no smoking piece of intelligence” proving culpability.
Despite shortcomings in the intelligence, the White House signaled urgency in acting, with Earnest saying the president believes there is a “compressed time frame” for responding.
“It is important for the Assad regime and other totalitarian dictators around the world to understand that the international community will not tolerate the indiscriminate, widespread use of chemical weapons,” the White House spokesman said.
Hagel said Thursday that any U.S. action against Syria would be part of “an international collaboration.” He did not expand on what that would entail.
U.S. allies in the region, including Sunni Muslim nations Saudi Arabia and Turkey, support the rebels in Syria and are calling for action against Assad.
On Thursday, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said his country’s armed forces “have been put in position to respond” if the president commits French forces to an intervention. But Hollande on Thursday stressed the importance of a political solution to bring “a stop to this escalation of violence, of which the chemical massacre is just one illustration.”
France has a dozen cruise missile-capable fighter aircraft at military bases in the United Arab Emirates and the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti. France’s military was at the forefront of the NATO-led attacks on Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, and led an intervention against extremists in Mali earlier this year.
Obama has ruled out putting American forces on the ground in Syria or setting up a no-fly zone. He’s also said any U.S. response to the chemical-weapons attack would be limited in scope and aimed solely at punishing Assad for deploying deadly gases, not at regime change.
The most likely military option would be Tomahawk cruise missile strikes from four Navy destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, U.S. officials have said. At a minimum, Western forces are expected to strike targets that symbolize Assad’s military and political might: military and national police headquarters, including the Defense Ministry; the Syrian military’s general staff; and the four-brigade Republican Guard that is in charge of protecting Damascus, Assad’s seat of power. Assad’s ruling Baath Party headquarters also could be targeted, officials said.
5 U.N. POWERS MEET
Obama continued to make his case for a military action to other world leaders, speaking Thursday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel also discussed Syria by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, insisting that the attack “requires an international reaction,” Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said.
Russia, a longtime supporter of Assad’s government, called for a meeting later Thursday of the five permanent members of the Security Council and called for the U.N. probe to be widened to include other reports of chemical use in Syria.
The meeting started breaking up after less than an hour, with the ambassadors of China, France, Britain, Russia and the United States steadily walking out. It was the second time in two days that the five Security Council powers met with no progress.
Russia and China remain opposed to military action, saying there is no evidence the Syrian regime was responsible for the attack. Both countries have said they would veto a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force.
China maintains a long-standing policy of what it calls noninterference and has consistently opposed military intervention. An exception was in 2011 when it abstained rather than vetoed a U.N. resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya, but soon afterward Beijing said it regretted the airstrikes that helped to topple Gadhafi.
“Turning Syria into another Libya or even Iraq is the last thing most people around the world want to see,” the English-language China Daily newspaper said in an editorial Thursday. “Before the crisis takes a turn … from bad to worse, it is high time the U.S. learned from its past mistakes.”
Another Syrian ally, Iran, has spoken out against military action, with President Hassan Rouhani saying his country and Russia would work in “extensive cooperation” to prevent what he called an “open violation” of international laws.
While condemning chemical weapons, Rouhani was quoted as saying, “Early judgment can be dangerous, before clarification” can be made of allegations that Syria used the weapons.
“Syria has a strategic and sensitive situation, and any sort of military invasion would lead to instability in the entire Middle East,” he said.
Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards, used stronger rhetoric, repeating an earlier threat that an attack on Syria would draw in Israel.
“The Zionists should know that a U.S. military attack on Syria will not save the fake regime from the resistance but it means the immediate destruction of Israel,” Jafari said.
In response to Iranian threats, Israelis continued to rush to distribution centers to pick up government-issued gas masks Thursday.
The Israel Postal Service, which is distributing the masks, announced on its website that the centers would extend their hours until evening “due to extraordinary demand.” In Haifa, the biggest city closest to the northern border with Lebanon and Syria, people waited in line for hours, Israel Radio said. Some centers ran out of masks.
Israel first distributed gas masks to its citizens before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, during which Iraq fired Scud missiles at the Jewish state after the U.S. attacked Iraq for invading Kuwait. None of the missiles carried chemical weapons.
In response to the latest threats, Israel has bolstered its air defenses in the northern part of the country, and has called up reserves in air force, military intelligence and homefront units.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press, The New York Times, Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/30/2013