Supporting Syrian strike, Boehner says

Troop use barred, time limit set in latest Senate measure

President Barack Obama, meeting Tuesday with House Speaker John Boehner and other congressional leaders at the White House, said the Syrian regime “poses a serious national security threat.”
President Barack Obama, meeting Tuesday with House Speaker John Boehner and other congressional leaders at the White House, said the Syrian regime “poses a serious national security threat.”

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama gained ground Tuesday in his drive for congressional backing of a military strike against Syria, winning critical support from House Speaker John Boehner, and administration officials agreed to explicitly rule out the use of U.S. combat troops in retaliation regarding a chemical-weapons attack.

“You’re probably going to win” Congress’ backing, Rand Paul of Kentucky, a conservative senator and likely opponent of the measure, conceded in a late-afternoon exchange with Secretary of State John Kerry.

The leader of the House Republicans, Boehner emerged from a meeting at the White House and said the United States has “enemies around the world that need to understand that we’re not going to tolerate this type of behavior. We also have allies around the world and allies in the region who also need to know that America will be there and stand up when it’s necessary.”

Boehner spoke as lawmakers in both parties called for changes in the president’s requested legislation, rewriting it to restrict the type and duration of any military action that would be authorized, possibly including a ban on putting U.S. combat forces on the ground.

A new resolution was written Tuesday by Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn. Menendez is the chairman and Corker is the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The resolution would bar American ground troops for combat operations and set a time limit of 60 days for any action and says the president can extend that for 30 days more unless Congress disapproves. It also would require “the Obama administration to submit their broader plan for Syria,” Corker said in a statement.

Menendez added, “We have an obligation to act.”

The Senate Democratic leadership supports the resolution, according to a Senate aide who asked not to be identified. The resolution could get a vote by the committee today.

The White House had no immediate reaction to the Senate measure although Kerry, testifying earlier before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signaled that the troop restriction was acceptable to the administration.

“There’s no problem in our having the language that has zero capacity for American troops on the ground,” he said.

However, Kerry had said earlier in the hearing that he’d prefer not to have such language, hypothesizing the potential need for sending ground troops “in the event Syria imploded” or to prevent its chemical weapons cache from falling into the hands of a terrorist organization.

“President Obama is not asking America to go to war,” Kerry said in an opening statement. He added, “This is not the time for armchair isolationism. This is not the time to be spectators to slaughter.”

Menendez supported military action, saying at the start of the hearing that the world can’t ignore the “horror” of Syria’s chemical-weapons attack.

“This decision will be among the most difficult any of us will be asked to make,” said Menendez. Senators need to “put aside political differences and personal ideologies, forget partisanship and preoccupations, forget the polls, politics and personal consequences.”

Obama said earlier in the day that he was open to revisions in the relatively broad request the White House made over the weekend. He expressed confidence Congress would respond to his call for support, and said Syrian President Bashar Assad’s action “poses a serious national security threat to the United States and to the region.”

The administration has said 1,429 died from the attack Aug. 21 in a Damascus suburb. Casualty estimates by other groups are far lower, and Assad’s government blamed the episode on rebels who have been seeking to overthrow the government in a civil war that began over two years ago. A United Nations inspection team is awaiting lab results on tissue and soil samples it collected while in the country before completing a closely watched report.

The president met top lawmakers at the White House before embarking on an overseas trip to Sweden and St. Petersburg, Russia, where he will be attending the Group of 20 economic summit Thursday.

The summit will bring Obama together with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who abruptly withdrew British participation in planned Syria strikes after losing a vote in Parliament, and with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has sided with Syria and blocked action in the United Nations Security Council.

The White House said Obama will meet privately with Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Francois Hollande on the sidelines of the summit. China, like Russia, has been an impediment to action at the Security Council.

Among major allies, only France has publicly offered to join the United States in a strike since the British House of Commons rejected one last week, but Hollande said Tuesday that he will await Congress’ decision. If Congress votes no, he said, France “will take up its responsibilities by supporting the democratic opposition [in Syria] in such a way that a response is provided.”

While Obama is away, the principal lobbying on the Syria issue at home will be left to Vice President Joe Biden and other members of the Obama administration.

Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the Senate committee hearing while, a few hundred miles away, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged caution. He said any punitive action against Syria could unleash more turmoil and bloodshed, and he advised that such strikes would be legal only in self-defense under the U.N. Charter or if approved by the organization’s Security Council. Russia and China have repeatedly used their veto power in the council to block action against Assad.

Asked about Obama’s proposal to have Congress vote on a limited military strike, Ban said, “I have taken note of President Obama’s statement, and I appreciate efforts to have his future course of action based on the broad opinions of the American people, particularly Congress, and I hope this process will have good results.”

He did not specify what he meant by “good results.”

Obama set the congressional action in motion Saturday when he unexpectedly stepped back from ordering a military strike under his own authority and announced he would seek congressional approval.

Obama has said he believes he has the authority to undertake limited military action without congressional backing, and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that even Congress’ refusal to authorize the president wouldn’t negate the power of the commander in chief. Pelosi said Assad’s action was “behavior outside the circle of civilized human behavior and we must respond.”

Still, the president also has stated that the United States will be stronger if lawmakers grant their support. But neither Obama nor his aides have been willing to state what options would be left to him should Congress reject his call.

As Obama has often noted, the country is weary of war after more than a decade of combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, and there is residual skepticism a decade after Bush administration claims went unproven that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

“I remember Iraq, Secretary Hagel remembers Iraq,” Kerry said. “We were here for that vote. We voted. And so we are especially sensitive - Chuck and I - to never again asking any member of Congress to take a vote on faulty intelligence. And that is why our intelligence community has scrubbed and rescrubbed the evidence.”

CONGRESSMEN BRIEFED

Apart from the meeting with Obama, the White House provided private briefings for members of Congress.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said after attending one session that administration officials told lawmakers that the targets the military had identified last week were still present despite the highly public discussion of a possible attack. “Seems strange to see some targets still available several weeks later,” Flake said, adding that he was “still listening” to the administration’s lobbying.

Dempsey addressed the same point later in the day. “Time works both ways,” he told the Senate panel. He said the United States has significant intelligence about Assad’s actions, and “we continue to refine our targets.”

Others were firmly opposed. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma said on Fox News, “It may sound real easy when people like Secretary Kerry say that ‘it is going to be quick and we’re going to go in, we’re going to send a few cruise missiles, wash our hands and go home.’ It doesn’t work that way. This could be a war in the Middle East, it’s serious.”

Paul, the Kentucky Republican who has close ties to Tea Party groups, said he probably would vote against authorizing Obama to use force. But he said it also wouldn’t be helpful to amend the resolution in a way that constrains the president too much to execute military action, if authorized.

He made his prediction that the White House would get its way in an exchange with Kerry in which he said Obama should agree to abide by Congress’ decision, rather than reserve the right to order a strike even if the vote goes against him.

Democrats, too, were divided although it appeared the administration’s biggest concern was winning support among conservative Republicans.

Corker indicated a potential hurdle to authorizing military force.

“The implementation of this is very, very important, and I think there’ve been mixed signals about what that implementation is actually going to mean and the effect it’s going to have on the country,” Corker said.

Corker also raised concerns that the administration isn’t doing more to help the Syrian opposition.

“I am still totally dismayed by the support we are giving to the vetted, moderate opposition,” he said, citing administration promises. “Very little of that has occurred.”

Hagel acknowledged that Obama decided in June to send lethal aid to the Syrian rebels. He said the Pentagon has not been directly involved because it is “a covert action.”

Despite his resistance, Corker said he’s “inclined” to support a resolution for limited military action, and other Republicans expressed strong concerns about the repercussions of a failure to act.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said after Tuesday’s White House meeting that a failure to respond to the use of chemical weapons “only increases the likelihood of future WMD [weapons of mass destruction] use by the regime, transfer to Hezbollah, or acquisition by al-Qaida.”

America’s largest pro-Israel organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also announced its support for legislation to authorize a military strike.

The United States maintains a significant military force in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The U.S. Navy released one of the warships that had been in the region, leaving four destroyers armed with cruise missiles, the USS Stout, USS Gravely, USS Ramage and USS Barry. Also in the area is an amphibious warship, the USS San Antonio, with about 300 Marines aboard.

In addition, there are two aircraft carriers in the region - the USS Nimitz strike group, which is in the southern Red Sea, and the USS Harry S Truman, which is in the Arabian Sea.

While announcing his support for military action and urging fellow Republicans to come to the same conclusion, Boehner firmly put the burden of rounding up votes on the administration.

Shortly after Boehner left the White House after the meeting, his spokesman Michael Steel said, “Everyone understands that it is an uphill battle to pass a resolution, and the speaker expects the White House to provide answers to members’ questions and take the lead on any whipping effort.”

Information for this article was contributed by Bradley Klapper, David Espo, Julie Pace, Josh Lederman, Donna Cassata, Alan Fram, Jennifer C. Kerr, Lolita Baldor, Peter James Spielmann, Sylvie Corbet, Jamey Keaten and staff members of The Associated Press; by Rick Gladstone, Thom Shanker, Mark Landler and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times; and by Roxana Tiron, Nicole Gaouette, Lisa Lerer, Joe Sobczyk, Alisa Odenheimer, Calev Ben-David, Scott Rose, Stepan Kravchenko, Anton Doroshev, Alex Nicholson, Mark Deen, Grant Smith, Gregory Viscusi, Gopal Ratnam, Julianna Goldman, Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Sangwon Yoon, Terry Atlas, Michael C. Bender and Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/04/2013

Upcoming Events