President Obama said he will take his pitch for a military strike directly to the skeptical American people on Tuesday and warned that failure to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons would be “a threat to global peace and security.”
This “isn’t just a Syrian tragedy,” Obama said Friday.
Failure to hold the Assad regime to account “would send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations that they can develop and use weapons of mass destruction and not pay a consequence,” Obama said as he prepared to depart Russia. “And that’s not the world that we want to live in.”
Well aware that the American public is decidedly against getting embroiled in another Middle Eastern conflict, Obama conceded that getting Congress to support what he called a “limited and proportional” attack would be a “heavy lift.”
Obama said he was also aware that even in his own Democratic party, there is little appetite for military action.
“I was elected to end wars, not start them,” he said. “But what I also know is that there are times where we have to make hard choices if we’re gonna stand up for the things that we care about. And I believe that this is one of those times.”
Obama said he would not have sought congressional approval if Assad and his chemical weapons had posed an imminent threat to the U.S. or its allies. But when pressed, Obama was vague about what he would do if Congress turned thumbs down on an attack.
“I’m not itching for military action,” he said. “I have been criticized for the last couple of years by some of the folks who are now saying they would oppose these strikes for not striking.”
In Washington, House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican who has battled Obama in the past but backs him on attacking Syria, said the President has to present a convincing case to the American public.
“Members of Congress represent the views of their constituents, and only a President can convince the public that military action is required,” Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said. “We only hope this isn’t coming too late to make the difference.”
Obama spoke as he was leaving St. Petersburg, where he tried to build support at the G-20 summit for punishing Assad.
He managed to wrest a joint statement from 10 countries that accused the Syrian government of launching a sarin gas attack last month that killed more than 1,400 civilians and called for a strong international response.
But the tough language stopped short of explicitly calling for military action.
And Obama made no headway with their host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a strong Assad ally who adamantly opposes military intervention.
In other developments:
— The State Department ordered all nonessential diplomatic personnel out of Lebanon, citing “tensions in the region” and issued a travel warning to Americans in Turkey.
— The Kremlin ratcheted up tensions further with the announcement that it was sending more warships to the coast of Syria, where Russia has a naval base.
— ABC News reported that the Obama administration is considering a two-day air campaign involving B-2 and B-52 bombers in addition to firing Tomahawk missiles at Syria from Navy destroyers off the coast.
Obama faces strong headwinds at home when Congress reconvenes Tuesday. Capitol Hill is now home to liberal Democrats who opposed the Iraq War but find themselves on the same side as conservative Republicans who had backed toppling Saddam Hussein but don’t want to attack Assad.
Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) is one of those Republicans and is best known for lobbying to change the name of french fries to “freedom fries” in the congressional cafeteria back in 2003 when France opposed intervention in Iraq.
But in a remarkably frank interview Friday with The Takeaway on NPR, Jones admitted he backed the Iraq War because he was “more concerned about being re-elected” and now deeply regrets embroiling the U.S. in a war based on false intelligence that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
“I was very naive,” Jones said. “I did not understand at the time that (the Bush administration) had manipulated the intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.”
Jones said he opposes attacking Syria because he is “dubious of any administration” that makes accusations about weapons of mass destruction. He dismissed the Obama administration’s push to attack Syria as “stupid foreign policy.”
With News Wire Services
