Reuters reports: White House efforts to convince the U.S. Congress to back military action against Syria are not only failing, they seem to be stiffening the opposition.

That was the assessment on Sunday, not of an opponent but of an early and ardent Republican supporter of Obama’s plan for attacking Syria, the influential Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, Mike Rogers.

Rogers told CBS’s “Face the Nation” the White House had made a “confusing mess” of the Syria issue. Now, he said, “I’m skeptical myself.”

Congress will be in session on Monday for the first time since the August recess. Debate on Syria could begin in the full Senate this week, with voting as early as Wednesday. The House of Representatives could take up the issue later this week or next.

Obama is expected to spend the next several days in personal meetings with members.

Some Democratic opponents of a military strike, meanwhile, were looking for a way to spare Obama’s administration the effects of a “no” vote.

Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts suggested that the president withdraw his request before it is defeated, saying on CNN’s “State of the Union” that there was insufficient support for it in Congress.

There are no signs that Obama is considering that, but speculation about the possibility that the administration might delay a vote surfaced on Sunday when Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking in Paris after meeting Arab foreign ministers, did not rule out returning to the United Nations Security Council to secure a Syria resolution.

A U.S. official who asked not to be named later squelched that speculation: “We have always supported working through the U.N. but have been clear there is not a path forward there.” [Continue reading…]

Each segment of the following interview is preceded by a 30 second commercial.

The Washington Post reports: Iran won Iraqi support for its efforts to oppose a U.S.-led military strike on Syria during a visit to Baghdad on Sunday by the new Iranian foreign minister, highlighting how close the two countries have grown since U.S. forces withdrew in 2011.

Speaking during his first visit abroad since he was appointed last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javed Zarif warned that U.S. intervention in Syria risks igniting a regionwide war.

“Those who are short-sighted and are beating the drums of war are starting a fire that will burn everyone,” Zarif said during a news conference.

Standing alongside him, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said all of Syria’s neighbors, including Iraq, would be harmed by American involvement in Syria’s two-year-old conflict.

“What I can say conclusively is that Iraq will not be a base for any attack, nor will it facilitate any such attack on Syria,” Zebari told reporters after holding talks with Zarif. [Continue reading…]

Rory Stewart writes: Like hundreds of thousands of civilians, soldiers, contractors, UN and charity-staff, I have worked in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 20 years.

I was in favour of the Prime Minister’s humanitarian motion on Syria but against a deeper intervention. I find it very difficult, however, to apply lessons from other countries to Syria. Many of those I have worked with feel the same.

This is in part because of the uncertainty and ignorance we experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan. You peer at the world through reinforced glass from armoured vehicles, live behind concrete blast-walls. You have very little contact with the local population. You don’t understand them, and they don’t understand you.

Sometimes, locals seem to give you the benefit of the doubt — in Kosovo, for example, our mistakes were largely interpreted as incompetence not malice. But in Afghanistan, I saw honest development projects interpreted as a conspiracy to steal oil, or a science-fiction material called “red mercury”.

In Bosnia — my first experience — our intervention finally improved a terrible situation. By 1995, 100,000 had been killed, a million refugees displaced, and the country was divided by militias and their checkpoints. Bosnian Serbs had massacred thousands in Srebrenica, and Sarajevo was being shelled.

The West was reluctant to intervene because people feared a second Vietnam; or that “centuries of ethnic hatred” would make the situation unresolvable.

Then, more than three years after the conflict began, the West bombed the Bosnian Serb artillery. Croat troops recaptured Serb territory. With the Serbs reeling, but not defeated, the US invited everyone, including war criminals, to a peace conference. And after the peace deal, the West deployed 60,000 soldiers, and established an international administration. The war ended.

Within the next decade, the militia had been disbanded, the internal borders had vanished, owners had retrieved a million properties, refugees had returned, and the war criminals had been brought to justice. This happened without a single US or British soldier being killed. The crime rate in Bosnia is now as low as Sweden.

But the key — and difficult – lesson for Syria is that Bosnia ultimately worked not because we took dramatic military action. It worked because our action was always not only principled, but cautious. Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, the West did not feel that Bosnia was “an existential threat” to its security. The aim was only to end the war, and improve local lives.

The West was reluctant to take risks. If it had proved too dangerous, we were always prepared to acknowledge that we had failed, and withdraw. In the first year, the international soldiers barely left their bases: there were more injuries on the basketball court than in the field. We were not committed to toppling Milosevic, and were prepared to talk to everyone, including war criminals.

The first refugee returns were led by Bosnian charities. The first moves against the war criminal Karadzic came from his allies. The genius of the international community lay in getting cautiously behind these Bosnian moves, and continuing a process that ended not just with peace but with Milosevic and Karadzic on trial at The Hague in 2001 and 2008.

9/11 made this kind of intervention much more difficult. Suddenly Iraq and Afghanistan were presented as a war against “an existential threat”, in which “failure was not an option”.

Rather than being reluctant to intervene, some leaders seemed eager. Rather than being prepared to work with almost anyone, and give space to local leaders, we refused to engage with our “enemies” (Sadrists or Taliban), and we focused with paranoid intensity on micromanaging the Iraqi and Afghan governments.

We tried to keep public support by over-emphasising the importance of the mission. We were drawn into betraying our principles, and strengthening warlords. And by the time it became clear that the mission was actually impossible, we were trapped by our boasts, promises, fears, and guilt. [Continue reading…]

Mark Perry writes: When asked by Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) during Senate testimony on Tuesday what the United States is “seeking” in Syria, Gen. Martin Dempsey had nothing to say. “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking,” he replied. Secretary of State John Kerry jumped in to answer for Dempsey, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman’s response to the senator’s question was noted, approvingly, by many at the Pentagon as something less than an endorsement of President Barack Obama’s Syria policy.

If Obama orders the military into action in Syria, the response will be unflinching. But there’s a discernible discomfort among recently retired generals and military intellectuals, echoed more quietly within the serving ranks, over fighting “wars of choice.” Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed this disquiet during a widely circulated address at West Point in April of 2008, when he cited the three axioms taught by legendary military tutor Maj. Gen. Fox Conner to guide decisions about when the U.S. should go to war: The U.S., Conner had said, should never fight unless it has to, never fight alone, and never fight for long.

It’s not known whether “Marty” Dempsey, as he is known within the top brass, embraces Conner’s principles, but it’s clear that he’s quietly asking the same questions over intervention in Syria: Is this war absolutely necessary; will we have to go it alone; and when does it end? They’re good questions, although Dempsey’s senior colleagues and close friends say his cautious counsel isn’t being sufficiently heeded in the White House. [Continue reading…]

By Max Weiss, Princeton University

“Every time the Syrians mourn a martyr another martyr falls, and that’s the way funerals drag along behind them…more funerals.” So wrote Samar Yazbek in her diaries of the Syrian revolution that I translated from the Arabic.

The specter of greater violence and even more funerals now looms on the Syrian horizon.

Following the massacre of over 1,000 Syrians in an alleged chemical weapons attack, which crossed a “red line” uttered by President Obama last year, our country is now hurtling towards a military campaign against Damascus, ostensibly to punish President Bashar al-Assad.

“We cannot raise our children in a world where we will not follow through on the things we say, the accords we sign, the values that define us,” Obama declared, announcing that he would deign to seek congressional support for armed action in Syria.

However, Mr. Obama is finding it hard to justify intervention.

The White House might summon the responsibility to protect (R2P), an emerging doctrine meant to guide the ethical conduct of states and international institutions, as a justification for intervention. The elephant in the room is that the first 100,000 lives lost to bullets and non-chemical attacks did not seem to activate the moral sensors of the R2P crowd. The nature of the weapons involved—be that chemical or biological, nuclear or conventional—should have no bearing whatsoever on the responsibility of the international community.

They could cite humanitarian suffering as a justification for intervention, but the United States and its allies have consistently lacked the political will to mitigate the humanitarian catastrophe inside Syria as well as among the mushrooming refugee populations in Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon. Given the deterioration of the security situation inside the country and the constantly shifting battleground, non-lethal aid has had a notoriously difficult time finding its way into the hands of those who need it most.

In June of this year, the White House rolled out $300 million in humanitarian assistance on top of $515 million that had already been committed, which sounds like a lot of money. But assuming a conservative estimate of over one and a half million refugees scattered around the region, and as many as 4 million people internally displaced, even if the entire $815 million were doled out in a single year and miraculously made it inside Syria, with no overhead costs, this would work out to $148/refugee. But the displacement crisis is years old now, and on the brink of spiraling out of control: the true assistance is probably closer to $40-50/refugee. In response to the UNHCR’s appeal for $4.4 billion, the largest in the organization’s history, the Obama administration responded by offering to take in 2,000 of the more than 5 million displaced.

So what justification for intervention is left?

For lack of a compelling legal, moral or humanitarian argument, the U.S. administration seems to be ramping up for what might be called Operation Save Face. Obama wants to drop bombs because he once said he would. Such a callous calculus is hardly grounds for a just and viable Middle East policy.

Key figures in the Syrian opposition abroad and inside the country reject negotiations with the regime; they want al-Assad’s head on a pike. Yet there is good reason to believe that military escalation in Syria will likely only result in further military escalation in Syria. Bashar al-Assad is unlikely to respond without a credible threat, but a stick-heavy approach devoid of carrots is a policy bound to fail.

The best course of action for the United States in Syria remains aggressive diplomacy and a more robust commitment to humanitarian assistance.

To begin with, U.S. diplomats and government representatives must live up to their titles and redouble their efforts to unclog sclerotic diplomatic channels. We could urge Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to stop fanning the flames by arming various rebel groups. We could make every effort to ensure that the upcoming Geneva peace talks do not fail. We could throw our weight behind the Friends of Syria initiative that is set to reconvene in Paris soon. Obama should set aside his dispute with President Vladimir Putin over Edward Snowden and demand a sit-down to resume discussion on this burning issue. Moreover, the election of moderate Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and U.S diplomat Jeffrey Feltman’s recent visit to Tehran represent an opportunity to improve U.S.-Iranian relations that must not be squandered. Unless the White House immediately builds upon these developments, then U.S. diplomacy is once again consigned to enabling militancy rather than defusing conflict.

“Just longing for peace does not necessarily bring it about,” Secretary of State John Kerry concluded in his recent remarks on the crisis in Syria. Through Kerry, the Obama administration affirmed its commitment to “a diplomatic process that can resolve” the conflict “through negotiation.” If diplomacy is the ultimate goal, how does a limited bombing campaign advertised well in advance work in the service of such a negotiated solution?

The Obama administration has made clear once again that the “values that define us” include unilateralism and punitive foreign policy — in other words, vigilantism and thuggery.

If the Obama administration remains loath to actively engage the diplomatic front with the same tenacity it seems to be pursuing military action, then we ought to drop the charade that the Syria crisis has escalated over a concern to protect the Syrian people and acknowledge that this is a policy of machismo: we said we would use our stick, and now we must prove to the world that we can.

Max Weiss is assistant professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

The Telegraph reports: The two-year-old uprising against the Damascus regime has broken down into countless battlefields fought over by a “vast array” of different rebel groups.

Rebel fighters may be able to make local gains behind a barrage of missile strikes, but are unlikely to overthrow Assad’s government.

The analysis from IHS Jane’s, a defence consultancy, comes as American military planners have been told to widen a list of potential targets for a more ambitious campaign of strikes.

President Barack Obama is now considering using long-range bombers to hit Assad’s forces harder and ensure they are unable to launch more chemical weapons attacks like the one that killed up to 1,400 people in an east Damascus suburb.

Charles Lister, author of the analysis, said: “The Syrian conflict has seen a vast array of armed groups emerge across the country.

“While it is perfectly feasible that localised insurgent groupings could take advantage of strikes that target government air assets and key artillery positions, it is unlikely that this will lead to a nationwide surge in opposition victories and any perceivable imminent overthrow of the government.”

The US has five guided-missile destroyers and at least one submarine in the eastern Mediterranean, each loaded with cruise missiles.

Planners are also considering bombing strikes from B52s or B2 stealth jets based in the US, which would be able to jam or evade Syria’s air defences.

A hit list being drawn up in Washington is reported to exceed more than 50 possible targets in Syria. [Continue reading…]

Rajan Menon writes: What’s striking about the debate over President Obama’s plan for a punitive strike against Syrian President Bashar Assad is the extent to which it centers on countries other than Syria. There’s a reason for this. A concept that has had a long, significant though subtle influence on U.S. foreign policy is at work again: credibility.

The foundational assumption — certainly the subtext — of many arguments for hitting Assad is that America’s reputation is on the line. It’s said that many bad things will happen if Obama folds: Various friends and allies will doubt America’s pledges to protect them; adversaries (Iran, North Korea, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others), smelling weakness, will act with impunity.

“Credibility” has great power in national security debates. It conveys strategic sagacity by using historical analogies. (Neville Chamberlain at Munich is a staple.) It warns of consequences that transcend specific nations or issues. It points to the “big picture” and to complex interconnections. It invokes the United States’ unique responsibilities for maintaining global order.

In reality, the credibility gambit often combines sleight of hand with lazy thinking (historical parallels tend to be asserted, not demonstrated) and is a variation on the discredited domino theory. This becomes apparent if one examines how it is being deployed in the debate on Syria.

Obama made a bad decision by publicly, and needlessly, warning a brutal strongman that the United States would resort to military force were he to use chemical weapons. With the White House having announced that Assad had done just that, Obama appears tangled in his own red lines.

But he should not make another mistake now just because he made one earlier. Yet that’s what those who invoke credibility in effect recommend because they don’t explain convincingly why it’s important for him to prove his resolve in this instance. They present credibility as an end in itself, not as a means to achieve a desired outcome, which is what it is.

The concept often serves as an all-purpose rationale. The result is that it can permit the past to dictate the future and give choice and prudence, the essentials of sound statecraft, short shrift. [Continue reading…]

As Americans hear seemingly endless debate about Syria — debate that mostly involves political analysts and reporters based in Washington — there is probably an increasing amount of Syria-fatigue setting in. Haven’t we already heard more than enough?

The reality, though, is that there is a world of difference between hearing people talking about Syria and knowing that much about what’s going on there.

August 21 has been marked as the day everything changed, but how many Americans are aware that since 1,400 people died on that day, another 1,400 Syrians have subsequently been killed?

These were the deaths that few in the Western media see any reason to mention.

64 deaths yesterday, 87 on Thursday, 72 on Wednesday, 66 on Monday, 107 on Sunday, 118 on Saturday, and on and on — the daily deaths in dozens that have become the signature of Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

The Los Angeles Times reports: In July 2012, senior U.S. intelligence officials drove to the Capitol to secretly brief top lawmakers on the first indications that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against its own people.

The classified reports about a small-scale attack weren’t definitive, according to U.S. officials who were privy to them. It was still a month before President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and “change his calculus” about taking action in Syria.

But it was the beginning of a stream of intelligence documenting what U.S. officials say was a yearlong escalation in the use of the banned weapons by the government of President Bashar Assad, a far more extensive record of the incidents than previously known. The Obama administration did not publicly acknowledge the attacks for months, and declared in April that it believed Syria had used chemical weapons.

Obama is struggling to build support now for a punitive strike after an attack Aug. 21 that it says killed 1,429 people. With many of its members deeply skeptical, Congress is expected to begin voting next week on whether to authorize military action.

Administration officials say the evidence for previous chemical attacks wasn’t as compelling, and critics acknowledge it would have been even harder to make the case for a military response to more limited use of the banned weapons. But some current and former officials say the slow response by the White House raises questions about whether earlier, clearer warnings by Obama — and perhaps limited actions such as providing sophisticated weapons to Syrian rebels — could have deterred last month’s attack in Damascus suburbs. [Continue reading…]

M.J. Rosenberg writes: AIPAC is taking an incredible risk by making an unprecedented full court press to pass the bomb Syria resolution.

Never in its history has it gone all out to achieve passage or defeat for anything not directly related to Israel. And, because Congress is snugly in its pocket on Israel issues, it rarely needs to fight.

AIPAC’s last big battle was in 1991 when it tried to get extra aid to support Soviet Jewish refugees in Israel. President George H. W. Bush said the extra aid (in the form of loan guarantees) would only be provided if Israel froze West Bank settlement construction. Prime Minister Shamir said no and Bush said: no extra aid for you.

AIPAC descended on the Hill as they now are over Syria, leading Bush to publicly say “I am one lonely little guy” up against “some powerful political forces” made up of “a thousand lobbyists on the Hill.” [Continue reading…]

Gareth Smyth writes: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 79, has been written off more than most. But the former president and head of the expediency council remains an astute operator, and my guess is that he has chosen his ground carefully in calling for a reappraisal of Iran’s unblinking support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

In saying Assad’s forces were responsible for using chemicals weapons in Damascus in an attack on 21 August, Rafsanjani has surely judged this a good issue for the first serious clash between pragmatists and more “hardline” forces since Hassan Rouhani, a Rafsanjani ally, took over as president a month ago.

While a clash was inevitable sooner or later – and while Rouhani still has the aura of June’s overwhelming election victory – it has arrived quickly, and reflects how delicate a time it is in the Middle East as the United States ponders its first direct military involvement in the Syrian war.

The public argument within Iran’s political class reflects a wider disagreement in Tehran over regional policy and the prospect of talks with Washington about the nuclear programme. There are many in Tehran who would love to undermine Rouhani’s calls for dialogue as means of reaching a compromise over the nuclear programme and reducing region-wide tensions between Shia and Sunni Muslims being brought to boiling point by violent chaos in Syria.

Whatever Iran’s longstanding alliance with Assad and whatever the imperatives of maintaining logistical support to Hezbollah, Iran has a strong public policy of opposition to chemical weapons. The deaths of 20,000 Iranian soldiers and the continuing suffering of around 100,000 Iranians from the use of chemicals by Iraq during the 1980-88 war are well known in the country. They are often highlighted on state television.

And while Iran’s link to Assad remains strategic, the conflict is clearly worsening relations with Sunni Arab states. Shia are deeply aware – it is intrinsic to the origins of the faith – of their minority status. Takiyya, the doctrine that holds that beliefs can be disguised in certain circumstances in order to protect the faithful from danger, came about because the Shia cannot win any all-out conflict.

The calculation of the pragmatists is surely that the longer the Syria war lasts, the greater the prospect that the fall of Assad. This would at the very least leave Tehran facing a new regime in Damascus, from which it and Hezbollah are deeply alienated, or perhaps a mess with little of a regime to speak of. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: President Obama’s position on Syria — punish President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons without seeking to force him from power — has been called “half-pregnant” by critics at home and abroad who prefer a more decisive American intervention to end Syria’s civil war.

But Mr. Obama’s limited strike proposal has one crucial foreign ally: Israel.

Israeli officials have consistently made the case that enforcing Mr. Obama’s narrow “red line” on Syria is essential to halting the nuclear ambitions of Israel’s archenemy, Iran. More quietly, Israelis have increasingly argued that the best outcome for Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, is no outcome.

For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.

“This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”

The synergy between the Israeli and American positions, while not explicitly articulated by the leaders of either country, could be a critical source of support as Mr. Obama seeks Congressional approval for surgical strikes in Syria. Some Republicans have pushed him to intervene more assertively to tip the balance in the Syrian conflict, while other politicians from both parties are loath to involve the United States in another Middle Eastern conflict on any terms.

But Israel’s national security concerns have broad, bipartisan support in Washington, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel lobby in Washington, weighed in Tuesday in support of Mr. Obama’s approach. The group’s statement said nothing, however, about the preferred outcome of the civil war, instead saying that America must “send a forceful message” to Iran and Hezbollah and “take a firm stand that the world’s most dangerous regimes cannot obtain and use the most dangerous weapons.” [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: Syrian rebel forces say they are planning a nationwide offensive in conjunction with anticipated U.S. strikes against the forces of President Bashar Assad, seeking to use U.S. military might to force a decisive shift in the country’s long civil war.

Rebel commanders disagree on the level of coordination they expect with the U.S. and its allies, and made it clear they hope the United States will do more than launch the limited strikes President Obama has proposed to deter Assad from using chemical weapons. The rebels have been disappointed by America’s reluctance to get involved more deeply in the conflict.

The issue is now before Congress. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed an amended resolution Wednesday approving military action to change the battlefield momentum in Syria away from the government. But many members of Congress, particularly in the House, have expressed deep skepticism about military involvement.

If the U.S. strikes, rebels said Thursday, they will be ready to take advantage — particularly around Damascus, the capital, where they say insurgents are infiltrating in preparation to attack.

“We are ready once the first rocket is launched,” said Col. Qassim Saad Eddine, spokesman for the Supreme Military Council, which oversees the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army. “We will attack the military sites, not just in one province, but all over Syria.” [Continue reading…]

Sune Engel Rasmussen writes: As opponents of a strike against Syria scramble to find alternative avenues for a peaceful solution, there is one murky diplomatic route, rarely mentioned, which now seems more necessary than ever to explore: talking to Iran.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad is neither unconditional nor everlasting. Despite having assisted the Assad regime from the beginning of the conflict with weapons and personnel, the war in Syria has not strengthened Iran, which likely wants to get out of the Syrian quagmire as soon as possible — if it can do so with some influence in Syria intact.

First of all, the war has created a regional image problem for the clerics in Tehran. Since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has strived to be a beacon for the downtrodden people of the Muslim world and a standard-bearer against what it sees as oppression by America in the region. Assad’s carnage against fellow Muslims makes Iran look really bad on the Arab street, where Iran tried hard to make the Arab Spring look like a logical extension of its own revolution.

Iran’s support for Assad is also financially costly and strains an economy already suffering under sanctions, inflation, and widespread mismanagement. This is partly why Iran wouldn’t be able to afford a proportionate response to a U.S. attack on Syria. As Meir Javedanfar has argued, Iran wouldn’t want to risk the loss of hard-to-replace anti-aircraft systems and fighter aircrafts, or to expose its nuclear facilities to attacks from Israel.

Lastly, propping up Assad after his alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people is causing rifts in the Iranian leadership. On Sunday, Iran’s éminence grise – and presidential ally – Hashemi Rafsanjani reportedly blamed the Syrian government for the chemical weapons attack that killed more than 1,400 in a Damascus suburb. The government since denied the remarks, but regardless, the episode exposed a very real dissent within the establishment. [Continue reading…]

Politico reports: The powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC is planning to launch a major lobbying campaign to push wayward lawmakers to back the resolution authorizing U.S. strikes against Syria, sources said Thursday.

Officials say that some 250 Jewish leaders and AIPAC activists will storm the halls on Capitol Hill beginning next week to persuade lawmakers that Congress must adopt the resolution or risk emboldening Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon. They are expected to lobby virtually every member of Congress, arguing that “barbarism” by the Assad regime cannot be tolerated, and that failing to act would “send a message” to Tehran that the U.S. won’t stand up to hostile countries’ efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, according to a source with the group.

“History tells us that ambiguity [in U.S. actions] invites aggression,” said the AIPAC source who asked not to be named. The source added the group will now be engaged in a “major mobilization” over the issue.

Despite the group’s political muscle, it often doesn’t get involved in congressional fights over authorizing military action, and it had been mum about intervening in Syria as recently as last week.

But the stepped-up involvement comes at a welcome time for the White House, which is struggling to muster the votes in both chambers for a resolution that would give President Barack Obama the authority to engage in ‘limited’ military action” in Syria for 60 days, with one 30-day extension possible. The hawkish group also has ties to many Republicans, including ones who have been critical of the Obama administration’s handling of U.S.-Israeli affairs. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The United States declared on Thursday that it has given up trying to work with the U.N. Security Council on Syria, accusing Russia of holding the council hostage and allowing Moscow’s allies in Syria to deploy poison gas against innocent children.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power’s remarks left no doubt that Washington would not seek U.N. approval for a military strike on Syria in response to an August 21 chemical attack near Damascus. She said a draft resolution Britain submitted to the five permanent council members last week calling for a response to that attack was effectively dead.

“I was present in the meeting where the UK laid down the resolution, and everything in that meeting, in word and in body language, suggests that that resolution has no prospect of being adopted, by Russia in particular,” Power told reporters.

“Our considered view, after months of efforts on chemical weapons and after 2-1/2 years of efforts on Geneva (peace talks), the humanitarian situation is that there is no viable path forward in this Security Council,” she said.