Bashar al-Assad is probably already planning his victory parade.

First Obama says he’s decided to attack Syria, but then he immediately says he’s seeking authorization from Congress. But then he signals he’ll attack even without the support of Congress. Then AIPAC wheels out its big guns in Obama’s support, but for once it doesn’t look like anyone’s too worried about what the Israel lobby thinks. Even though Israel itself supports Obama, more than anything they just want to see the war in Syria continue. “Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here,” says a former Israeli diplomat. And now Obama’s latest effort to rally international support has fallen flat — even the French are getting cold feet.

Is the president who likes to lead from behind now ready to lead with on one behind?

Apparently not. The White House isn’t ready to raise the white flag just yet but it’s already signalling that it may soon concede defeat.

Garance Franke-Ruta writes: President Obama does not intend to act in defiance of Congress if it votes down a resolution authorizing the use of force in Syria, White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken told Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition Friday.

“Has the president decided what he will do if Congress votes no on using force?” Inskeep asked during the short segment.

“You know Steve, when, after the events of August 21, we reached out to Congress and we had conversations with members of Congress across the country,” Blinken replied. “And the one thing we heard from nearly all of them is that they wanted their voice heard and their vote, and their votes counted.”

“The president of course has the authority to act, but it’s neither his desire nor his intention to do, to use that authority absent Congress backing,” Blinken said.

It was the second such signal-sending move of the day, following on the heels of Peter Baker’s report in the New York Times:

Although Mr. Obama has asserted that he has the authority to order the strike on Syria even if Congress says no, White House aides consider that almost unthinkable. As a practical matter, it would leave him more isolated than ever and seemingly in defiance of the public’s will at home. As a political matter, it would almost surely set off an effort in the House to impeach him, which even if it went nowhere could be distracting and draining.

Another way to look at this: If Obama were comfortable acting alone — that is to say, without the support of Congress, the United Nations, NATO, the Arab League, or any major allies save France — to order a strike on Syria, he had the opportunity to do so without going to Congress and requesting that each of its members rouse their electorates and invest political capital in considering and voting on the question for themselves. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. has intercepted an order from Iran to militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Baghdad in the event of a strike on Syria, officials said, amid an expanding array of reprisal threats across the region.

Military officials have been trying to predict the range of possible responses from Syria, Iran and their allies. U.S. officials said they are on alert for Iran’s fleet of small, fast boats in the Persian Gulf, where American warships are positioned. U.S. officials also fear Hezbollah could attack the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

While the U.S. has moved military resources in the region for a possible strike, it has other assets in the area that would be ready to respond to any reprisals by Syria, Iran or its allies.

Those deployments include a strike group of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and three destroyers in the Red Sea, and an amphibious ship, the USS San Antonio, in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would help with any evacuations.

The U.S. military has also readied Marines and other assets to aid evacuation of diplomatic compounds if needed, and the State Department began making preparations last week for potential retaliation against U.S. embassies and other interests in the Middle East and North Africa.

U.S. officials began planning for a possible strike on Syrian regime assets after the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus in which the U.S. says Syrian government forces killed over 1,400 people using chemical weapons. The U.S. military has prepared options for an attack and beefed up its military resources in the region, including positioning four destroyers in the Eastern Mediterranean.

That process slowed last weekend when Mr. Obama said he would first seek an authorization for using military force from Congress.

A delay in a U.S. strike would increase opportunities for coordinated retaliation by groups allied with the Assad government, including Shiite militias in Iraq, according to U.S. officials. [Continue reading…]

In the event that the U.S. goes ahead with strikes on Syria, it goes without saying that U.S. interests across the region will be possible targets for acts of retaliation of some kind from a variety of possible sources. So why have U.S. officials chosen to leak this particular classified intelligence on a purported threat from Iran? Is this all part of President Obama’s new found desire to promote transparency in the intelligence community? Unlikely.

Maybe there are some members of the administration who are trying to hit the brakes and want to alert the public to the risks involved in the attacks. Think Benghazi.

But this report isn’t based on whistle-blowing — it’s based on a briefing and the object of the exercise soon becomes clear.

An alarm bell is being rung and the message to Congress is: don’t hold up the strikes on Syria because if you do, you will be responsible for the next Benghazi.

But just a minute! Wasn’t it only last weekend that Obama declared: “our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now.”

It’s not time-sensitive, but the longer the delay, the greater the risks of retaliation.

It’s not time-sensitive, but the delay that’s already taken place through seeking Congressional approval means that the Pentagon is already working on expanding the target list.

But if the White House is now hitting the panic button, this might have less to do with the information its getting from the Pentagon and more to do with the word from Capitol Hill.

Concerted pressure from AIPAC notwithstanding, there is a strong possibility that Congress may this time around pay more attention to public opinion than anything else and as a consequence reject Obama’s plan. Obama will then be on a trajectory to enter his own unique expression of unilateralism: no support from Britain, nor from the UN, nor from Congress, nor the American people. Even George Bush never attempted to go it alone to this degree.

Obama’s already passed the point of no return. He’s committed the U.S. to this operation with or without the support of Congress.

With Libya, Obama led from behind. With Syria, he may be on the brink of leading with no one behind.

Here’s a friendly bit of advice to some Syrians: If you happen to own a small two-axle flatbed truck — the kind you might use for hauling construction materials, produce deliveries or that kind of thing — and you don’t want to get hit by an American cruise missile, you might want keep your truck in a garage for a few weeks.

It’s now reported that the Pentagon is expanding its target list and will be attempting to destroy “equipment used to deploy chemical weapons.” Most Americans probably think that such equipment would be readily identifiable as military equipment, but if the image below is reliable — it’s a screenshot from a video believed to show a missile launcher used for chemical weapons — then the equipment in question, once covered by a tarpaulin, is probably indistinguishable from thousands of trucks being driven around every single day in Syria for perfectly innocent purposes.

On the other hand, let’s give the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt and assume that its intelligence is so strong that it knows exactly which white trucks at which it should aim. Can it be equally confident that none of them will actually be carrying chemical weapons? Can we be sure that the U.S. effort to prevent the further use of chemical weapons will not instead result in the release of more sarin?

The New York Times reports: President Obama has directed the Pentagon to develop an expanded list of potential targets in Syria in response to intelligence suggesting that the government of President Bashar al-Assad has been moving troops and equipment used to employ chemical weapons while Congress debates whether to authorize military action.

Mr. Obama, officials said, is now determined to put more emphasis on the “degrade” part of what the administration has said is the goal of a military strike against Syria — to “deter and degrade” Mr. Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons. That means expanding beyond the 50 or so major sites that were part of the original target list developed with French forces before Mr. Obama delayed action on Saturday to seek Congressional approval of his plan.

For the first time, the administration is talking about using American and French aircraft to conduct strikes on specific targets, in addition to ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles. There is a renewed push to get other NATO forces involved.

The strikes would be aimed not at the chemical stockpiles themselves — risking a potential catastrophe — but rather the military units that have stored and prepared the chemical weapons and carried the attacks against Syrian rebels, as well as the headquarters overseeing the effort, and the rockets and artillery that have launched the attacks, military officials said Thursday.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that other targets would include equipment that Syria uses to protect the chemicals — air defenses, long-range missiles and rockets, which can also deliver the weapons. [Continue reading…]

C.J. Chivers reports from an undisclosed location:

The Syrian rebels posed casually, standing over their prisoners with firearms pointed down at the shirtless and terrified men.

The prisoners, seven in all, were captured Syrian soldiers. Five were trussed, their backs marked with red welts. They kept their faces pressed to the dirt as the rebels’ commander recited a bitter revolutionary verse.

“For fifty years, they are companions to corruption,” he said. “We swear to the Lord of the Throne, that this is our oath: We will take revenge.”

The moment the poem ended, the commander, known as “the Uncle,” fired a bullet into the back of the first prisoner’s head. His gunmen followed suit, promptly killing all the men at their feet.

This scene, documented in a video smuggled out of Syria a few days ago by a former rebel who grew disgusted by the killings, offers a dark insight into how many rebels have adopted some of the same brutal and ruthless tactics as the regime they are trying to overthrow.

The New York Times reporter (one of their best — and I mean that) just got his hands on this video. Its content provides a graphic fresh image of the country in which the United States is about to become militarily entangled. The report is clearly intended as a warning: venture no closer.

What Chivers clearly didn’t realize when he filed his report (I’m assuming he’s in Turkey) was that the video he had just been handed was a year and a half old. Only after the story got published was the date of the video later corrected from April 2013 to the spring of 2012.

It’s not that there is the slightest reason to think that the situation in Syria has improved during the intervening period, yet I doubt that Chivers would have made the centerpiece of his presentation of “an increasingly criminal environment populated by gangs of highwaymen, kidnappers and killers,” a video made that long ago. It naturally begs the question: if you want to convey what Syria’s like in late 2013, why are you using a video from early 2012?

Moreover, in his choice of language — gangs of highwaymen, kidnappers and killers — why is Chivers now sounding like Bashar al-Assad who has always insisted that his battle is against criminals and terrorists?

Summary executions, wherever they take place, are always an ugly affair. Americans, however, are generally shielded from the brutal nature of such killing because the cases we most often hear about are not carried out at the order of a vindictive field commander, nor with bullets through the back of the head. Instead, all we hear is that an estimated number of suspected terrorists died in a covert drone strike that had presumably been authorized by the president. No blood, no bodies, no names.

The argument against Obama’s plan to strike Syria takes frequent twists and turns, but a theme that keeps on returning — they are all as bad as each other — appears like the ghost of 9/11.

What are Americans to make of the Middle East with its teeming masses of Muslims. Some Sunni, some Shia, and how to remember which is which, yet above all, each a potential terrorist. Surely the wisest course of action is to have nothing to do with the lot.

After 12 years we’re still talking about “bad guys” and our difficulty in knowing who they are — a difficulty that has led so many Americans to conclude: they’re all bad guys.

And then we’re told that even now the intelligence services, who are supposedly better informed than anyone else, are still struggling to connect the dots. Why? Because they haven’t finished working on their coloring books?

Maybe the problem has less to do with the nature of the Middle East, and more to do with the fact that Americans remain locked in a kindergarten mindset, seeing a world persistently rendered with no more complexity than a comic book. We imagine a comic book world, but we don’t actually live in one.