BackTop US Republicans back Syria strike as refugee crisis mounts
Obama urges swift Congress approval for Syria action; Boehner and Cantor say they will back call for strikes
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Beirut/Washington: US President Barack Obama won the backing of two top Republicans in Congress in his call for limited US strikes on Syria to punish President Bashar al-Assad for his suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.
Speaking after the United Nations (UN) said 2 million Syrians had fled a conflict that posed the greatest threat to world peace since the Vietnam war, Obama said the US also has a broader plan to help rebels defeat Assad’s forces.
In remarks that appeared to question the legality of the US plans to strike Syria without UN backing, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said the use of force is only legal when it is in self-defence or with UN Security Council authorization.
He said that if UN inspectors confirm the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the Security Council, which has long been deadlocked on the 2-1/2-year Syrian civil war, should overcome its differences and take action.
Having startled friends and foes alike in the Middle East by delaying a punitive attack on Assad until Congress reconvenes and agrees, Obama met congressional leaders at the White House on Tuesday to urge a prompt decision and assure them it did not mean another long war like Iraq or Afghanistan.
John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, and House majority leader Eric Cantor both pledged their support for military action after the meeting.
Votes are expected to be held in the US Senate and House next week, with the Republican-led House presenting the tougher challenge for Obama.
The Republican House leadership has indicated the votes will be “conscience votes," meaning they will not seek to influence members’ votes on party lines. All the same, it would have been a big blow to Obama if he had not secured the backing of the top two Republicans.
“I believe that my colleagues should support this call for action," Boehner told reporters.
The president said strikes aimed at punishing the use of chemical weapons would hurt Assad’s forces while other US action would bolster his opponents—though the White House has insisted it is not seeking “regime change."
“What we are envisioning is something limited. It is something proportional. It will degrade Assad’s capabilities," Obama said. “At the same time we have a broader strategy that will allow us to upgrade the capabilities of the opposition."
Assad denies deploying poison gas that killed hundreds of civilians last month.
The Syrian opposition, which on Tuesday said a forensic scientist had defected to the rebel side bringing evidence of Assad forces’ use of sarin gas in March, has appealed to Western allies to send them weapons and use their air power to end a war that has killed more than 100,000 and made millions homeless.
The presence in rebel ranks of Islamist militants, some of them close to al Qaeda, has made Western leaders wary, while at the same time the undoubted—and apparently accelerating—human cost of the conflict has brought pressure to intervene.
The chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee said on Tuesday he was confident after talking with Obama that the US would step up its support for “vetted" elements of the Syrian opposition.
Senator Carl Levin said he urged the president, a fellow Democrat, to arm the Syrian rebels a day after two influential Republican senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, sought similar assurances from Obama. Levin said he told the White House that the US should provide rebels with arms such as anti-tank weapons “which cannot be turned on us."
Top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi also voiced support for military strikes after meeting Obama on Tuesday, but Obama will still have to persuade some lawmakers, including Democrats, who have said they are concerned the president’s draft resolution could be too open-ended and allow possible use of ground troops or eventual attacks on other countries.
US secretary of state John Kerry and secretary of defence Chuck Hagel took the administration’s message to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Kerry said the world was watching to see what the US would do. “They want to know if America will rise to this moment and make a difference," he told senators at the hearing.
Refugee Crisis
After two and a half years of war, nearly one Syrian in three has been driven from home by violence and fear.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said there had been a near tenfold increase over the past 12 months in the rate of refugees crossing Syria’s borders into Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon—to a daily average of nearly 5,000 men, women and children.
This has pushed the total living abroad above 2 million.
That represents some 10% of Syria’s population, the UNHCR said. With a further 4.25 million estimated to have been displaced but still resident inside the country, close to a third of all Syrians are living away from their original homes.
Comparing the figures to the peak of Afghanistan’s refugee crisis two decades ago, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, said: “Syria has become the great tragedy of this century—a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history."
Speaking of the acceleration in the crisis, he said: “What is appalling is that the first million fled Syria in two years."
“The second million fled Syria in six months," Guterres said.
“The risks for global peace and security that the present Syria crisis represents, I’m sure, are not smaller than what we have witnessed in any other crisis that we have had since the Vietnam war," said Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister.
Russia, backed by China, has used its veto power in the UN Security Council three times to block resolutions condemning Assad’s government and threatening it with sanctions. Assad, like Russia, blames the rebels for the 21 August gas attack.
Obama has said he is “comfortable going forward without the approval of a United Nations Security Council that so far has been completely paralysed and unwilling to hold Assad accountable."
Ban questioned whether the use of force to deter Syria or other countries from deploying chemical arms in the future could do more harm than good.
“We must consider the impact of any punitive measure on efforts to prevent further bloodshed and facilitate a political resolution of the conflict," he said, calling for renewed diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis.
The conflict has divided the Middle East on sectarian lines, with Shi’ite Iran backing Assad and Washington’s Sunni Arab Gulf allies supporting the mainly Sunni rebels. It has also revived Cold War-style tensions between the Western powers and Moscow.
In an interview in Tuesday’s Le Figaro, Assad told the Paris newspaper: “Everybody will lose control of the situation when the powder keg blows. There is a risk of a regional war."
The rebels have been struggling to hold ground in recent months, let alone advance. According to one opposition report, government forces took the strategic northwestern town of Ariha on Tuesday, though others said the battle was not over.
Missile Jitters
While Obama’s wait for Congress to return from its summer recess seems to rule out Western military action this week, Israeli forces training in the Mediterranean with the US navy set nerves on edge in Damascus on Tuesday with a missile test that triggered an alert from Assad’s ally Russia.
When Moscow raised the alarm on Tuesday morning that its forces had detected the launch of two ballistic “objects" in the Mediterranean, thoughts of a surprise strike on Syria pushed oil prices higher on world markets and must have put the troops operating Syria’s Russian-equipped air defence system on alert.
A Syrian security official later told a Lebanese television channel that its early warning radar had picked up no threats.
Clarification came only later when the Israeli defence ministry said that its troops had—at the time of the Russian alert—fired a missile that is used as a target for an anti-missile defence system during an exercise with the US forces.
The jitters reflected a nervousness since Western leaders pledged retribution for the use of chemical weapons.
Britain has dropped out of planning for attacks since its parliament rejected a proposal by Prime Minister David Cameron but France, western Europe’s other main military power, is still coordinating possible action with the Pentagon. Reuters
Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Steve Gutterman and Timothy Heritage in Moscow, Jeffrey Heller and Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Dasha Afanasieva in Istanbul contributed to this story.
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