Arab League Rejects Attack Against Syria
New York Times --- By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MARK LANDLER --- Published: August 27, 2013
CAIRO —
The leaders of the Arab world on Tuesday blamed the Syrian government for a chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of people last week, but
declined to back a retaliatory military strike, leaving President Obama without the broad regional support he had for his last military intervention in the Middle East, in Libya in 2011.
While the Obama administration has robust European backing and more muted Arab support for a strike on Syria, the position of the Arab League and the
unlikelihood of securing authorization from the United Nations Security Council complicate the legal and diplomatic case for the White House.
The White House said Tuesday that there was “no doubt” that President Bashar al-Assad’s government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack — an assessment shared by Britain, France and other allies — but it has yet to make clear if it has any intelligence directly linking Mr. Assad to the attack. The administration said it planned to provide intelligence on the attack later this week.
As Mr. Obama sought to shore up international support for military action,
telephoning Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, administration
officials said they did not regard the lack of an imprimatur from the Security Council or the Arab League as insurmountable hurdles, given the carnage last week.
Administration officials have declined to spell out the legal justification that Mr. Obama would use in ordering a strike, beyond saying that the large-scale use of chemical weapons violates international norms. But officials said he could draw on a range of treaties and statutes, from the Geneva Conventions to the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Mr. Obama, they said, could also cite the need to protect a vulnerable population, as his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, did in ordering NATO’s 78-day air campaign on Kosovo in 1999. Or he could invoke the principle of “responsibility to protect,” which some officials cited to justify the American-led bombing campaign in Libya.
“There is no doubt here that chemical weapons were used on a massive scale on Aug. 21 outside of Damascus,” said the White House spokesman, Jay Carney. “There is also very little doubt, and should be no doubt for anyone who approaches this logically, that the Syrian regime is responsible for the use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21 outside of Damascus.”
A number of nations in Europe and the Middle East, along with several humanitarian organizations, have joined the United States in the assessment. But with
the specter of the faulty intelligence assessments before the Iraq war still hanging over American decision making, and with polls showing that
only a small fraction of the American public supports military intervention in Syria, some officials in Washington realize that there needs to be some kind of a public presentation making the case for war.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/world/middleeast/arab-league-rejects-attack-against-syria.html?_r=0
