With a conspicuous absence of enthusiasm and an emphasis on saving face, U.S. lawmakers began falling in line behind President Barack Obama Tuesday, with top officials from both parties endorsing punitive strikes against Syria.
A morning meeting with Obama brought the highest profile conversions, with House Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor announcing their support.
In the afternoon, Secretary of State John Kerry sat through a nearly four-hour grilling from senators and occasional anti-war hecklers, insisting that if the U.S. chooses not to strike Syria, “it’s a guarantee” the Assad regime will use chemical weapons again.
And as night fell on Washington, the deepening crisis was returning to the global stage with Obama en route to Europe, where he is expected to rally lukewarm international resolve at the upcoming G20 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Canada’s John Baird confirmed he would be taking the unusual step of joining an ad-hoc group of his fellow foreign ministers at the G20. The summit, normally dedicated to the global economy, now will involve side meetings focusing on “the situation in Syria,” Baird’s office said.
Obama’s weekend feint the simultaneous announcement to proceed with military action against the Syrian government, but also to defer action while he wins the support of Congress remains a hard sell for most Americans, according to two new polls showing strong opposition.
But the White House now appears to be slowly turning momentum in Congress, if not the electorate, toward endorsing limited intervention in war-torn Syria.
The Senate was widely expected to back Kerry’s demand for support, as he pledged to provide additional “classified” evidence against Syria in a closed-door Senate briefing Tuesday.
America’s other elected chamber, the House of Representatives, remains a wild card with its Republican majority, including a so-called “hell-no caucus,” as the hardest sell.
But pressure on Republicans to endorse military action now includes a growing range of influential U.S. conservatives who argue that failure to back Obama will make the country, and not just its president, an international laughing stock.
Republicans must “rise above” the temptation to punish Obama even if they believe the president’s policies “will prove ineffective, do no good, waste money, or entail unforeseen risks,” conservative commentator James Ceaser argued on the First Things blog.
“The stakes are too high. The weaker the president’s credibility on the world scene, the more the need to swallow and do what will not weaken it further. President Obama is the only president we have. That remains the overriding fact,” wrote Ceasar.
Kerry, during Tuesday’s extended Senate hearing, insisted under heated questioning from Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul that America will not be going to war “in the classic sense.”
“The president is asking for the authority to do a limited action that will degrade the capacity of a tyrant who has been using chemical weapons to kill his own people. It’s a limited action. It’s limited,” said Kerry.
In an earlier exchange, however, Kerry inadvertently awakened the worst fears of U.S. lawmakers when he addressed a hypothetical scenario in which he could envision U.S. soldiers on the ground in Syria.
In the event that Syria “imploded,” said Kerry, there might be a scenario in which U.S. soldiers would be mobilized inside the country to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of extremists.
“I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to a president of the United States to secure our country,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But within minutes, as those words coursed through social media, Kerry scrambled to take back those words, explaining he was simply “thinking out loud” and was not asking for an open door to send ground troops.
“Let’s shut the door now,” Kerry said. “The answer is, whatever prohibition clarifies it to Congress or the American people, there will not be American boots on the ground with respect to the civil war.”
