Eurasia Press & News
The Obama administration’s longtime sceptics of a Syria strike have reversed their position, defense secretary Chuck Hagel testified to the Senate on Tuesday.
Hagel, a former senator and a Vietnam combat veteran, put aside his previous hesitations about another entanglement in the Middle East and told the Senate foreign relations committee that President Obama’s “entire national security team” asked themselves “tough questions, before we concluded that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets”.
“The answer to whether I support additional support to the moderate [Syrian] opposition is yes,” testified US army general Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who has long warned about the dangers of US intervention in the Syrian conflict.
For the last several days, administration briefings for Congress have focused on the intelligence underpinning Obama’s assertion that Bashar al-Assad used the nerve agent sarin against rebel-controlled neighborhoods in suburban Damascus on 21 August.
Tuesday’s hearing was the first to discuss the so-far unaddressed question of what the strikes Obama wishes to launch will accomplish.
“President Obama is not asking America to go to war,” said John Kerry, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the committee, who denied that strikes would prelude deeper US involvement. “If Assad is arrogant enough, and I would say foolish enough, to retaliate to the consequences of his own criminal activity, the US and its allies have ample ways [of responding] … without going to war.”
