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President Pulls Lawmakers Into Box He Made President Pulls Lawmakers Into Box He Made
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — More than once, President Obama has confided to aides that he regards Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless, the choices are all bad, and the pressure to do something is unrelenting. WASHINGTON — President Obama’s aides were stunned at what their boss had to say when he summoned them to the Oval Office on Friday at 7 p.m., on the eve of what they believed could be a weekend when American missiles streaked again across the Middle East.
On Saturday, those treacherous crosscurrents were on vivid display in the Rose Garden. After two years of resisting deeper involvement in Syria, Mr. Obama finally decided to order a military strike — only to put his order on a shelf while he seeks Congressional approval. In a two-hour meeting of passionate, sharp debate in the Oval Office, he told them that after a frantic week in which he seemed to be rushing toward a military attack on Syria, he wanted to pull back and seek Congressional approval first.
For Mr. Obama, who presented his most fervent case yet that Syria needed to be punished for a deadly chemical weapons attack, the ironies are deep: having at last convinced himself of the imperative to act, he concluded that he had not secured enough political support at home to fire Tomahawk missiles at Syria. He had several reasons, he told them, including a sense of isolation after the terrible setback in the British Parliament. But the most compelling one may have been that acting alone would undercut him if in the next three years he needed Congressional authority for his next military confrontation in the Middle East, perhaps with Iran.
As a former senator who built his foreign policy on extricating the United States from wars, he now faces one of the greatest challenges of his career in persuading Congress to thrust the United States into another conflict in the Middle East. If he made the decision to strike Syria without Congress now, he said, would he get Congress when he really needed it?
To a large degree, much of Mr. Obama’s quandary is that he boxed himself in by setting a “red line” on the use of chemical weapons by Syria, a line he now feels obliged to enforce to preserve his credibility. But the path to this messy moment has been complicated by more than an ill-advised utterance on Syria. “He can’t make these decisions divorced from the American public and from Congress,” said a senior aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations. “Who knows what we’re going to face in the next three and a half years in the Middle East?”
Throughout his presidency, whether the goal was closing the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or backing the NATO air campaign in Libya, Mr. Obama has proved better at articulating legal principles than at managing the politics that could help him defend those principles. The Oval Office meeting ended one of the strangest weeks of the Obama White House, in which a president who had drawn a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons, and watched Syrian military forces breach it with horrific consequences, found himself compelled to act by his own statements. But Mr. Obama, who has been reluctant for the past two years to get entangled in Syria, had qualms from the start.
Syria has also laid bare a fundamental contradiction: a president who is a staunch defender of international law on issues like the use of chemical weapons but also a reluctant warrior who is desperate to pull the United States out of the morass of the Middle East. Even as he steeled himself for an attack this past week, two advisers said, he nurtured doubts about the political and legal justification for action, given that the United Nations Security Council had refused to bless a military strike that he had not put before Congress. A drumbeat of lawmakers demanding a vote added to the sense that he could be out on a limb.
That ambivalence has been palpable in Mr. Obama’s public statements on possible military action. While Secretary of State John Kerry has delivered a thunderous case against President Bashar al-Assad, his boss has been circumspect, sprinkling his words with caveats about the modest scale of the operation and acknowledgments of the nation’s combat fatigue. “I know well we are weary of war,” Mr. Obama said in the Rose Garden on Saturday. “We’ve ended one war in Iraq. We’re ending another in Afghanistan. And the American people have the good sense to know we cannot resolve the underlying conflict in Syria with our military.”
“We don’t have good options, great options, for the region,” the president said in an interview Wednesday on the PBS program “NewsHour,” before describing a “limited, tailored” military operation that he said would amount to a “shot across the bow” for Mr. Assad’s government. The speech, which crystallized both Mr. Obama’s outrage at the wanton use of chemical weapons and his ambivalence about military action, was a coda to a week that began last Saturday, when he convened a meeting of his National Security Council.
There are other reasons for his predicament, not least the legacy of the Iraq war, which contributed to the devastating vote against military force in the British Parliament. Then there is the intransigence of Syria’s big allies, Russia and China, which has precluded the endorsement of the United Nations Security Council, where both countries hold a veto. In that meeting, held in the White House Situation Room, Mr. Obama said that he was devastated by the images of women and children gasping and convulsing from the effects of a poison gas attack in the suburbs of Damascus three days before. The Aug. 21 attack, which American intelligence agencies say killed more than 1,400 people, was on a far different scale than earlier, smaller chemical weapons attacks in Syria, which were marked by murky, conflicting evidence.
But Mr. Obama himself has seemed torn. Having warned Mr. Assad in March that his use of chemical weapons would be a “game changer,” the president reacted to earlier, smaller-scale attacks by agreeing to supply arms to Syria’s rebels covertly, which meant the White House never openly discussed it. “I haven’t made a decision yet on military action,” he told his war council that Saturday, according to an aide. “But when I was talking about chemical weapons, this is what I was talking about.”
Some analysts say that Mr. Obama’s determination even now to divorce military action from broader engagement in Syria may have complicated his effort to rally international support. From that moment, the White House set about formulating the strongest case for military action it could.
“We’re telling people, we still don’t want to get involved, we just want to punish this guy,” said Vali R. Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The reason people aren’t lining up with us is that they don’t have trust in our policy.” On Sunday, it issued a statement dismissing the need to wait for United Nations investigators because their evidence, the statement said, had been corrupted by the relentless shelling of the sites. By Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who had long advocated a more aggressive policy on Syria, delivered a thunderous speech that President Bashar al-Assad was guilty of a “moral obscenity.”
At home, Mr. Obama has not felt political pressure to act. Recent polls show that a majority of Americans do not support military action against Syria, even if its government used chemical weapons. They are more closely divided if they are asked about a missile strike that would pose no risk to American lives. By midweek, administration officials were telling reporters that the administration would not be deterred by the lack of an imprimatur from the Security Council, where Syria’s biggest backer, Russia, held a veto.
When his national security staff begin debating how to respond to the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack, Mr. Obama set off on a bus tour of Pennsylvania and upstate New York, where he barely mentioned Syria but told an audience that law school should be shortened from three years to two. Yet Mr. Obama’s ambivalence was palpable, and public. While Mr. Kerry made his fiery case against Mr. Assad, the president was circumspect, sprinkling his words with caveats about the modest scale of the operation and acknowledgments of the nation’s combat fatigue.
With Congress, the president’s effort to sell the military strike has been weakened by the belief, particularly among rank-and-file members, that he did not adequately consult them before committing American forces to the Libya air campaign in 2011. “We don’t have good options, great options, for the region,” the president said in an interview Wednesday on the PBS “News Hour,” before describing a “limited, tailored” military operation that he said would amount to a “shot across the bow” for Mr. Assad.
Mr. Obama has been wrestling with how the United States should use its military might since the start of his presidency. White House aides were in the meantime nervously watching a drama across the Atlantic. They knew that Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempt to win the British Parliament’s authorization for action was in deep trouble, but the defeat on a preliminary motion by just 13 votes on Thursday was a jolt. Although aides said before the vote that Mr. Obama was prepared to launch a strike without waiting for a second British vote, scheduled for Tuesday, the lack of a British blessing removed another layer of legitimacy.
In 2009, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the president made a case for using force to avert episodes of mass atrocities, saying: “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That’s why all nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.” Mr. Obama was annoyed by what he saw as Mr. Cameron’s stumbles, reflecting a White House view that Mr. Cameron had mishandled the situation. Beyond that, Mr. Obama said little about his thinking at the time.
But two years later, having reluctantly backed the NATO campaign in Libya, Mr. Obama was quick to draw limits. It was only on Friday that he told them, they said, about how his doubts had grown after the vote: a verdict, Mr. Obama told his staff, which convinced him it was all the more important to get Congressional ratification. After all, he told them, “We similarly have a war-weary public.”
“We cannot prevent every injustice perpetrated by a regime against its people,” he said in a speech on the Middle East, “and we have learned from our experience in Iraq just how costly and difficult it is to impose regime change by force.” And if the British government was unable to persuade lawmakers of the legitimacy of its plan, shouldn’t he submit it to the same litmus test in Congress, even if he had not done so in the case of Libya?
Advisers to Mr. Obama say the difference between the Iraq war and the likely Syria operation is central to understanding him: one was a large-scale invasion aimed at ousting Saddam Hussein; the other would be a limited operation to enforce a violation of the international norm against the use of chemical weapons. Mr. Obama’s backing of a NATO air campaign against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 had left a sour taste among many in Congress, particularly rank-and-file members. More than 140 lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, had signed a letter demanding a vote on Syria.
“What’s missing in this discussion is that this is not something with a long timeline attached to it,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “The use of very limited military force to enforce U.S. security interests and global norms is a very different model than the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan.” Moving swiftly in Libya, aides said, was necessary to avert a slaughter of rebels in the eastern city of Benghazi. But that urgency did not exist in this case.
Mr. Obama’s legalistic approach has been evident in his comments in the last week. So, too, has been his steadfast conviction that broader military involvement would only make matters worse. Indeed, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Mr. Obama that the limited strike he had in mind would be just as effective “in three weeks as in three days,” one official said.
“The world has an obligation to make sure that we maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons,” he said Friday. On PBS, he talked about Syria’s “sectarian arguments that have spilled over into bloodshed and have escalated over the last couple of years” — an analysis that could have been applied, word for word, to Iraq. That comparison is never far from Mr. Obama’s mind, his advisers say, and for a politician who built his national career on his opposition to the Iraq war, it is a telling one. Beyond the questions of political legitimacy, aides said, Mr. Obama told them on Friday that he was troubled that authorizing another military action over the heads of Congress would contradict the spirit of his speech last spring, in which he attempted to chart a shift in the United States from the perennial war footing of the post-Sept. 11 era.
Given the intractable nature of the Syrian conflict and the deep-rooted suspicions in the Arab world about American motives, some former administration officials said that Mr. Obama’s limited intervention would inevitably create a new set of problems. All of these issues were on Mr. Obama’s mind when he invited his chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, for an early evening stroll on the south lawn of the White House. In the West Wing, an aide said, staff members hoped to get home early, recognizing they would spend the weekend in the office.
“If the scope of the attacks is too narrow,” said Steven Simon, who until this year was the senior director for the Middle East at the National Security Council, “Obama is going to end up with a gloating Assad. If it’s too sweeping, it’s going to raise questions about regime change and American ownership. How do you find the sweet spot?” Forty-five minutes later, shortly before 7 p.m., Mr. Obama summoned his senior staff to the Oval Office.
For that reason, officials expect Mr. Obama to follow his military action with a renewed diplomatic effort. The trouble is, the fracturing of Syria into warring, increasingly radical factions makes diplomacy even harder. “I have a pretty big idea I want to test with you guys,” he said to the group, which included Mr. McDonough and his deputy, Rob Nabors; the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, and her two deputies, Antony Blinken and Benjamin J. Rhodes; his senior adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, and several legal experts to discuss the War Powers Resolution.
For those who argued that Mr. Obama should have done more to support the rebels a year ago, his quandary seems sadly inevitable. The resistance from the group was immediate. The political team worried that Mr. Obama could lose the vote, as Mr. Cameron did, and that it could complicate the White House’s other legislative priorities. The national security team argued that international support for an operation was unlikely to improve.
“What was eminently predictable has come to pass,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning at the State Department and the incoming president of the New America Foundation. “Because of the way it’s evolved, it is an incredibly complicated problem.” At 9 p.m., the president drew the debate to a close and telephoned Mr. Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to tell them of his plans.

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.