“While
most top congressional leaders have vowed to back President Barack
Obama in seeking authority to launch missile strikes, there’s little
evidence that they can — or even want to — help him round up the
rank-and file-Republicans he’ll need to win a vote in the House,”
reports Politico.com,.
Speaker
John Boehner’s spokesman said that he “expects the White House to
provide answers to members’ questions and take the lead on any whipping
effort.” Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), whose aides and allies
run the whip process, isn’t yet in favor of Obama’s request for
military authority in Syria. Several lawmakers and aides who have been
canvassing support say that nearly 80 percent of the House Republican
Conference is, to some degree, opposed to launching strikes in Syria.
Informal counts by Obama allies show that support in Congress for
Obama’s plans is in the low dozens.
This is hardly surprising
since the Republicans gain little by supporting Obama, irrespective of
their opinions on the wisdom of military action. If the strikes are
successful, Obama will receive all the glory. But if the strikes turn
into a military nightmare, they will share in the blame, and will have
to answer to the unhappy Republican voters in their local districts.
Better to find reasons — and there are many — to block the resolution,
and leave Obama to act alone if he must.
Two,
the ghosts of Iraq. The debacle may have not prevented the Obama
administration from doubling down in Afghanistan or striking Libya, but
it has left behind an electoral legacy in the United States. No
politician wants another “Iraq vote” on his record. The 2002
congressional vote to authorise military action in Iraq turned into a
political albatross for members of Congress and presidential hopefuls,
who were forced to justify their support for George Bush’s greatest act
of hubris. A reason perhaps why the two potential Republican
presidential hopefuls, Rand Paul and Marc Rubio, voted against the
recent Senate committee resolution.
“That vote has haunted several Senators for years, and many have said they wish they would have voted differently,”
notes MSNBC.com. And the specter of Iraq looms larger than ever with the 2014 midterm elections round the corner.
USA Today reports:
Whatever
the outcome of the vote, Syria could be an issue in key Senate races
next year, when Republicans hope to wrest six seats away from Democrats
and take control of the chamber. “If (a war in Syria) gets complicated,
then it could become a problem for everybody,” says Jennifer Duffy of
the Cook Political Report.
The picture in the House of Representatives — where all seats are up for grabs next year —
is bleaker still:
That
opposition is evident throughout the ranks of the Democratic and
Republican caucuses — and among their constituents — who haven’t yet,
and may never, draw the conclusion that the horror of Assad using
chemical weapons is a matter of urgent U.S. national security. Rep. Andy
Harris (R-Md.) tweeted Tuesday that “constituents who have contacted my
office by phone or mail oppose action in Syria 523-4 so far.” Rep.
Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who is libertarian, said on Twitter that four of
about 200 constituents he encountered support action in Syria.
As
Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told Xinhua, “If you’re not sure
which way your political future is going, the ‘no’ vote is the safe
one.”
Three, John Kerry. “[A]t this
point, the overwhelming narrative is that authorizing military action
in Syria will be one of the toughest sells of Obama’s time in the White
House,”
notes Politico And the White House has chosen precisely the wrong salesman to make their case.
“Our intelligence community has carefully reviewed and re-reviewed information regarding this attack,” Kerry said in
an address
to the State Department. “And I will tell you it has done so more than
mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment.” But he
didn’t point out the other big difference between making the case for
Syria versus Iraq: Colin Powell.
Kerry possesses neither the
gravitas nor the credibility of a Powell thanks to his unfortunate
record on the electoral stump as a presidential candidate in the 2004
elections. In one of his more infamous moments of equivocation, he
scrambled to explain his vote for an $87 billion supplemental
appropriation for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, sayingq
“I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.”
Kerry’s
own fumbling alongwith the vicious Swift Boat attacks helped the Bush
campaign to successfully paint the Democrat as an unreliable
flip-flopper. His word may carry some weight with his fellow Senators,
but will hold little water with their voters — who, as poll numbers
consistently show, remain far from persuaded of the wisdom of yet
another military intervention.
Four, permission to do, um, what? Kerry’s penchant for self-goals was evident in
his testimony
in front of the Senate Foreign Relations committee where he managed to
flip-flop on exactly what kind of action the Congress was authorising.
First he demanded a broad resolution that would permit the White House
to do pretty much anything, including putting boots on the ground:
In
the event Syria imploded, for instance, or in the event there was a
threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of al-Nusra or
someone else, and it was clearly in the interests of our allies and all
of us — the British, the French and others — to prevent those weapons
of mass destruction falling into the hands of the worst elements, 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.
Faced with a series of anxious follow-ups from committee members, he retreated in haste, saying:
This
authorization does not contemplate and should not have any allowance
for any troop on the ground. I just want to make that absolutely clear.
You know, what I was doing was hypothesizing about a potential; it might
occur at some point in time, but not in this authorization, in no way,
be crystal clear. There’s no problem in our having the language that has
zero capacity for American troops on the ground within the
authorization the president is asking for.
Right. Confusion
reigns over what the Obama administration intends to do, and how far it
is willing to go to do so. It is one reason the President has failed
entirely to persuade the American people. The ambivalence — and
resultant skittishness — will only increase as various factions in
Congress pitch in with their versions of the resolution.
Five, Obama the unhappy warrior. He incautiously drew that red line in the sand, and now has to put his
arsenal
where his mouth was back in August, 2012, when he promised “enormous
consequences” if Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons. Obama did
his best to ignore small-scale chemical attacks for a year until
ghastly
video footage of dead babies
left him with little face-saving choice. Syria’s defiance has now been
framed as “a defining test,” as Time magazine puts it, of America’s
reputation and might.
But as the same cover story makes clear,
this US President has little appetite for intervention in the Middle
East, having laid low through the Arab Spring, and struck against Libya
only when European allies stepped forward. Above all, Obama is a man of
great caution, a quality that is both his great weakness and virtue. The
decision to seek a congressional vote — “overriding all his top
national security advisers” — is likely motivated by a desire to avoid
being rushed headlong into battle. As
Amy Davidson writes in the New Yorker:
This
may be the first sensible step that Obama has taken in the Syrian
crisis, and may prove to be one of the better ones of his
Presidency—even if he loses the vote, as could happen. Politically, he
may have just saved his second term from being consumed by Benghazi-like
recriminations and spared himself Congressional mendacity about what
they all might have done. It will likely divide the G.O.P. Although he
said that he didn’t really, truly need to ask Congress for permission,
he is doing so. Presidents—including Obama, in his decision to ignore
the War Powers Act in Libya despite its clear application—have abandoned
even the pretense that they need to seek Congressional approval.
However,
a president who seeks approval when he doesn’t need it is unlikely to
ignore the outcome of Congressional vote. When he loses in Congress — as
he likely will — Obama will have take it on the jaw, as the price of
being “the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy,” as
he describes it.
If Congress is loath to make history as being
the first to deny a sitting president the authority to wage war, the
resultant brouhaha will end instead in a whimper, as in a one-time
authorisation for a single strike that will achieve little, either in
symbolic or military terms. And that may constitute a greater defeat for
Obama, who will spend the rest of the term as a lame-duck president
both abroad and at home.
Read more at:
5 reasons why the us wont go to war with syria
