WASHINGTON — A congressional defeat for President Obama’s Syrian strike would be “catastrophic,” his old foe, Sen. John McCain, warned yesterday.
Obama secured McCain’s support for military action against Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime as the administration prepared for a full-court press on Capitol Hill to win authorization.
“A rejection of this resolution would be catastrophic, not just for him but for the institution of the presidency and the credibility of the United States,” McCain (R-Ariz.) said after meeting at the White House yesterday with the man who defeated him in the 2008 presidential election.
Obama will roll out his big guns — Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey — when they plead the administration’s case this afternoon before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry will testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee tomorrow.
But McCain said there was “a long way to go” to get the Syrian resolution passed.
Aides said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) negotiated yesterday with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) on the text of a resolution, after some lawmakers balked, fearing the White House draft amounted to a blank check.
The unusual frenzy of activity on Labor Day came amid other developments in the Syrian crisis:
* Theaircraft carrier USS Nimitz and four other ships in its strike group moved into the Red Sea, hinting at a more robust action against Syria, as hawks like McCain have advocated.
* Kerry, Hagel, Dempsey and other top Obama officials briefed House Democrats in a 70-minute conference call that bared some of the dissent in Obama’s own party.
Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.) and Kerry ended up in a “heated exchange” when Nolan challenged the administration’s evidence that Assad used poison gas to kill 1,429 of his own people, Politico reported.
* The Wall Street Journal reported that although the White House authorized the CIA to provide arms to those fighting the Syrian regime in June, the rebels have still not received weapons.
* France issued its own intelligence report, saying that the Aug. 21 chemical attack “could only have been ordered and carried out by the regime.”
* Assad warned France it would become Syria’s “enemy” if it joined a US-led strike. “The Middle East is a powder keg, and the fuse is getting shorter,” Assad said.
* British military officers at US Central Command in Florida can no longer participate in classified briefings because they have been deemed “nonreliable” by the US military after the Brits ruled out an attack on Syria, according to press reports out of the UK.
* Russian media said President Vladimir Putin hopes to send a delegation of lawmakers to the US to lobby Congress against voting to authorize a military strike.
Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, raised the bizarre idea yesterday. “We would like to address the Senate and the Congress,” she said.
Putin, in an apparently staged Kremlin meeting, said, “The initiative is very timely and correct.”
Obama turned the focus of the crisis from Syria to Washington on Saturday, when he said that, although he supports a strike, he would not order military action unless Congress approves it.
Votes to authorize military action will likely be held next week, beginning with the Senate. Congress returns from its summer recess on Monday.
The administration appears to be intent on first nailing down support from conservatives, then relying on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and others to maximize support from Democrats.
The remarks by McCain, and fellow hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who joined him at the White House, appeared to be aimed at fellow Republicans.
Graham faces a challenge from the right in next year’s GOP Senate primary in South Carolina.
“I can’t sell another Iraq or Afghanistan, because I don’t want to,” he said. “[What] I can sell to the people of South Carolina [is] that if we don’t get Syria right, Iran is surely going to take the signals that we don’t care about [its]nuclear program.”
McCain hinted that Obama may be leaning toward more robust military action than the “limited” and “narrow” cruise-missile strike he spoke of last week
“We have been given some reason to believe that very serious strikes may take place as opposed to cosmetic,” McCain said.
“We now need to see a lot of the details.”
Graham said, “There seems to be emerging from this administration a pretty solid plan to upgrade the opposition.”
The situation in Syria remains bleak. A watchdog agency said nearly 90 rebels were killed near Damascus over the past 48 hours.
At least 29 of those died in an army ambush yesterday in Adra, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.