On Syria, A Drumbeat With Some Echoes Of Iraq - NYT

[WillyT]

On Syria, a Drumbeat With Some Echoes of Iraq
By MARK LANDLER - NYT
August 28, 2013

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Such an elaborate campaign is not necessary in this case, administration officials argued, because the evidence is already overwhelming and the scope of the proposed response is more limited. Still, the White House faces an American public considerably more skeptical about intervention in Syria than it was about Iraq. The feverish atmosphere of the years after the Sept. 11 attacks has given way to a country exhausted after more than a decade of war.

Mr. Bush obtained strong Congressional backing for the war in Iraq, but now even the Republican Party is split between hawks like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who advocates forceful intervention, and neo-isolationists like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who argues that the United States has no business getting entangled in the Middle East. At this point the bulk of Republican members of Congress are skeptical of taking military action.

On Tuesday, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Ed Royce of California, put the White House on notice that it needed to make a persuasive case for war this time. “Any U.S. military action could bring serious consequences or further escalation,” Mr. Royce said in a statement. “The president should be making the case to the American public, and his administration should come to Congress to explain their plans.”

In the coming days, administration officials said, they will present intelligence that they say reinforces the documentary evidence that the Syrian government carried out the attack. The material is likely to include intercepted radio communications of Syrian commanders — much as General Powell played intercepts of exchanges between Iraqi officials at the United Nations.

Syria, weapons inspectors said, is more skilled at covering its tracks than Iraq was. Olli Heinonen, a former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, recalled his frustrated efforts to investigate whether Syria had developed a nuclear reactor — destroyed by Israel in an airstrike in 2007 — with technology supplied by North Korea. Thwarted at every step by the Syrian authorities, Mr. Heinonen said the agency never uncovered a smoking gun that linked North Korea to the facility. But he said the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. “When you put all those pieces of the puzzle together,” he said, “it was just consistent.”

As Mr. Obama makes his case over the coming days, he is likely to fall back on a similar argument.

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More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/world/middleeast/on-syria-a-drumbeat-with-some-echoes-of-iraq.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&pagewanted=print

[leftstreet]

1. DURec

[BlueMTexpat]

2. Ya think?

"Some" is much too tentative. This has nearly ALL the echoes of Iraq - and most of the noise is coming from the same warmongers as it did then.

[Hydra]

3. Deja Moo

In attempting to push a Republican war plan, the Republicans will fight the President.

Shades of Romneycare + Colin Powell at the UN?

[bvar22]

4. No Deja Vu here.

NEVER heard anything like this before!


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