The Boston Herald September 08, 2013

Allies: Stall strike on Syria

By Antonio Planas

European allies yesterday urged President Obama to put the brakes on military action against Syria until United Nations inspectors release findings on a chemical weapons attack, but a national security expert said the U.N. report won’t bolster the president’s position that a strike against the Assad regime is warranted.

“They’re going to report what happened, not who did it,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. “It’s entirely plausible that their reports will be less definitive from the reports we’ve seen from American, British and French intelligence. ... It certainly won’t help his (Obama’s) case.”

Pike said the report will have too many unknowns, including who was behind the chemical attacks in late August that killed more than 1,400 people and hundreds of children. The Obama administration said Syrian President Bashar Assad was responsible for the attacks, and European Union ministers yesterday agreed that evidence seems to point to the Assad regime. But they stopped short of saying what kind of response they would back.

It was not clear when the United Nations would release its findings.

With tepid support in Congress, Obama continued making calls to lawmakers, as he had done on Friday, to explain his position. The lobbying will culminate Tuesday when Obama, during a prime-time address, will make his case to the nation for a military strike against Syria. The Senate is expected to vote Wednesday and a House vote is likely the week of Sept. 16.

Cedric Leighton, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and former National Security Agency’s deputy director for training, said Obama should have intervened in Syria years ago. Syrians have been fighting a civil war for more than two years, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths.

“When the death toll was about 2,000, that’s when alarms should have been going off,” Leighton said. “Once you start getting into thousands of deaths, it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.”

Meanwhile, yesterday in Boston, for the second Saturday in a row, about 40 protesters gathered outside the Park Street MBTA station, chanting “Hands Off Syria!”

“There’s nothing that’s going to be improved by bombing as a way of punishing a president,” said Susan McLucas, 64, of Somerville. “We should just stay out.”