Obama Falls Short on Wider Backing for Syria Attack
Obama Discusses Syria at the G-20 Summit: In St. Petersburg, President Obama continued to hold his ground on Syria. He also said he intended to make his case in an address Tuesday to the American people.
By PETER BAKER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: September 6, 2013 675 Comments
STRELNA, Russia — President Obama raced home on Friday to confront one of the biggest tests of his presidency as he ramped up a campaign to persuade Congress to support airstrikes against Syria that many world leaders he had consulted declined to back.
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Abo Shuja/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A destroyed street in Deir al-Zour, in eastern Syria. President Obama and world leaders remain divided on the conflict.
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After two days of tense discussions, including a dinner debate that went into the morning hours, Mr. Obama left without forging an international consensus behind military action as other leaders urged him not to attack without United Nations permission. But he won agreement from some allies on blaming Syria's government for a chemical weapons attack and on endorsing an unspecified response.
The deep divisions on display here at the Group of 20 summit meeting raised the stakes even further for Mr. Obama as he seeks authorization from Congress for a "limited, proportional" attack. While aides said he never expected or sought a more explicit endorsement of military action during the meeting, the president hoped to use the statement from allies condemning Syria to leverage more domestic support, but he acknowledged that he had a "hard sell" and might fail to win over an American public that polls show still opposes a strike.
Mr. Obama wasted little time vaulting back into the domestic debate as he called members of Congress from both parties from Air Force One on his way back to Washington. He ordered aides to fan out in coming days with a series of speeches, briefings, telephone calls and television appearances to sway both Democrats and Republicans reluctant to get involved in yet another Middle East war. He also announced that he would address the nation from the White House on Tuesday evening to lay out his case before Congress votes.
"Failing to respond to this breach of this international norm would send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations that they can develop and use weapons of mass destruction and not pay a consequence," he said at a news conference in this St. Petersburg suburb.
The return to the Washington fray came after a tense overseas trip punctuated by an extraordinary showdown with the meeting's host, President Vladimir V. Putin, who not only opposes a strike, but also dismisses the notion that Syria's government gassed its own people.
During a long, late-night discussion about Syria, the two presidents effectively competed for the support of the other leaders, each man arguing his position and soliciting peers as if they were voters. At the end, Mr. Putin said a majority of the leaders joined him in opposing a military strike independent of the United Nations, including the leaders of China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Germany and South Africa.
"We hear each other and understand the arguments," Mr. Putin said. "We simply don't agree with them. I don't agree with his arguments and he doesn't agree with mine, but we hear and try to analyze."
The only members of the Group of 20 nations that supported Mr. Obama's plan, Mr. Putin said, were Canada, France, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all of which were on Mr. Obama's side when he arrived here on Thursday.
White House aides disputed Mr. Putin's tally, and Susan E. Rice, the president's national security adviser, negotiated a joint statement including those allies as well as Australia, Britain, Italy, Japan, Spain and South Korea. The statement condemned the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack near Syria's capital, Damascus, and held the government of President Bashar al-Assad responsible. According to American intelligence agencies, the attack killed more than 1,400 people.
"We call for a strong international response to this grave violation of the world's rules and conscience that will send a clear message that this kind of atrocity can never be repeated," the statement said. "Those who perpetrated these crimes must be held accountable."
The statement did not explicitly endorse military action, and some of the signers, like Italy, have warned against an American strike. But Obama administration officials argued that those that signed understood they were backing the United States as it was preparing for military retaliation, and therefore effectively embracing it.
Before returning to Washington, Mr. Obama acknowledged facing a difficult task to persuade Congress. "I knew this was going to be a heavy lift," he said. "I was under no illusions when I embarked on this path. But I think it's the right thing to do. I think it's good for our democracy. We will be more effective if we are unified going forward."
The Syria dispute came to dominate the Group of 20 meeting, ostensibly focused mainly on economic matters, and underscored the difficulty Mr. Obama has faced with Mr. Putin in recent months. After Russia gave temporary asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who disclosed secret American surveillance programs, Mr. Obama canceled a separate one-on-one meeting with Mr. Putin in Moscow.
But Mr. Putin approached the American president after a plenary session and began chatting casually, at which point Mr. Obama suggested they sit down. They talked for more than 20 minutes, mainly about Syria, as other world leaders looked on. Mr. Obama said Mr. Snowden's case did not really come up. "It was a candid and constructive conversation, which characterizes my relationship with him," Mr. Obama said.
For his part, Mr. Putin said the two leaders agreed to disagree.
He added that they did agree that Syria ultimately needed a political settlement, and that they delegated the matter to Russia's foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Secretary of State John Kerry. In May, the two officials announced an effort to begin negotiations for a settlement in Syria, to be held in Geneva, but that effort has since stalled and now seems further away than ever.
The strongest support for Mr. Obama continued to come from President François Hollande of France. But even Mr. Hollande has been under pressure in France to seek the widest possible approval at home and abroad before participating in military action, and on Friday he announced that France would await the findings of United Nations inspectors who visited the site of the Aug. 21 attack.
"We're now going to wait for the decision by Congress," Mr. Hollande said, "then the inspectors' report."
Mr. Hollande offered no explanation for his decision to await the United Nations findings, the timing of which remain uncertain, but French lawmakers have in recent days increasingly called for him to do so. White House aides said such a position was in keeping with theirs since the Congressional debate now effectively means there will be time for the inspectors' report before any strike.
Even as Mr. Putin ardently argued against an American-led intervention, Russia's navy continued preparations in the event of an attack. It has already dispatched at least four warships to the Mediterranean Sea, including three that passed through the Bosporus on Thursday.
Mr. Putin's chief of staff, Sergei B. Ivanov, told reporters that the landing vessels were being sent in case it was necessary to evacuate Russian citizens from Syria.
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