As U.N. inspectors head into the Damascus suburbs on Monday to examine the site of a reported mass chemical attack, some rare alliances - and rifts - are breeding among members of Congress split by thousands of miles, still two weeks out of their return from summer recess.
"I hope the president, as soon as we get back to Washington, will ask for authorization from Congress to do something in a very surgical and proportional way," Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. - ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - said over the weekend on "Fox News Sunday." "Something that gets their attention, that causes them to understand that we are not going to put up with this kind of activity."
Democratic New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on the same program agreed, but warned that lawmakers' return to Washington on Sept. 9 might not be soon enough: "We have to move, and we have to move quickly," he said. Engel suggested President Obama act sooner rather than later to okay missile strikes that could take out Syrian President Bashar Assad's chemical weapons stockpiles and operating bases.
"We could wipe out the Syrian air force if we wanted to" with surgical air strikes, Engel continued.
A senior White House official said Sunday there was "very little doubt" Assad's regime used a chemical weapon against civilians in an Aug. 21 incident that killed at least 100 people, but added the president hadn't yet determined how to proceed.
It's an issue with no clear partisan breaks, defined vaguely in the Capitol Hill community by hawks versus wait-and-see advocates. On one side: Corker and Engel, rallying to protect U.S. interests through military intervention in the region's raging civil war. On the other: Gen. Colin Powell, a former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee Jack Reed, D-R.I., and, to a lesser extent, Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, pleading to wait out the probe into the chemical weapons attack.
Gen. Powell on Egypt and Syria
Assad is a "pathological liar," Powell, who has dealt with the Syrian president in the past, said Sunday on "Face the Nation." But, he qualified, the rebels fighting against him might not be any better: "I have no affection for Mr. Assad," he said. "But at the same time, I am less sure of the resistance. What do they represent? And is it becoming even more radicalized with more al Qaeda coming in? And what would it look like if they prevailed and Assad went? I don't know."
Powell argued the United States should recognize the limits of its own ability to affect change abroad: "We can influence things and we can be ready to help people when problems have been resolved or one side has prevailed over the other, that's when I think we can play a role. But to think that we can change things immediately just because we're America - that's not necessarily the case.
"These are internal struggles and the parties inside those countries are going to have to sort it out amongst themselves," Powell continued.
Reed agreed later on the show that the raging violence is a "regional conflict," transcending boundaries "into Lebanon with Hezbollah." That's why, he said, "this has to be an international operation; it can't be a unilateral American approach." During a telephone meeting with French President Nicolas Hollande, Mr. Obama "discussed possible responses by the international community and agreed to continue to consult closely," his office said Sunday.
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