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France Urges ‘Force’ in Syria if Chemical Attacks Are Confirmed Obama Officials Weigh Response to Syria Assault
(about 5 hours later)
PARIS — As Western powers pressed Syria to allow United Nations inspectors to examine the site of a possible poison gas attack outside the capital, Damascus, France said on Thursday that outside powers should respond “with force” if the use of chemical weapons was confirmed. WASHINGTON — The day after a deadly assault in Syria that bore many of the hallmarks of a chemical weapons attack, a sharply divided Obama administration on Thursday began weighing potential military responses to President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
At the same time, Israel said its intelligence assessments pointed to the use of chemical weapons. Senior officials from the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies met for three and a half hours at the White House on Thursday to deliberate over options, which officials say could range from a cruise missile strike to a more sustained air campaign against Syria.
“According to our intelligence assessments, there was use of chemical weapons,” the Israeli minister of strategic and intelligence affairs and international relations, Yuval Steinitz, told Israel Radio, “and this of course was not for the first time.” The meeting broke up without any decision, according to senior officials, amid signs of a deepening division between those who advocate sending Mr. Assad a harsh message and those who argue that military action now would be reckless and ill timed.
Mr. Steinitz did not specifically accuse the government of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, of using chemical weapons on Wednesday, but in the past Israel has frequently accused pro-Assad forces of using weapons from their large stockpiles of such munitions. Similar debates played out across the Atlantic. France backed the use of force to counter such an attack, and Turkey and Israel expressed outrage. But diplomats in several countries conceded there was no stomach among the Western allies, including the United States, for long-term involvement in a messy, sectarian civil war.
In April, Israel’s senior military intelligence analyst, Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, told participants at a security conference in Tel Aviv that the Syrian government had “increasingly used chemical weapons.” General Brun said, “The very fact that they have used chemical weapons without any appropriate reaction is a very worrying development, because it might signal that this is legitimate.” While the Obama administration said it would wait for the findings of a United Nations investigation of the attack, American officials spoke in strikingly tougher terms about what might happen if President Obama were to determine that chemical weapons were used.
In an interview with BFM-TV, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, expressly ruled out the idea of ground forces’ intervening in Syria’s bloody civil war, now in its third year with more than 100,000 fatalities. “If these reports are true, it would be an outrageous and flagrant use of chemical weapons by the regime,” the State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said. “The president, of course, has a range of options that we’ve talked about before that he can certainly consider.”
“There would have to be reaction with force in Syria from the international community,” Mr. Fabius said, but “there is no question of sending troops on the ground.” The United States first confirmed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons early this year, and Obama administration officials responded by signaling they would supply the rebels with weapons. But to date, none have arrived.
He gave no further details of what he had in mind. During the Libyan revolt that overthrew Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, France, then led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, joined with Britain in an air campaign that drew on strong support from the United States and other NATO allies. Among American officials, there was a growing belief that chemical weapons had been used in the latest attack, early Wednesday east of Damascus — potentially the worst of its kind since Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s — and little doubt that anyone but Mr. Assad’s forces would have used them.
The Obama administration has shown little appetite for comparable intervention in Syria. Indeed, America’s top military officer has told Congress that while the Pentagon could forcefully intervene in Syria to tip the balance in the civil war, there are no moderate rebel groups ready to fill a power vacuum. But given how difficult it was last time to prove the use of chemical weapons, administration officials offered no timetable for how long it might take this time, raising questions about how promptly the United States could act.
“Syria today is not about choosing between two sides, but rather about choosing one among many sides,” wrote Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in response to a congressman who asked for a detailed analysis of potential, but limited, options for punishing Mr. Assad’s government in Syria. “It is my belief that the side we choose must be ready to promote their interests and ours when the balance shifts in their favor. Today, they are not.” Israel said its intelligence strongly suggested a chemical weapons attack, while the Syrian opposition pointed to evidence, including the use of four rockets and the locations from which they were fired, which members of the opposition said proved that the attack could have been carried out only by the government’s forces.
In Paris, Mr. Fabius’s remarks were made a day after diplomatic moves at the United Nations Security Council in New York produced a limited response to the claims by opposition forces on Wednesday. Their charges that scores if not hundreds of people had perished in the attack were supported by copious, if unverified, video images. An opposition official described an assault that began shortly after 2 a.m., when the rockets, which they said were equipped with chemical weapons, were launched. Two were fired from a bridge on the highway from Damascus to Homs; the others were launched from a Sironex factory in the Qabun neighborhood of the Syrian capital. The Assad government has denied involvement, and Russians have accused the rebels of staging the attack.
In an emergency session, the Security Council called for a prompt investigation of the allegations and a cease-fire in the conflict, but it took no further action. Mr. Fabius said that if the Security Council could not reach a decision, then action would have to be taken “in other ways,” which he did not identify. The rebels said the government’s presumed goal was to soften up the opposition before a major conventional attack with tanks, armored personnel carriers and attack planes. On Thursday, fighting persisted in the area, raising doubts about the ability of the United Nations to send investigators to collect samples from the wounded and dead.
Throughout the Syrian crisis, France has taken a lead among Western nations in supporting the Syrian rebels, and its government was the first in the West to fully embrace a coalition of rebel forces last November. Among the options discussed at the White House, officials said, was a cruise missile strike, which would probably involve Tomahawks launched from a ship in the Mediterranean Sea, where the United States has two destroyers deployed.
The allegations of a gas attack were particularly jarring because a team sent by the United Nations is already in Damascus to investigate chemical strikes reportedly waged earlier in the war. The United States, the European Union and other world powers called for the investigators to visit the site of Wednesday’s attack, which news reports said took place only a 15-minute drive from the inspectors’ hotel. The Pentagon also has combat aircraft — fighters and bombers — deployed in the Middle East and in Europe that could be used in an air campaign against Syria. The warplanes could be sent aloft with munitions to be launched from far outside Syrian territory, which is protected by a respectable air defense system.
The Security Council’s caution provoked a harsh outburst on Thursday from Turkey, a bitter foe of Mr. Assad’s government, which shares a long and porous border with Syria and has been at the forefront of efforts to support the rebels trying to overthrow him. The targets could include missile or artillery batteries that launch chemical munitions or nerve gas, as well as communications and support facilities. Symbols of the Assad government’s power — headquarters and government offices — also could be among the proposed targets, officials said.
Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey said Thursday: “All red lines have been crossed, but still the U.N. Security Council has not even been able to take a decision. This is a responsibility for the sides who still set these red lines and for all of us.” As leaders digested the harrowing images from Syria of victims gasping for breath or trembling, there was a flurry of phone calls among diplomats expressing horror at the calamitous situation in Syria and frustration at the lack of an obvious response.
If outsiders do not act, he said, they will lose the power to deter future attacks. “They are all bad choices,” said a European diplomat who asked not to be named because of the delicacy of the situation.
The notion of “red lines” was initially introduced last August by President Obama, who said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would radically alter American calculations about the war. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Ahmad al-Jarba, the president of the Syrian opposition. Mr. Kerry expressed his condolences and the Obama administration’s “commitment to looking into what has happened on the ground,” Ms. Psaki said.
At the time, Mr. Obama declared that the use or deployment of chemical or biological weapons would “change my calculus” and “change my equation.” Mr. Kerry also spoke to Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister of France, who raised the prospect of military action. He called Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu; several Arab foreign ministers; the European Union’s senior foreign policy official, Catherine Ashton; and the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon.
Speaking at a joint news conference with Mr. Davutoglu on Thursday, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle of Germany urged the authorities to give United Nations inspectors immediate access to the area where the attack was reported. “We are very worried about the reports that poison gas has been used near Damascus,” he said. “These reports are very serious and if they are confirmed would be outrageous.” At home, however, officials said the administration remained divided about how to proceed. “There’s a split between those who feel we need to act now and those who feel that now is a very bad time to act,” said one senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s internal deliberations.
At the United Nations on Thursday, a spokesman for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he had asked his top arms control official, Angela Kane, the high representative for disarmament affairs, to visit Damascus as part of an effort to secure the Syrian government’s permission for the U.N. investigative team currently in the country to visit the attack site. The official did not give details about who pushed for a hawkish response to the attack and who urged caution, but he said that some at the White House meeting raised worries that it would take time to build international support for a military response, and that any strikes against Mr. Assad’s government might worsen a refugee crisis that has already placed great strain on Syria’s neighbors.
“The Secretary-General believes that the incidents reported yesterday need to be investigated without delay,” the spokesman, Eduardo del Buey, said. Neither the United States nor European countries yet have a “smoking gun” to prove that Mr. Assad’s troops used chemical weapons in the attack, the official said. But he said intelligence agencies had amassed circumstantial evidence that some kind of chemical had been used — not the least of which was the hundreds of casualties.

Alissa J. Rubin reported from Paris, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Victor Homola from Berlin and Rick Gladstone from New York.

“The sheer number of bodies is one pretty good indicator,” he said.
Two officials with the Syrian opposition said that none of the weapons American officials said would be provided by the Central Intelligence Agency had yet been delivered.
Mohammad Salaheddine, a Syrian reporter for Al Aan Television, an Arab satellite television station, painted a bleak picture of the situation in East Ghouta, the area near Damascus that was the site of the reported chemical attack.
Mr. Salaheddine was reached by Skype on Thursday with the help of the Syrian Support Group, an American-based organization that supports the opposition to Mr. Assad.
He asserted that more than 1,500 people had been killed by the chemical attack and that many more had been wounded. The area, he said, was cut off by the fighting, making it hard for opposition members to smuggle hair, urine and blood samples out for analysis.
Senior military officials, in particular Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have cited the risks and costs of large-scale military intervention, as has been urged by some members of Congress.
Yet the greater political risk now might be to Mr. Obama’s credibility, analysts said, given that he laid down a red line last summer to prevent Mr. Assad from using chemical weapons again.
“Assuming that there was a large-scale chemical attack, it indicates that the regime has not been deterred by the statements coming out of Washington,” said Jeffrey White, a former Middle East analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Mark Landler and Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Paris. Michael R. Gordon and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.