Arab League Stance Muddies U.S. Case

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/world/middleeast/arab-league-rejects-attack-against-syria.html

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CAIRO — The leaders of the Arab world on Tuesday blamed the Syrian government for a chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds of people last week, but declined to back a retaliatory military strike, leaving President Obama without the broad regional support he had for his last military intervention in the Middle East, in Libya in 2011.

While the Obama administration has robust European backing and more muted Arab support for a strike on Syria, the position of the Arab League and the unlikelihood of securing authorization from the United Nations Security Council complicate the legal and diplomatic case for the White House.

The White House said Tuesday that there was “no doubt” that President Bashar al-Assad’s government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack — an assessment shared by Britain, France and other allies — but it has yet to make clear if it has any intelligence directly linking Mr. Assad to the attack. The administration said it planned to provide intelligence on the attack later this week.

As Mr. Obama sought to shore up international support for military action, telephoning Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, administration officials said they did not regard the lack of an imprimatur from the Security Council or the Arab League as insurmountable hurdles, given the carnage last week.

Administration officials said the United States did not seek an endorsement of military action from the Arab League. It sought condemnation of the use of chemical weapons and a clear assignment of responsibility for the attack to the Assad government, both of which the officials said they were satisfied they got.

The Obama administration has declined to spell out the legal justification that the president would use in ordering a strike, beyond saying that the large-scale use of chemical weapons violates international norms. But officials said he could draw on a range of treaties and statutes, from the Geneva Conventions to the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Mr. Obama, they said, could also cite the need to protect a vulnerable population, as his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, did in ordering NATO’s 78-day air campaign on Kosovo in 1999. Or he could invoke the “responsibility to protect” principle, cited by some officials to justify the American-led bombing campaign in Libya.

“There is no doubt here that chemical weapons were used on a massive scale on Aug. 21 outside of Damascus,” said the White House spokesman, Jay Carney. “There is also very little doubt, and should be no doubt for anyone who approaches this logically, that the Syrian regime is responsible for the use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21 outside of Damascus.”

A number of nations in Europe and the Middle East, along with several humanitarian organizations, have joined the United States in that assessment. But with the specter of the faulty intelligence assessments before the Iraq war still hanging over American decision making, and with polls showing that only a small fraction of the American public supports military intervention in Syria, some officials in Washington said there needs to be some kind of a public presentation making the case for war.

A statement by the Arab League on Tuesday adds to the uncertainty, underscoring the complexity of the regional landscape, where years of turmoil have set off fierce sectarian fighting and a tidal wave of refugees and left many fearful that a United States strike would further inflame tensions.

Leaders of the Arab world are deeply divided over a potential Western airstrike against Syria in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons, caught between deep public hostility to any kind of intervention and a tangle of shifting rivalries and allegiances.

The vast majority of Arabs are emotionally opposed to any Western military action in the region no matter how humanitarian the cause, and no Arab nation or leader has publicly endorsed such a step, even in countries like the Persian Gulf monarchies whose diplomats for months have privately urged the West to step in. In the region, only Turkey has pledged to support intervention.

Behind the scenes at least two closely allied Arab heavyweights, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, may be split over which enemy poses the greater immediate threat to their regional interests: the Sunni Islamists who dominate the Syrian rebels, or the Shiite Iranian backers of Mr. Assad.

The Arab League, a regional diplomatic forum that has already expelled Mr. Assad’s government, said in its statement that it holds “the Syrian regime responsible for this heinous crime,” but the statement also appeared to suggest that the specific “perpetrators” were not yet known and should be brought to international justice.

Stopping short of endorsing Western intervention, the league called on the United Nations Security Council to “overcome the disagreements between its members” so it could “take the necessary deterring measures against the perpetrators of this crime, whose responsibility falls on the Syrian regime,” and end other abuses that “the Syrian regime has been committing.”

Obama administration officials, who asked not to be identified because they were talking about behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts, asserted that they were satisfied with the Arab League statement.

“This was a big diplomatic step forward in laying the groundwork for actions the president might choose, and required days of aggressive diplomacy to avoid delay,” a senior administration official said Tuesday night.

“We know there’s a complicated dynamic inside the Arab League, including division over Egypt,” the official added. “But an unequivocal condemnation, unambiguous assignment of blame and unmistakable call for action to stop it from happening again was exactly what the doctor ordered.”

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry made intensive efforts to mobilize support from Arab officials. He spoke twice to Nabil el-Araby, the secretary general of the Arab League, and also spoke with his counterparts from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Outside the Arab world, Mr. Kerry spoke with the foreign ministers from Turkey and Britain; the secretary general of the United Nations and of NATO; and Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s senior foreign policy official.

The near-unanimous refusal to condone Western or even United Nations action publicly is a reflection of the unpopularity of such measures across the region, said Shibley Telhami, a scholar at the University of Maryland who studies Arab public opinion.

“Don’t expect anybody to thank the U.S., even if it is for humanitarian reasons,” he said. Polls show the vast majority of Arabs view any United States action as motivated by its own interest or Israel’s, no matter the context, perhaps because of the history of colonialism.

Even when the Western intervention in Libya appeared to be a triumph for its people, he said, polls showed that most Arabs considered it the wrong decision.

But while they will not say it publicly, several countries in the region have been working vigorously behind the scenes to topple the Assad government. For two years, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey have been shipping money and arms to rebels challenging Syrian troops. Neither Saudi Arabia nor any of the Sunni-dominated gulf states have publicly endorsed Western intervention. But all feel threatened by the regional rivalry with Iran, and all have privately urged the Western powers to intervene on behalf of the rebels, Western diplomats say.

In the Arab League meeting on Tuesday, Arab diplomats said, Saudi Arabia pushed for stronger language explicitly condemning Mr. Assad for launching the attack, which would have come closer to helping the Western powers justify military action.

But Egypt, still the most populous Arab state with the largest Arab military, disagreed, Arab diplomats said.

“It shows the schizophrenia of the Arab world,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, noting that gulf states and Jordan also appear to be working closely with the West on possible intervention while refusing to endorse it publicly.

But their silence created a potential problem for the United States and its European allies, he said, because it undermined the notion of a broad-based coalition with Arab support. “And every day that it goes on, opponents will try to exploit it,” he said.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Mark Landler from Washington. Michael R. Gordon and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington, and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.