White House sends Congress draft Syria resolution
The resolution authorizes President Barack Obama to use military force against Syria.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House has sent Congress a draft of a resolution authorizing President Barack Obama to use military force against Syria.
The draft follows through on Obama s decision, announced Saturday, to seek congressional approval for a strike against Syrian President Bashar Assad s regime.
The resolution lays out the administration s claim that Assad s regime killed more than 1,000 people in an Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack. It says the objective of a U.S. military response would be to "deter, disrupt, prevent and degrade" the regime s ability to use chemical weapons.
The resolution authorizes Obama to use the military as he determines "necessary and appropriate" to serve that goal.
The draft doesn t lay out a timeline for action. But it does say only a political settlement can resolve the Syrian crisis.
Earlier, in a statement issued from White House, President Barack Obama said that ten days ago, the world watched in horror as men, women and children were massacred in Syria in the worst chemical weapons attack of the 21st century. Yesterday the United States presented a powerful case that the Syrian government was responsible for this attack on its own people.
Our intelligence shows the Assad regime and its forces preparing to use chemical weapons, launching rockets in the highly populated suburbs of Damascus, and acknowledging that a chemical weapons attack took place. And all of this corroborates what the world can plainly see hospitals overflowing with victims; terrible images of the dead. All told, well over 1,000 people were murdered. Several hundred of them were children young girls and boys gassed to death by their own government.
This attack is an assault on human dignity. It also presents a serious danger to our national security. It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm.
In a world with many dangers, this menace must be confronted.
Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. Instead, our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope. But I m confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out.
