Anti-War Sentiment Remains Strong

As time moves on and we get closer to a vote in Congress on an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) Obama and his war cabinet are running up against two major impediments to an attack on Syria. First, public opinion is dead set against the folly of another military campaign. Charles Blow, a staunch Obama liberal, in an opinion piece this morning, "The Era of Disbelief," traces the post-9/11 history that has delivered the electorate's current anti-war "hive mind." It is backed up by a Jeremy Peters story, "Obama Faces Barrier in His Own Party on Syria," that captures the absence of any solid bloc of support in the Democratic caucus for Obama's warmongering. Elijah Cummings, former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and current member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says Obama's got more work to do in convincing the public.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, who represents a district that includes parts of Baltimore and has not decided how he stands on attacking Syria, said the pressure from his constituents to oppose the president’s plan is unmistakable. When he visited a grocery store on Wednesday, he said, almost a dozen people told him they thought intervening in Syria was a bad idea. None of them expressed support. 

“If you’ve got 95 percent of them saying one thing, it becomes far more difficult to go against them,” he said, adding that the president needed to make a more forceful and convincing case to the public if he wanted Congressional consent for an attack. “As a good friend of his and someone who supports him, I think he’s got to help the Congress help him.”

Which brings us to the second major impediment to a rush to war: the press is starting to do its job. If the administration's bum rush, which began this past Sunday with Secretary of State John Kerry's appearance on cable news and has been going non-stop backed by a steady stream of support from allied intelligence services, has yet to make a dent in anti-war sentiment then it is unlikely, given a growing skepticism in certain segments of the fourth estate for some of Kerry's pronouncements, that any new revelations of Syrian regime barbarity will make a difference. As an example of the press beginning to examine some of the incongruities of Obama administration's case against the Assad government, see Colum Lynch's "U.S. dismisses U.N. inspections in Syria of alleged chemical weapons sites":

Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. inspector who headed the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, said he finds it “ironic” that the Obama administration finds itself on similar ground as the Bush administration, which also decided to bypass the work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq. 

“It’s odd that they are dismissing the United Nations,” he said. 

“By going through the U.N., you subject yourself to the vagaries of that schedule,” Duelfer said. “Certainly it will take time for inspectors to develop results of the analysis of these samples. But the utility of that is it is seen as credible in the international community.” 

Duelfer acknowledged that it’s possible that U.N. inspections could provide a muddy picture of what happened in Syria. Some of the evidence, according to diplomatic officials, may point to exposure of Syrian security forces — Russia and Syria could claim that it proves rebel forces used chemical weapons, but British, French and American officials could contend that it was the result of misfired rockets hitting the government’s own troops. 

Still, Duelfer disputed the U.S. contention that it is too late to collect credible evidence. The science of inspections, he said, has advanced so that traces of chemical weapons agents can be obtained years after an attack.

Then there is today's story by C.J. Chivers, "Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West," which directly addresses the lie told by Kerry in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing the other day that the moderate elements of the opposition are on the rise. Hopefully Chivers' piece will get some play on the big search engine news pages.

The warhawks backed by their cheerleaders in the media waxed mightily the last three-four days. Things started to shift yesterday thanks to stubborn anti-war sentiment in the United States. With Obama likely to take a drubbing at the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg, support for the administration's warmongering will continue to wane. Keep a skeptical watch out for breaking news of incendiary claims as the warhawks realize that they don't have the votes in the House for the AUMF.