Peace Prize President Punishes Poorly, Putridly -- Syria

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

 

 

 

You can tell we are in insane territory when Fox News and people like Rand Paul make more sense than any other corporate media.  Some Libertarians take their cue from the crazed Ayn Rand and even mention her as an inspiration, until they find out that she was an atheist and then suddenly her name disappears.

 

Of course, we have to respect POTUS’s new method of reasoning.  He has been mentioning “my calculus” quite often without telling what that means.  Integral or Differential?  Leibnitz or Newton?  Or later revision that allowed for the fact that an infinite number of nothings equaled either nothing or infinity, but not 2.18 or whatever.  Lest we deter further reading, we proceed.

 

No, not yet.  POTUS made these remarks in Sweden at a synagogue to celebrate the start of the Jüdisje New Year with the Prime Minister of Sweden as his companion on the stage and, as you know, “companion” in the Aramaic should be translated as “spouse,” and if you don’t believe that, just read John Milton’s Doctirine and Discipline of Divorce and John Milton knew everything there was to know at that time and if you don’t believe that I don’t care and I’m not going to stop because I’m not getting paid a cent for this and nobody’s gonna stop me you motherfuckers, got that?  Yeah?  Well, ok.  Now:

 

In the presentation for attacking Syria, John Kerry indicated to the Senate committee that he did not want “boots on the ground,” so they attempted then to rule them out.  He immediately said not to take them off the table.  So, in effect, our administration is calling for boots on the table, something any mother would immediately take issue with.

 

He was then asked if the administration would abide by the decision of congress, and he said no.  Paul correctly pointed out that this made the entire process political “theater.”

 

Another issue was raised, that of people not having all the facts.  This is precisely what the anti-Viet-Nam protestors were accused of.  They didn’t have all the facts; otherwise they’d support the effort.  Now, five or six decades later, the facts are still not available.   The only fact available is that the escalation was planned after the death of JFK and before the election of LBJ (the peace candidate).

 

Even congress is now aware that al-Quaeda groups are at work in Syria against the legitimate government (Assad).  Still, the drumbeat goes on.

 

It is quite clear that the poison gas came from the opposition, but Kerry clearly maintained that we would know they were used by Assad (if we had the facts, which are a secret, don’t you know).   The number dead is strangely precise as well, in all cases.  Why use poison gas when you have your enemy surrounded?

 

Well, not to bother with more of this, here are some interviews that make the case pretty clear:

 

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2013

As U.S. Pushes For Syria Strike, Questions Loom over Obama Claims in Chemical Attack

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing on Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted the administration has irrefutable evidence showing the Assad regime was responsible for the deadly chemical attack in late August. But questions remain over key parts of the administration’s case for military action. To explore these issues, we speak with journalist Mark Seibel of McClatchy, co-author of the article, "To Some, U.S. Case for Syrian Gas Attack, Strike Has Too Many Holes." "When it came to questions of the efficacy of a U.N. investigation, or the number of people killed in the conflict, or even the U.S. rendition of what happened in what order, there are contradictions," Seibel says. The United States has claimed it had "collected streams of human, signals and geospatial intelligence" that showed the Assad government preparing for an attack three days before the event. "That claim raises two questions," Seibel writes. "Why didn’t the U.S. warn rebels about the impending attack and save hundreds of lives? And why did the administration keep mum about the suspicious activity when on at least one previous occasion U.S. officials have raised an international fuss when they observed similar actions?"

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: During Tuesday’s Senate hearing on Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted the administration has irrefutable evidence showing the Assad regime was responsible for the deadly chemical attack in late August.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: We can tell you beyond any reasonable doubt that our evidence proves the Assad regime prepared for this attack, issued instructions to prepare for this attack, warned its own forces to use gas masks. We have physical evidence of where the rockets came from and when. Not one rocket landed in regime-controlled territory. Not one. All of them landed in opposition-controlled or contested territory.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Secretary of State John Kerry.

For more on Syria, we’re joined by Mark Seibel of the McClatchy news service. He co-wrote a piece this week headlined "To Some, US Case for Syrian Gas Attack, Strike Has Too Many Holes."

Mark, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you lay out what you see those holes are?

MARK SEIBEL: Well, thank you very much.

The holes that we identified in the piece really have to do with contradictions between what Secretary of State Kerry has said in his public announcements and what other partners, if you use that phrase, in the Syrian issue have also reported. And, basically, what we identified is that when it came to questions of the efficacy of a U.N. investigation or the number of people killed in the conflict, or even the U.S. rendition of what happened in what order, there are contradictions. Do they completely undercut the case? I don’t know. If you believe that conclusions are based on facts, then the question becomes, do we have the facts? And that’s—you know, that’s an issue.

AMY GOODMAN: So, take us through these issues one by one. Talk, for example, about the numbers. The number that Senator Kerry—Secretary of State Kerry has referenced, how did the U.S. reach that tally of 1,429 people killed in a gas attack, including 426 children?

MARK SEIBEL: Well, we actually don’t know how they obtained that number. It is the highest number that’s reported by anyone, 1,429. It’s a very precise number. The U.S. intelligence summary doesn’t tell us how they arrived at it. It’s interesting because it is so much higher than even what the local coordinating committees, which is the Syrian opposition group on the ground, reports, and they reported 1,252. Again, a precise number, but much lower than the U.S. number. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is generally considered the most authoritative source for violence in Syria, they’ve figured about 502, maybe a hundred children, some number of rebel fighters in that number. The French, who have been the most transparent about how they arrived at a number, have reported 281. The French looked at 47 videos, according to their intelligence summary, and they counted the bodies in them. So, of course, they say it’s quite likely that there were more than 281 people killed, but at least we know where their precise number came from.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So why do you think it is that we have no idea that the—how the U.S. obtained this figure?

MARK SEIBEL: Well, that’s a—that’s a good question. I mean, it, you know, is a—it seems to me simple enough to say we got it from "X" source. I don’t know why we don’t have that sort of information. Kerry has not taken questions from the news media on that, and it didn’t come up in yesterday’s hearing, because I think most people are generally unaware that the numbers are all over the map. And you can say, "Well, what’s the difference, you know, whether it was 1,400 or 200?" But I think it probably makes a difference in understanding was this the largest chemical weapons assault, or was it a middling chemical weapons assault? What do we really know about the assault? And those are—those are questions we ought to at least know the answers to as we conclude what our response is going to be.

And one of the bigger issues for me was the immediacy with which the administration denounced a U.N. investigation into the probe. I mean, even before the investigation had begun, the secretary of state was on TV telling the American people that there had been a five-day delay, which he later changed to four—there had been a five-day delay, and that was been too long to get any credible evidence. And that was just simply not a true statement. And why they work so hard to discredit the United Nations’ investigation, even before it had gotten started, you know, is an open question.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Mark Seibel, chief of correspondents for McClatchy Newspapers. You also raised the question about the proof that a chemical attack happened, and the question of who was involved with that.

MARK SEIBEL: Excuse me? Tell me the question again?

AMY GOODMAN: You raised the question in your piece in McClatchy Newspapers of the proof that a chemical attack happened and who was responsible for it.

MARK SEIBEL: Well, you know, we’ve been told that a chemical attack took place, and the evidence seems to be that some sort of attack took place. We don’t actually know what the chemical was. The U.S. has said that it was sarin. There’s every reason to think that might be true, but we don’t know what the chemical test was that led them to conclude that it was sarin. We don’t know how the evidence was obtained. We don’t know what lab it was worked in. We actually don’t know how they arrived at that conclusion so quickly. You know, they announced it Sunday. But, you know, according to—again, to the secretary of state, it will take the U.N. two, three, maybe four weeks to reach that same determination in very modern labs in Europe. So there’s an awful lot we don’t know about that. And because we don’t know it—because we don’t know the details, at least in the public case—and again, you know, we’re not sitting in the classified briefings, but we don’t really know. We are being asked to—excuse me—to trust the assertion that it was sarin and that we know that, but, here again, it’s—we’re asked to make a leap of faith.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go to Secretary of State John Kerry, who says that humanitarian organizations working on the ground in Syria corroborated U.S. government claims that chemical weapons had been employed.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Our understanding of what has already happened in Syria is grounded in facts, informed by conscience and guided by common sense. The reported number of victims, the reported symptoms of those who were killed or injured, the first-hand accounts from humanitarian organizations on the ground, like Doctors Without Borders and the Syria Human Rights Commission, these all strongly indicate that everything these images are already screaming at us is real, that chemical weapons were used in Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Kerry speaking last week. Now, Doctors Without Borders, which also goes by its French acronym MSF for Médecins Sans Frontières, posted a statement on its website saying, quote, "MSF is aware that incorrect, manipulated information about MSF and Syria is circulating on the internet and social media. ... MSF does not have the capacity to identify the cause of the neurotoxic symptoms of patients reported by three clinics supplied by MSF in Damascus governorate. ... MSF does not possess the capacity or ability to determine or assign responsibility for the event that caused these reported symptoms to occur. Any statement or story that asserts any of these things is false." Mark Seibel, if you could respond to what MSF and the secretary of state, John Kerry, is saying?

MARK SEIBEL: Well, one of the things that I think, in terms of Doctors Without Borders, is that the secretary of state talks about it as first-hand observation by Doctors Without Borders, and Doctors Without Borders has been very clear that it’s too dangerous for their people to actually go in there. So it is not Doctors Without Borders’ first-hand observation. What Doctors Without Borders does have is information from Syrian medical personnel that they have worked with previously and that they have provided supplies to. And they reported, you know, what they were told by those doctors at three hospitals that they had treated 3,600 patients who showed various symptoms and that 355 of those patients have died. But I think to say it was a first-hand observation, it’s not a first-hand observation. The information may be perfectly valid, but we don’t know that. And so, here again, it’s—does it undercut the full case? I don’t know. Does it support the full case? I don’t know. What it does say is that what we’re being told publicly is not exactly what other people are saying.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, another problem that you raise, an issue that you raise in your article, is that if the U.S. knew, through intelligence sources, as Kerry claimed last week, that the Assad regime was preparing to launch chemical weapons attacks three days before the attacks occurred, why didn’t the U.S. warn the opposition that these attacks were coming?

MARK SEIBEL: Well, that’s a—you know, that’s a very interesting question, and it gets at something that we have learned since the piece ran, because the presentation that has been made over the last several days leads you to believe that, well, we saw them getting ready for a chemical attack, we saw the rockets launched, and then there was a chemical attack. It turns out—and we’ve learned subsequent to writing this piece—that that’s not how it worked at all, that there was the chemical attack, and then apparently the U.S. began processing intelligence that it had picked up or information it had gotten previously, and determined, oh, in here we have seen some signs that they were putting on to get gas masks or mixing chemicals or whatever, but we didn’t actually pick that information up before the attack. So, here again, it’s—in the presentation of the information, we have been given a timeline that does not actually reflect what—the process by which we have, quote-unquote, "learned" what took place.

It struck a lot of the Syrian opposition as wrong that the United States would have seen preparations for a chemical attack and not bothered to say anything. And we know last December that when they perceived that there were preparations being made for a chemical attack, that the U.S. made a big fuss about it. Obama redrew his red line. Hillary Clinton made statements. The U.N. withdrew its personnel from the ground. None of that took place in August, and that had struck the Syrian opposition as odd. You know, why didn’t you let us know? But as it turns out, while we’re saying now that we detected these preparations, we did not detect those preparations in real time. That’s something we’ve concluded was taking place by looking at things we recovered after we were aware of the attack.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this conversation with Mark Seibel, chief of correspondents for McClatchy Newspapers. His most recentpiece, which he co-authored with Hannah Allam, is "To Some, US Case for Syrian Gas Attack, Strike Has Too Many Holes." This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: While finishing his testimony in front of the Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry was interrupted by Medea Benjamin of CodePink, who yelled "We don’t want another war!" Listen carefully.

SEN. BOB MENENDEZ: Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Secretary Kerry, the American people say no to war!

SEN. BOB MENENDEZ: Committee will be in order.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Ban Ki-moon says no to war!

SEN. BOB MENENDEZ: The committee will be in order.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: The pope says no to war! We don’t want another war!

SEN. BOB MENENDEZ: I ask the police to restore order.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: [inaudible] Nobody wants this war! Cruise missiles—launching cruise missiles means another war. The American people do not want this! Secretary Kerry—

SEN. BOB MENENDEZ: Secretary Hagel.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: Can I just say, before I say—you know, the first time I testified before this committee, when I was 27 years old, I had feelings very similar to that protester, and I would just say that is exactly why it is so important that we are all here having this debate, talking about these things before the country, and that the Congress itself will act representing the American people. And I think we all can respect those who have a different point of view. And we do.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was John Kerry speaking yesterday. But let’s go back over 40 years. I want to play a short clip from 1971, when John Kerry, then a young Naval lieutenant, testifying in uniform, first pleaded with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This time it was to stop the Vietnam War.

JOHN KERRY: Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, "the first president to lose a war." And we are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? We are here to ask, and we’re here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?

AMY GOODMAN: That was John Kerry coming back from the war against Vietnam, against the war in Vietnam. Mark Seibel, you’re chief of correspondents for McClatchy Newspapers. The piece you have written is a very interesting one, "To Some, US Case for Syrian Gas Attack, Strike Has Too Many Holes." So we go back 40 years to then John Kerry—today he’s secretary of state—and we go back 10 years to look at what happened in Iraq, to look at the argument made for weapons of mass destruction. You even had General Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, who testified February 5th, 2003, before the United Nations, actually playing the recordings of conversations, saying they proved that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. General Colin Powell would later say the speech was a blot on his career. Can you talk about what we know today and compare it to what was known 10 years ago that was used to build the case to go to war with Iraq, right about the same time, right before the Legislature, the Congress, voted for war?

MARK SEIBEL: Well, you know, it’s—I haven’t done a detailed comparison. So, impressionistically, you know, I think Colin Powell came out with some very detailed information that turned out to not be very accurate. And that’s why I’m a little bit obsessed with the details of what we’re being told, because I think if the details are wrong, then the conclusion might be wrong, as well. Kerry makes assertions—he did yesterday, for example—that moderate forces among the rebels are on the rise in Syria. You know, as a person who sends correspondents into Syria, worries about their safety while they’re there, I don’t—

AMY GOODMAN: It just froze for a minute. While we get Mark Seibel back on, I want to go to Tuesday’s hearing on Syria with Secretary of State Kerry, who was questioned by Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado. Udall asked about Syrian President Assad and al-Nusra, a Syrian opposition group with ties to al-Qaeda.

SEN. MARK UDALL: By degrading his capacity, don’t you in fact make him weaker and make the people out there, like al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and these other extremist forces, stronger? And this is what I want General Dempsey to talk about in a little bit, too. But—

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: I’m happy to—

SEN. MARK UDALL: —will you answer that? Could you answer that?

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: I’m—

SEN. MARK UDALL: By degrading him, you make these extremist forces stronger, do you not?

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: No, I don’t believe you do. As a matter of fact, I think you—you actually make the opposition stronger. The opposition is getting stronger by the day now. And I think General Idris would tell you that, that he is not sitting around, and his daily concern is not the opposition, it’s Assad and what Assad is doing with his scuds, with his airplanes, with his tanks, with his artillery, to the people of Syria.

But I think it’s important also to look at this, because you raised the question of, doesn’t this make the United States the policeman of the world? No. It makes the United States a multilateral partner in an effort that the world, 184 nations strong, has accepted the responsibility for. And if the United States, which has the greatest capacity to do that, doesn’t help lead that effort, then shame on us. Then we’re not standing up to our multilateral and humanitarian and strategic interests.

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Kerry was also questioned by Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson. Ron Johnson is the Wisconsinite who beat Russ Feingold in the Senate. Republican Senator Ron Johnson talked about the makeup of the Syrian rebel groups, asked Kerry about this.

SEN. RON JOHNSON: It seems like initially the opposition was maybe more Western-leaning, more moderate, more democratic, and as time has gone by, it’s degraded, become more infiltrated by al-Qaeda.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: No, I—

SEN. RON JOHNSON: Is that—is that basically true?

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: No, that is—

SEN. RON JOHNSON: Or to what proportion has that happened?

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: No, that is actually, basically not true. It’s basically correct. The opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation, more defined by the breadth of its membership, and more defined by its adherence to some, you know, democratic process and to an all-inclusive minority-protecting constitution, which will be broad-based and secular with respect to the future of Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Secretary Kerry yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he used to sit. Mark Seibel, talk about the rebels.

MARK SEIBEL: Well, you know, the problem we see for our correspondents going in is that it’s not as safe to be there in areas that we used to think were safe, and it’s largely because of the presence of al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which are two al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations that we’ve seen their influence grow from closer to the border with Iraq, across the northeast and northern Syria, where they’re now very, very active in Idlib province and were responsible for fighting in Latakia, which is on the Mediterranean coast, though the fighting was not on the coast. And so, we’ve actually seen Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq—we’ve seen their influence grow in the last few months, and it’s one of the reasons that news organizations now are not sending correspondents into Syria in the way they used to, because it is not safe to be there. People get kidnapped. They’re being held by Nusra, and it’s not easy to work with them. Every—we had a correspondent in—fairly recently who encountered Nusra every step of the way. He was traveling with moderate rebels, if you will, but they encountered Nusra all the time. So, I’m not quite certain how—how we reached a conclusion that more moderate forces are on the ascendancy in the rebel movement.

We know, for example, that the capture of an air base in Idlib province in July, the Supreme Military Council, which is—which is our moderate military group, and the Syrian Opposition Coalition, which is the moderate civilian leadership that provide money to, when they announced the capture, they acknowledged that the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, Nusra and Islamic State of Iraq, were very much part of that attack and that assault. And our experience has been that whenever there is a rebel triumph, that the Nusra people have usually been in the vanguard. So, you know, it’s a highly debatable topic about which it would be good to hear more information, because, of course, that has always been one of the big concerns about assisting the rebels or getting involved. And it was certainly something General Dempsey brought up in a letter to Senators McCain and Levin in July, that you don’t want to empower the extremist forces in the rebel movement with any military action you take in Syria, and that the moderate forces that we champion there—meaning the United States champion there—are not strong enough to run the country at this point. So that’s—you know, I think there are lots of questions to be asked about that, and I’d like to hear more information on what makes us think that the moderates are in the ascendancy.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, in July, during his battle for the nomination as the U.S.'s top military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey warned against military action in Syria, as you point out. He said, quote, "The regime could withstand limited strikes by dispersing its assets." But during Tuesday's congressional hearings, he appeared to have reversed his position.

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: We’re preparing several target sets, the first of which would set the conditions for follow-on assessments, and the others would be used if necessary. And I’m—we haven’t gotten to that point yet. What we do know is that we can degrade and disrupt his capabilities and that that should put us in a better position to make the kind of assessment you’re talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have Secretary of State Kerry initially refusing to rule out the eventual deployment of boots on the ground, saying he can’t take an option off the table.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: In the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of al-Nusra or someone else, and it was clearly in the interests of our allies and all of us—the British, the French and others—to prevent those weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the worst elements, I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to a president of the United States to secure our country.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, later he would walk this back, but, Mark Seibel, this is extremely important, significant, both what Dempsey said before and also what Secretary of State Kerry said yesterday, as he talked about, you know, what happens, he said, if Syria implodes.

MARK SEIBEL: Well, I mean, that’s—you know, I think that’s what Dempsey was saying in his letter to McCain and Levin back in July, which is, once you start a military campaign—and we can call this not classic war, but it’s a military campaign—once you start it, you really don’t know where it’s going to go. And it’s the, as he put it, unintended consequences that you have to be concerned with. And so, you do have to have a strategy for what you’re going to do, if, for example, the country collapses, or if you so weaken an Assad military force that they suddenly lose control of their chemical weapon stores and that a group like the Islamic State of Iraq or al-Nusra comes in and captures them. And then what do you do? So that’s a—that’s a real concern.

And so, the fact that he is holding open the possibility of having to put boots on the ground—and he did come back to that theme, and he never really rejects it—he says, "We don’t want to do that," but he keeps the option there—is an expression, and probably a smart one, of understanding that once you begin a military operation, you do not know where it will lead, and you need to have your options open. So the question then becomes, I think for Congress, well, do you want to start? And if you start, are you prepared to finish?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, during Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Republican Senator Rand Paul accused the administration of playing, quote, "constitutional theater" with Congress.

SEN. RAND PAUL: You’re making a joke of us. You’re making us into theater. And so we play constitutional theater for the president. If this is real, you will abide by the verdict of Congress. You’re probably going to win. Just go ahead and say it’s real, and let’s have a real debate in this country and not a meaningless debate that in the end you lose and you say, "Oh, well, we have the authority anyway. We’re going to go ahead and go to war anyway."

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mark Seibel, very quickly, before we conclude, what do you think is going to happen now?

MARK SEIBEL: Oh, well, I don’t know. I think there’s going to be a lot of debate. I suspect that the—you know, the common wisdom in Washington is that the Senate will authorize action and that it’s—

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds, Mark.

MARK SEIBEL: And that it’s very close in the House.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Seibel, we want to thank you very much for being with us, chief of correspondents for McClatchy Newspapers. We’ll link to your piece, "To Some, US Case for Syrian Gas Attack, Strike Has Too Many Holes."

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With Focus on U.S.-Led Strikes, Global Failure to Meet Syria’s Humanitarian Crisis Goes Unnoticed

While Washington debates the use of military force in Syria, the United Nations has revealed the number of refugees who have fled the country’s civil war has topped two million, with another four million internally displaced. The tide of children, women and men leaving Syria has risen almost tenfold over the past 12 months. On average, almost 5,000 people take refuge in Syria’s neighboring countries every day. The United Nations warned last month that the war is fueling the worst refugee crisis since the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Overall, the fighting in Syria has killed more than 100,000 since 2011, including some 7,000 children. In Beirut, Lebanon, we’re joined by Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser, just back from visiting refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is preparing to vote as soon as today on a draft authorization for the use of military force in Syria. The resolution sets a 60-day limit on U.S. military action in Syria, with a possible 30-day extension. On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee saying Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be held accountable for his alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: If the United States of America doesn’t hold him accountable on this, with the—with our allies and friends, it’s a guarantee Assad will do it again. A guarantee. And I urge you to go to the classified briefing and learn that. Secondly, let me just point out to you that with respect to this question of Americans wanting to go to war, you know, you’ve got three people here who have been to war. You’ve got John McCain, who’s been to war. There’s not one of us who doesn’t understand what going to war means, and we don’t want to go to war. We don’t believe we are going to war in the classic sense of taking American troops and America to war. The president is asking for the authority to do a limited action that will degrade the capacity of a tyrant who has been using chemical weapons to kill his own people.

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Kerry testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While the Senate’s draft resolution includes a provision barring the use of U.S. troops on the ground, Kerry admitted there are some scenarios when the president might decide to send troops into Syria.

SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: In the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of al-Nusra or someone else, and it was clearly in the interests of our allies and all of us—the British, the French and others—to prevent those weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the worst elements, I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to a president of the United States to secure our country.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: John Kerry later walked back his comments on committing U.S. troops, saying the White House has no such plans. The New York Times, meanwhile, reports at least 50 CIA-trained rebels have now crossed into Syria from Jordan.

Meanwhile, this weekend, Pope Francis called for peace in a message delivered at Saint Peter’s Square. He called for Friday to be a day of fasting and prayer for Syria and said, "War begets war, violence begets violence."

POPE FRANCIS: [translated] With all my vigor, I exhort the international community to make every effort to promote clear proposals for peace in that country without further delay, a peace based on dialogue and negotiation, for the good of the entire Syrian people.

AMY GOODMAN: Pope Francis speaking in Saint Peter’s Square. President Obama goes to Saint Petersburg, Russia, with a very different message. And that’s the issue that is in Washington right now as it debates the use of military force.

The United Nations has revealed the number of refugees who have fled Syria has topped two million. The tide of children, women and men leaving Syria has risen almost tenfold over the past 12 months. On average, almost 5,000 people take refuge in Syria’s neighboring countries every day. The U.N. warned last month the war is fueling the worst refugee crisis since the Rwanda genocide in ’94. Two million refugees have fled Syria, half of them to neighboring Lebanon. Jordan hosts over 500,000, and there are tens of thousands in Turkey. Overall, the fighting in Syria has killed more than 100,000 people since 2011. More than 7,000 children have died.

For more, we’re joined by Raymond Offenheiser, president of the international relief and development organization Oxfam. He’s been visiting Oxfam’s refugee program in Jordan and Lebanon, and joins us now from Beirut, Lebanon.

Raymond Offenheiser, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the situation right now, since President Obama has pushed for a military strike against Lebanon? How has that—against Syria? How has that affected the refugee crisis?

RAYMOND OFFENHEISER: Well, thank you very much, Amy. It’s good to be with you.

We’ve been here for the last four days, basically, visiting the refugee camps in Jordan and all the improvised settlements that refugees are finding themselves in through both—through both Lebanon and Jordan. And I don’t know that there’s been an immediate reaction. There’s an enormous sense of expectation here in the region about what this action may mean and whether in fact it will trigger greater refugee flows across the border. I think, at this point, there isn’t necessarily the perception that the flows are increasing dramatically, but that—you know, we don’t know what will happen if in fact a strike does in fact occur.

That being said, I think the point you made earlier about the scale of this emergency, the fact that we’re talking about two million refugees outside the borders of Syria, and we’re talking about really some six or seven million IDPs or personnel that are moving around in Syria that are not properly housed, that are in need of humanitarian assistance, this is an enormous emergency. And much of that population we can’t reach, because they’re inside the borders of Syria right now in the midst of the conflict.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Raymond Offenheiser, you’ve just been visiting these refugee camps in Jordan and in Lebanon. Can you describe what you have witnessed of the situation of these refugees?

RAYMOND OFFENHEISER: Well, there’s of course the big camp, Zaatari, on the Jordan-Syrian border, which I think has gotten a lot of press and a lot of coverage. There’s 120,000 refugees in that one camp. But that’s really the only one large camp that exists in either Syria or Lebanon of that scale. It’s the fourth-largest city now in Jordan. There are some—half the residents of that are children. Some 60,000—of 60,000 children in that camp, only 15,000 of them, for example, are in school at the present time. They’re living in a combination of tents or small wooden-frame structures. The camp is, I suppose you might say, in reasonably good order, but that belies the fact that many other refugees are making their way into Lebanon and Jordan and trying to find improvised housing in tents in the middle of fields. Others are trying to find very affordable apartments in Amman and other cities or towns. And if you can imagine that only 120,000 of 500,000 of these refugees, in the case of Jordan, are in this camp, the rest of them are putting an enormous strain on municipal services, on the education system and the health system in Jordan, and similarly here in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the effect that the announcement of the possible strike is having on people in Syria and the refugees you are speaking to in Lebanon and Jordan?

RAYMOND OFFENHEISER: Well, I can’t speak to Syria, because I haven’t been inside the country, and it’s been very hard to kind of get any sense of what things look like or how people are feeling there. I think there’s a sense of—high sense of anxiety. And if you’re watching the local cable news networks here, you can sense that because it’s being reported and speculated on really 24/7.

Within the camps themselves, I think there’s sort of an expectation that something dramatic is going to happen. I think that a lot of the people think that this is the beginning of a much more dramatic action on the part of the United States, and perhaps the international community, than the sort of surgical strike that perhaps the president has been describing.

I think what’s really clear in the minds of the refugees is they want to go home. They want to go home now. And they are really looking for some sort of a solution, any solution that will really end this conflict and allow them to go home, and are really worried that we’re looking at a conflict that could be going on for months, if not years, having them having this enormous two million population outside the country and the IDP population in the country literally vulnerable for months and years to come. And that’s not—I don’t think that’s an acceptable situation. It’s not an acceptable status quo. And I think we’ve got to really move toward driving toward some sort of political solution to end this conflict.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Raymond Offenheiser, what exactly is Oxfam calling for? What do you think the U.S. should be doing now, and international community?

RAYMOND OFFENHEISER: Well, we’re deeply—as a humanitarian organization, we condemn the use of chemical weapons and indiscriminate killing of civilians. We’re very concerned about the protection of civilians in all of these contexts. That’s what our mission is about. That’s what we’re doing here now. And we recognize, along with the rest of the international community, that the use of chemical weapons is prohibited by international law, and it’s prohibited by the rules of law, and that’s been the case since World War I.

That being said, we also recognize there’s a need for some strong and immediate action. But we’re not sure that military action is the answer. I think there’s—it’s pretty clear that when you strip away all the rhetoric about the military strike, that there is agreement between the Russians and the Americans and the Vatican and the Arab League about the fact that at the end of the day this is going to require a political solution. Our concern is that a military strike basically would likely—offers the potential of widening the conflict, turning it into a wider regional conflict, inflicting the potential for more civilian casualties, undermining the trust that’s needed to get us a political dialogue going, and prolonging the conflict in ways that are not necessary.

So, this is not to say that Oxfam has never in the past called for the use of military force to end a conflict that has been out of hand, and we’ve called for it as, you might say, a last-resort measure in Rwanda, the Congo and in Liberia. But in this particular case, we don’t think that this meets the six criteria we might use to make a judgment about whether in fact this is appropriate or not. We think this is a moment in which the president in Saint Petersburg today, or at the start of the G-20 talks, ought to be trying to pull the international community together and start that political dialogue and restart the Geneva talks.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of government—of U.S. support for aid for Syria, humanitarian aid, is this an issue for Oxfam and other groups?

RAYMOND OFFENHEISER: Well, I think that the U.N. has made an appeal for humanitarian aid that is quite substantial, and only about 30 percent of that has been met. And I think we’re seeing on the ground what the implications of that are for the refugees. And this is a very challenging crisis because of the fact that it’s not a situation where we’re seeing the large kind of camps that we’ve seen in other contexts, but we see families moving into—you know, families that have moved out of urban areas, moving into urban areas in Lebanon and Jordan and trying to find ways of making a go of it. They don’t necessarily have the right to work in these countries, although they do have access to services. And while the aid so far has been enabling us to kind of get up and running and the U.N. agencies to deliver some support, this is not an emergency that I think is going to be sustainable over time in terms of the financial burden it’s going to put on the U.N. system, and certainly the financial burden it’s putting on Jordan and Lebanon.

And just to give you a simple case in point, I think recently King—the king of Jordan basically visited with President Obama and made the point that if we were to see something equivalent to what we’re seeing in our own country to what Jordan is experiencing, it would represent 20 million Canadians crossing the border into the city of Buffalo, and the city of Buffalo and its environs having to receive that population and accommodate it. Or another way of looking at it is in Lebanon, there are four million Lebanese, there are one million refugees from Syria in Lebanon. And think about what that would mean for, you know, our own country if we had to absorb that kind of movement of population and do it over months and perhaps even years. So the scale of this crisis is enormous on the borders of Syria for all these countries.

And I really want to underline for your listeners and viewers the fact that what we’re seeing on the borders is only the tip of the iceberg. What’s really of critical importance is understanding that there are six to seven million internally displaced population inside Syria that we cannot reach because of the conflict, and they are living in desperate straits. There’s only 5 percent of them that are in any kind of reasonable housing or shelter; 95 percent of them are living in tents or on the move or living in collapsed buildings without basic services. And the medical system in Syria is collapsing. And literally 50 percent—the estimate is some 50 percent of the kids in the country are out of school. So, this is an enormous crisis that we’ve got to bring to a halt quickly, and we’d like to see it end with a political solution and intensified political discussions between the United States, Russia, Iran and the other parties to the—to potential negotiations.

AMY GOODMAN: Raymond Offenheiser, we want to thank you for being with us, president of Oxfam America. He’s been visiting Oxfam’s refugee program in Jordan and Lebanon. He was joining us from Beirut, Lebanon. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

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It should be noted that Alan Grayson never did show up, but that was because he was organizing and getting read for the performance by Kerry in front of Congress.