THE NEW YORK TIMES – WASHINGTON – Two cabinet secretaries who fought during the Vietnam War and a four-star general whose views on intervention were shaped by command tours in Iraq appeared before the Senate on Tuesday to argue the Obama administration’s case for Congressional authorization to attack Syria over chemical weapons use.
The three men, drawn from President Obama’s senior national security team, said that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government directly puts American interests at risk, and that other potential adversaries, whether North Korea or Iran, would be emboldened if the United States failed to act.
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Secretary of State John Kerry, in his remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged Congress to vote in favor of the president ordering a military strike and argued that “the risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting.”
Mr. Kerry, who once served as the chairman of the committee, sat next to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a former member of the panel, and recalled the flawed intelligence assessments that helped propel the Senate to approve American military action against Iraq in 2003. He said this case was different.
Read more at The New York Times.
