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.
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.
“I remember Iraq, Secretary Hagel remembers Iraq,” Mr. Kerry said. “We were here for that vote. We voted. And so we are especially sensitive — Chuck and I — to never again asking any member of Congress to take a vote on faulty intelligence. And that is why our intelligence community has scrubbed and rescrubbed the evidence.
“We can tell you beyond any reasonable doubt that our evidence proves the Assad regime prepared for this attack, warned its forces to use gas masks,” Mr. Kerry said, referring to the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
“We have physical evidence of where the rockets came from and when,” he said. “Not one rocket landed in regime-controlled territory. All of them landed in opposition-controlled or contested territory. We have a map, physical evidence, showing every geographical point of impact — and that is concrete.”
Mr. Kerry argued against any restrictions in the Congressional authorization, including whether ground forces would be prohibited. He emphasized that Mr. Obama had no intention to put “boots on the ground.” But he said that if Syria imploded and chemical weapons depots were at risk of being raided by militants, then ground troops might be required to secure those locations. He said such an action would most likely be undertaken with allies.
Mr. Kerry warned that the turmoil in Syria, if not contained, might allow extremists to find haven in a country with chemical weapons. That nexus of chemical weapons depots and militant fighters tied to international terrorist organizations, he said, could threaten American allies that border Syria, American troops in the region and perhaps even United States territory.
He also sought to tie the deaths by chemical weapons in Syria to the gas attacks of World War I and the horrors of World War II. But he said the authorization for use of force would not foreshadow a full war. “There will be no American boots on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said, nor would the United States assume responsibility for the Syrian civil war.
The goal, he said, is to degrade the Syrian government’s ability to use chemical weapons and deter their future use.
“This is not the time for armchair isolationism,” Mr. Kerry said, knowing that there is great reluctance for another conflict in the Middle East among both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. “This is not the time to be spectators to a slaughter. Neither our country nor our conscience can afford the cost of silence.”
Mr. Hagel, like Mr. Kerry a veteran of the Vietnam War, used an argument heard from previous administrations in warning of the potential links between terrorist organizations and authoritarian governments that held arsenals of unconventional weapons.
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