text: Whom should President Obama ask before he bombs Syria? One of the answers being bandied about is nobody but his own conscience, and some generals who will tell him how to do it. An Op-Ed in today’s Times tells him not to mind various laws and treaties, or rather the lack of applicable ones. Maybe the awful pictures from Ghouta are telling him the same thing; not getting anyone outside White House meeting rooms, or at the other end of a secure phone line, to put his or her name down might be natural, even instinctive, but it is not what the moment demands. There have been calls for the President to reconvene Congress and put this one before them, and such calls are right. It might even help the Administration figure out what, exactly, it hopes to accomplish by shooting missiles in the general direction of Damascus. 
   
   Having people, representatives, raise their hands before you do something is not an empty ritual, even when they don’t vote the way you want them to. Britain’s David Cameron has called in Parliament, which will meet Thursday, with plans to vote more than once; on Wednesday, his government submitted a draft resolution to the Security Council of the United Nations that would authorize “all necessary measures to protect civilians” in Syria. It would be a shock if it doesn’t fail, because Russia and China would veto it at this juncture—and, as John Cassidy writes, the weapons inspectors trying to figure out just what happened need time. But our domestic political process needs time, too, and deserves it. 
   
   As of Wednesday afternoon, a hundred and fourteen members of Congress had signed a letter put together by Scott Rigell, a Virginia Republican with a lot of service members in his district, asking Obama to reconvene them and get authorization for any attack. Most of those who signed on were Republicans, but not all of them. Obama could do so if he wanted to. John Boehner could also bring back the House, and Harry Reid the Senate; it would be a mistake not to. 
   
   What is the disadvantage of going to Congress? That they are loud and annoying and someone will try to introduce a resolution tying action in Syria to Obamacare? If the Administration can’t stand up to Ted Cruz, it can hardly hope to frighten Bashar al-Assad. And if going to Congress now feels time-consuming, how does it compare to the hours, days, weeks, and sanity expended on the Benghazi hearings? Those might have happened anyway, but they got a fair share of their formless force from the Administration’s initial decision to not really bother with Congress and the War Powers Act when it came to Libya. If you haven’t been asked in the first place, there is no cost to turning a tragedy into a piece of political theatre. 
   
   What, too, does Obama think that future Presidents, even those more reckless than he is, and Congresses, even those that are more unhinged than this one (it is possible), will do if he repeats his Libyan calculation with a Syrian one? Obama is hardly the first President to treat the War Powers Act as something empty and broken; but unless he thinks it should just be crushed, that’s all the more reason not to toss it aside. He’d said that the War Powers Act didn’t apply in Libya because we weren’t engaged in “hostilities”: as the Rigell letter asks, “If the use of 221 Tomahawk cruse missiles, 704 Joint Direct Attack Munitions, and 42 Predator Hellfire missiles expended in Libya does not constitute ‘hostilities,’ what does?” Under the War Powers Resolution, the President is supposed to inform Congress within forty-eight hours of starting military action, and get their permission to keep it up after sixty days. That is not onerous in a situation in which no one thinks Syria is about to invade us. 
   
   And on this one, the Administration needs Congress—it needs deliberation. George Packer has laid out what that might look like on a personal level; on a political one, the Administration needs to be interrogated, sharply, about just what it thinks is going to happen after the two or maybe three days of missile strikes that leaks tell us to expect. It might even be asked about non-military options (perhaps something that could help people trapped in refugee camps like Za’atari). Maybe then it would figure it out, at least a little. There is a cloud of haze there now: we don’t want regime change; we just want Assad and the world to remember that chemical weapons shock us deeply. We can’t bomb the chemical-weapon storage sites, though, both because that might itself send out a cloud of poison and because the rebels, whom we don’t trust, might then be able to grab a few canisters. We don’t want to think about what they might do if they did; we don’t want to think about a lot of things in Syria, including the awful last moments in the lives of the children whose bodies we’ve seen stacked up. We would like to have been able to hold them and tell them that anyone who hurts them will have to answer to us. But just bombing a place doesn’t disperse ghosts; more often, it brings chaos and new ones. Is that the only plan? Ask Congress. 
   
   Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty. 
   
   Read more of our coverage of the war in Syria. ||||| It looks as if we’ll be firing Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria in the coming days, and critics are raising legitimate concerns: 
   
   President Bashar al-Assad may escalate. Hezbollah may retaliate against Western targets. Our missiles may kill civilians. We’ll own a civil war in a broken country. We’ll be distracted from nation building at home. A couple of days of missile strikes will offer merely a slap on the wrist that advertises our impotence. 
   
   There’s some truth to all that, but we also need to acknowledge something fundamental: President Obama’s policy toward Syria has failed, and it’s time to try a tougher approach. 
   
   Obama reportedly rejected a proposal from Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus to arm rebels in Syria, because he feared getting dragged into the conflict. Now we’re getting dragged in anyway, and everything we worried about has come to pass: 
   
   The war has spread and destabilized Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. The hard-line Nusra Front rebels have gained strength, partly because we have spurned moderates. The Syrian Army has won ground. Prolonged war has deepened sectarian hatreds that will make it harder than ever to put Syria back together. 
   
   More than 100,000 Syrians have been killed. At the rate the killings have accelerated, Syria could even approach a Rwanda-size death toll by the time Obama steps down. 
   
   I tend to be wary of the military toolbox, and I strongly opposed the Iraq war and the Afghan “surge.” But in conjunction with diplomacy, military force can save lives. We saw that in Bosnia and Kosovo under Bill Clinton (who appears to favor a more forceful American approach in Syria), and we saw that just this year in Mali. 
   
   The problem is that overcommitments in Afghanistan and Iraq have left us with society-wide PTSD, so that we’re wary of engaging in Syria at all. Obama’s passivity is easy to understand: only one-fifth of the American public favors arming rebels. 
   
   But when I was last in Syria, in November, I met a grandma who had already lost her husband, her son and her daughter-in-law to the Assad regime. She was living in her fifth home that year, a leaky tent, wondering who would die next, and like everyone was desperate for international support. “We ask for God’s help in ending this, and Obama’s,” she said. 
   
   What do we tell her? That we don’t have the stomach to help her? That we’d rather wait until all her grandkids have died and the death toll has reached hundreds of thousands and embarrassed us to take firmer action? 
   
   Granted, there’s a legitimate question about whether a day or two of missile strikes against Syria (seemingly the most likely scenario) will deter Assad from further use of chemical weapons. We can’t be sure, but to me that seems plausible. 
   
   Chemical weapons are of only marginal use, simply one more way to terrorize and demoralize opponents. President Assad has carefully calibrated his actions over the last few years, testing the domestic and international response before escalating. 
   
   At first he merely arrested protesters. Then his forces began firing on them. Next his soldiers swept hostile neighborhoods. Then the Syrian Army began firing rockets and mortars at rebel positions. Assad moved on to indiscriminate bombing. Then his army apparently used chemical weapons in small attacks. Finally, his army appears to have undertaken a major assault with nerve gas. 
   
   We’ve been the frog in the beaker. 
   
   To me there’s some hope that destroying military aircraft or intelligence headquarters can persuade Assad that chemical weapons are not worth the cost and that he is better off employing more banal ways to slaughter his people. That’s unsatisfying but would still be a useful message to other leaders. It would reinforce the international norm against weapons of mass destruction. 
   
   Are we making too much of chemical weapons? Probably less than 1 percent of those killed in Syria have died of nerve gas attacks. In Syria, a principal weapon of mass destruction has been the AK—47. 
   
   Yet there is value in bolstering international norms against egregious behavior like genocide or the use of chemical weapons. Since President Obama established a “red line” about chemical weapons use, his credibility has been at stake: he can’t just whimper and back down. 
   
   Look, Syria is going to be a mess, whatever we do. The optimal window to intervene by supporting moderate rebels to achieve a quick end to the war may have closed. But if the coming clash gives us a chance to do more to arm certain rebel groups or share intelligence with them, that would still be worthwhile — all while backing the idea of a negotiated settlement. 
   
   For all the risks of hypocrisy and ineffectiveness, it’s better to stand up inconsistently to some atrocities than to acquiesce consistently in them all. ||||| As of this writing, early Thursday morning, some Syrians are scheduled to pay with their lives for America’s “credibility.” The bombarding of an already war-ravaged country is acknowledged as “symbolic,” intended simply to “send a message.” This is an obscenity as great as the one Washington purports to answer. Another Middle Eastern society will come further unstitched, and those doing the unstitching will have nothing on offer to replace it. 
   
   The U.S. long ago squandered what credibility it may once have enjoyed or desired in the Mideast. If credibility were the cause, Washington need do no more than start dismantling the Potemkin village it has made of the principles it tediously mouths.But this thought goes nowhere these days. 
   
   And so the U.S. stalks into another war in the Middle East. Unlike the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—American works of art, both—the conflict in Syria is somebody else’s canvas. But apart from this, the similarities among these three instances of Washington’s wanton hostility toward uncompliant regimes are astonishingly similar. 
   
   Make that tragically similar. History proceeds, we Americans insist on the virtue of ignorance, on learning nothing and knowing nothing. And what we are about to get is what we get, predictably and always. We are a singular people, no question. Maybe even exceptional. 
   
   As of these hours, the Obama administration is on the record as rejecting any deliberations the U.N. may judge just. On Wednesday evening, British Prime Minister David Cameron gave in to Labour Party objections to his support for Washington’s invasion plans. Britain now wants to see a U.N. report on the alleged chemical attacks from weapons instructors, and to give the Security Council process more time. 
   
   But listen closely to President Obama speaking Wednesday on PBS' "Newshour" and it is clear the U.S. could go it alone against the Syrian regime if need be. "We’re prepared to work with anybody – the Russians and others – to try to bring the parties together to resolve the conflict," Obama said. "But we want the Assad regime to understand that by using chemical weapons on a large scale against your own people ... you’re also creating a situation where U.S. national interests are affected, and that needs to stop." 
   
   So not even the fig leaves of international assent matter now. 
   
   Events since the apparent attacks with chemical substances in four residential districts of Damascus last week bear all the marks of a disgraceful bum’s rush. Given that the cruise missiles the Obama administration is about to send into Syria will bear the chalk signatures of every American, like a World War II bomb, we are the chumps of the piece (once again, that is). This is a shared responsibility. It makes us complicit. 
   
   The fabrications and duplicity put before us as Washington prepares to “respond” to the latest savagery in Syria are so strangely formed that it is hard to follow the bouncing ball. The Obama people have changed their story diametrically before our eyes, casting aside all consistency, self-evidently making it up as they go along. And it is the same story recited countless times before. Maybe it is the only story Americans can articulate or grasp—a disturbing thought, but one begging consideration at this point. 
   
   Stories require media, of course, and there they are, on the case in the Syrian crisis and delivering the goods with irresponsible single-source stories dressed up as responsible multiple-source stories. When was it that journalists began thinking of themselves as national security operatives? It is getting unbearable, this errand-boy act in the face of power. If journalists did their jobs properly we would get into fewer messes such as Syria and would be more nationally secure. As it is now, the press is a defective piece in the democratic mechanism. 
   
   Instantly after news of chemical weapons and fatalities arrived last week, Washington and its allies began clamoring for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to allow a team of U.N. inspectors to examine the sites in question. It absolutely had to be. Nothing else would do. We read this. 
   
   Within 48 hours, the Obama people asserted that any such scrutiny was beside the point. When Assad gave assent to the U.N. team’s visit, which was not much delayed given the shelled zone is a battlefield, he was “too late to be credible.” All the evidence would have “degraded,” as we also read. 
   
   Too late? Degraded? The U.N. team is one of experts. They are in Syria to examine sites where chemicals were allegedly used months ago and would not be there if the question of degradation were authentic. This we did not read, with one exception. On Wednesday the New York Times’ science correspondent, William Broad, had the integrity and sense to cite non-government sources—Yikes!—to point out that chemical agents used in weaponry do not dissipate for a woefully long time. Skeptics can ask the Vietnamese. 
   
   The Broad piece got the bottom of page eight. As I.F. Stone once said of the Washington Post, the paper is always a kick because you never know where you will find a front-page story. 
   
   By early this week, if you can take this in, U.S. officials were privately urging the U.N. to abort the mission in Syria. Washington had plainly decided by this time that evidence was not quite the thing. We did not read this, either—not in an American publication. 
   
   We come to the Mack truck Obama’s people want to park unnoticed in the driveway. “Evidence” of chemical weapons use, even as Obama’s people dodged from any, quickly became “undeniable” (Secretary of State Kerry), a matter of “no doubt” (Vice President Biden), and many other forcefully stated things. This language we read in abundance—and with no decent, professional scrutiny on the part of those conveying it. 
   
   And did you notice? Evidence of use became evidence of the Assad regime’s use. This is the trump suit in the game. No mention by any U.S. official that responsibility may lie with the awful-as-Assad insurgents. And of course one could not read of this prospect in U.S. newspapers or hear it from U.S. broadcasters. An indefensible lapse in logic also goes unnoted. I honestly cannot figure how dumb we are supposed to be. 
   
   We are promised incontrovertible evidence of Assad’s guilt in the course of Thursday. Needless to anticipate. In wars of imagery and spectacle, variants of the above-described routine are frequently rehearsed. Think yellowcake, or Colin Powell at the United Nations, or Judith Miller's "metal tubes" or "mobile weapons labs" in Iraq so eagerly reported by the New York Times. 
   
   I aired my suspicions that the insurgents might well be the culprits in this space last week. I stand by these thoughts times two. 
   
   Assad’s opponents do not possess supplies of sarin gas or other chemical agents, it is suggested. 
   
   Rubbish. Not so by a long way. And they have behaved as savagely as anyone in Assad’s army. 
   
   The rebels could not be capable of mounting an attack of the scale apparent in Damascus last week, we are also advised. 
   
   The defensible position is that of the Russians and responsible elements within Britain: They want a proper investigation and propose we all abide by it. 
   
   Carla del Ponte, the noted investigator of war crimes and a member of the U.N. inquiry on Syria, asserted in May that there was sound reason to examine whether the insurgents were responsible for an obscenity in Syria at that time involving sarin gas. The U.N. human rights investigator said that, "According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas," adding that her commission's best understanding of the facts was that "sarin gas has been used ... by opponents, by rebels, not by government authorities." 
   
   She was tarred and feathered, as our media are versed at doing in the best American tradition. 
   
   But Obama appears determined to circumvent the U.N. regardless of what its investigators suggest. On Wednesday Britain advanced a resolution in the Security Council calling for intervention, but this was pro forma. The Security Council is composed as it is so that alternative worldviews are properly represented. Obama honors alternative worldviews as much as George W. Bush treasured them. So no U.N., not with a veto in the offing from Russia, a Security Council member. Better to go lawless again, and that is the word to bear in mind as the fireworks display unfolds in the coming days. 
   
   In the run-up, there is some piling on. We have once again the crummy “coalition of the willing” junk, familiar from the Iraq war: There are the batboy British, the flimsy resistance of Labourites notwithstanding, and the uncertain France of François Hollande, and Angela Merkel’s Germany (complicated motives there), and of course Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, which is (on the record) eager to regionalize the Syria question so that Iran can be bombed. I have previously identified Bibi as the most dangerous man in the Middle East, and he earns the title once again. 
   
   The Arab League says no. The European Union says no. Even NATO equivocates as of this hour. Take it apart. Most of humanity is not on board for this adventure in theater. 
   
   I conclude with what I consider the caker, the preposterous-news- of-the-week prize, even if we cannot read about it in our country but online. 
   
   “The bulk of evidence proving the Assad regime’s deployment of chemical weapons—which would provide legal grounds essential to justify any western military action—has been provided by Israeli military intelligence.” That would be the reliable folk at Mossad. The quotation comes from the Guardian, which simply reported on a report in a German magazine called Focus. 
   
   My goodness. Send in the clowns. They’re already here. ||||| All the signs are they're going to do it again. The attack on Syria now being planned by the US and its allies will be the ninth direct western military intervention in an Arab or Muslim country in 15 years. Depending how you cut the cake, the looming bombardment follows onslaughts on Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, as well as a string of murderous drone assaults on Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. 
   
   The two former colonial powers that carved up the Middle East between them, Britain and France, are as ever chafing for a slice of the action as the US assembles yet another "coalition of the willing". And as in Iraq and Sudan (where President Clinton ordered an attack on a pharmaceuticals factory in retaliation for an al-Qaida bombing), intelligence about weapons of mass destruction is once again at the centre of the case being made for a western missile strike. 
   
   In both Iraq and Sudan, the intelligence was of course wrong. But once again, UN weapons inspectors are struggling to investigate WMD claims while the US and its friends have already declared them "undeniable". Once again they are planning to bypass the UN security council. Once again, they are dressing up military action as humanitarian, while failing to win the support of their own people. 
   
   The trigger for the buildup to a new intervention – what appears to have been a chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta – certainly has the hallmarks of a horrific atrocity. Hundreds, mostly civilians, are reported killed and many more wounded, their suffering caught on stomach-churning videos. 
   
   But so far no reliable evidence whatever has been produced to confirm even what chemical might have been used, let alone who delivered it. The western powers and their allies, including the Syrian rebels, insist the Syrian army was responsible. The Damascus government and its international backers, Russia and Iran, blame the rebels. 
   
   The regime, which has large stockpiles of chemical weapons, undoubtedly has the capability and the ruthlessness. But it's hard to see a rational motivation. Its forces have been gaining ground in recent months and the US has repeatedly stated that chemical weapons use is a "red line" for escalation. 
   
   For the same reason, the rebel camp (and its regional sponsors), which has been trying to engineer a western intervention in the Libya-Kosovo mould for the past two years to tip the military balance, clearly has an interest in that red line being crossed. 
   
   Three months ago, the UN Syria human rights commission member Carla Del Ponte said there were "strong concrete suspicions" that rebel fighters had used the nerve gas sarin, and Turkish security forces were reported soon afterwards to have seized sarin from al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front units heading into Syria. 
   
   The arms proliferation expert, Paul Schulte, of King's College London, believes rebel responsibility "can't be ruled out", even if the "balance of probability" points to the regime or a rogue military commander. Either way, whatever Colin Powell-style evidence is produced this week, it's highly unlikely to be definitive. 
   
   But that won't hold back the western powers from the chance to increase their leverage in Syria's grisly struggle for power. A comparison of their response to the Ghouta killings with this month's massacres of anti-coup protesters in Egypt gives a measure of how far humanitarianism rules the day. 
   
   The Syrian atrocity, where the death toll has been reported by opposition-linked sources at 322 but is likely to rise, was damned as a "moral obscenity" by US secretary of state John Kerry. The killings in Egypt, the vast majority of them of civilians, have been estimated at 1,295 over two days. But Barack Obama said the US wasn't "taking sides", while Kerry earlier claimed the army was "restoring democracy". 
   
   In reality, western and Gulf regime intervention in Syria has been growing since the early days of what began as a popular uprising against an autocratic regime but has long since morphed into a sectarian and regional proxy war, estimated to have killed over 100,000, balkanised the country and turned more than a million people into refugees. 
   
   Now covert support has become open military backing for a rebel movement split into over 1,000 groups and increasingly dominated by jihadist fighters, as atrocities have multiplied on all sides. While the focus has been on Ghouta this week, rebels have been ethnically cleansing tens of thousands of Kurds from north east Syria across the border into Iraq. 
   
   Until now, the western camp has been prepared to bleed Syria while Obama has resisted pressure for what he last week called more "difficult, costly interventions that actually breed more resentment". Now the risk to US red line credibility seems to have tipped him over to back a direct military attack. 
   
   But even if it turns out that regime forces were responsible for Ghouta, that's unlikely to hold them to account or remove the risk from chemical weapons. More effective would be an extension of the weapons inspectors' mandate to secure chemical dumps, backed by a united security council, rather than moral grandstanding by governments that have dumped depleted uranium, white phosphorus and Agent Orange around the region and beyond. 
   
   In any case, chemical weapons are far from being the greatest threat to Syria's people. That is the war itself and the death and destruction that has engulfed the country. If the US, British and French governments were genuinely interested in bringing it to an end – instead of exploiting it to weaken Iran – they would be using their leverage with the rebels and their sponsors to achieve a ceasefire and a negotiated political settlement. 
   
   Instead, they seem intent on escalating the war to save Obama's face and tighten their regional grip. It's a dangerous gamble, which British MPs have a responsibility to oppose on Thursday. 
   
   Even if the attacks are limited, they will certainly increase the death toll and escalate the war. The risk is that they will invite retaliation by Syria or its allies – including against Israel – draw the US in deeper and spread the conflict. The west can use this crisis to help bring Syria's suffering to an end – or pour yet more petrol on the flames. 
   
   Twitter: @SeumasMilne
target: – As the US considers what to do about Syria, there's no shortage of advice on the pros and cons: Pro-strike: Nicholas Kristof is generally wary of the "military toolbox," but it's important here to "reinforce the international norm against weapons of mass destruction," he writes in the New York Times. "For all the risks of hypocrisy and ineffectiveness, it’s better to stand up inconsistently to some atrocities than to acquiesce consistently in them all." Ditto: "Deepening American involvement in yet another Middle East conflict goes against President Obama’s instincts—and ours," write the editors at the Miami Herald. "Unemployment should be his principal focus. But events have a way of intruding on presidential agendas. In this instance, it’s unavoidable. Syria’s brazen disregard for humanitarian norms cannot go unanswered." Bad idea: Just what the world needs, yet another western military intervention in an Arab or Muslim country, writes Seumas Milne at the Guardian. Too many questions persist about the alleged chemical weapons attack, he writes, adding that military strikes would only escalate the war. "The risk is that they will invite retaliation by Syria or its allies—including against Israel—draw the US in deeper and spread the conflict." Better for the West to use its leverage with the rebels to try to force cease-fire talks. Slow down: This is remarkably similar to the run-ups to both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, writes Patrick L Smith at Salon. "Make that tragically similar. History proceeds, we Americans insist on the virtue of ignorance, on learning nothing and knowing nothing. And what we are about to get is what we get, predictably and always." Give the UN investigators the time they need, he urges. Ask Congress: Whatever the final decision, President Obama must consult with Congress about it, writes Amy Davidson at the New Yorker. "Having people, representatives, raise their hands before you do something is not an empty ritual, even when they don’t vote the way you want them to," she writes. The White House can't just ignore the War Powers Act whenever it's convenient. "The Administration needs to be interrogated, sharply, about just what it thinks is going to happen after the two or maybe three days of missile strikes that leaks tell us to expect."