Obama withstood pressure from warmongers on additional Syria "opposition" arming

Long article but worth your time.  After reading it, it is apparent that if there was anybody other than Obama as the head of the USA,  we would have been in WW3.  Historians will say that Obama avoided WW3 and historians will be right. By ignoring warmongers he has created many powerful enemies in the USA and around the world .... but he has also saved thousands of innocent civilians in Syria and probably people of surrounding countries by not giving in to the pressure he was under from interested parties.  Give credit where credit is due.  I shudder to think what might have happened if a Republican like McCain was the prez.  

Mark Mazzetti, Robert Worth and Michael Gordon writing at  NYTimes:
With rebel forces in Syria in retreat  and the Obama administration’s policy toward the war-ravaged country in disarray, Secretary of State John Kerry arrived at the White House Situation Room one day in June with a document bearing a warning. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons against his people, the document said, and if the United States did not “impose consequences,” Mr. Assad would see it as a “green light for continued CW use.”

President Obama had signed a secret order in April — months earlier than previously reported — authorizing a C.I.A. plan to begin arming the Syrian rebels. But the arms had not been shipped, and the collapse of rebel positions in western Syria fueled the atmosphere of crisis that hung over the June meeting.

Yet after hours of debate in which top advisers considered a range of options, including military strikes and increased support to the rebels, the meeting ended the way so many attempts to define a Syrian strategy had ended in the past, with the president’s aides deeply divided over how to respond to a civil war that had already claimed 100,000 lives.


The State Department’s June warning, laid out in a document obtained by The New York Times, proved to be prophetic. A devastating poison gas attack on Aug. 21 killed hundreds of civilians, touching off a crisis that brought the United States close to launching military strikes in Syria and that ended only when Mr. Obama seized on a Russian-sponsored agreement to secure Syria’s chemical weapons.

Now, two years after Mr. Obama publicly declared that Mr. Assad had to go, he is banking on the success of that Russian-initiated plan — which relies on Mr. Assad’s cooperation and which the Syrian president offered in a recent interview as a convenient shield against American intervention.

But as Mr. Kerry held meetings in London with representatives of Syrian opposition groups on Tuesday in the hopes of reviving a proposed peace conference, the prospects for a diplomatic breakthrough appeared dim. Mr. Assad’s position is stronger, and the rebellion has grown weaker, more fragmented and more dominated by Islamic radical factions.............

...........As the president and his advisers debated their options in Syria, two American allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, were steadily funneling money and weapons to the rebels — and urging the Obama administration to join them.......

.............Denis R. McDonough, the deputy national security adviser and one of the biggest skeptics about American intervention in Syria, was promoted to White House chief of staff. Mr. McDonough had clashed frequently with his colleagues on Syria policy, including with Samantha Power, a White House official who had long championed the idea that nations have a moral obligation to intervene to prevent genocide.
Ms. Power came to believe that America’s offers of support to the rebels were empty.
“Denis, if you had met the rebels as frequently as I have, you would be as passionate as I am,” Ms. Power told Mr. McDonough at one meeting, according to two people who attended.
“Samantha, we’ll just have to agree to disagree,” Mr. McDonough responded crisply........

........In private conversations with aides, Mr. Obama described Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless and all the options are bad. Those views would then be reflected in larger groups by Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mr. McDonough.

“You could read the president’s position through Tom and Denis,” one former senior White House official said.

Slowly, however, Mr. Obama’s position began to change, in no small part because of intense lobbying by foreign officials. During a three-day trip to the Middle East in March, Mr. Obama met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who warned him that the Assad government’s chemical weapons could fall into the hands of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The pressure was even more intense the next day in Jordan, where Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon and Mr. Kerry had a late-night dinner with King Abdullah II. Jordan was straining under the weight of more than 100,000 Syrian refugees, and the king urged Mr. Obama to take a more active role in trying to end the war.
Jordanian officials were even offering to allow the C.I.A. to use the country as a base for drone strikes in Syria — offers that the Obama administration repeatedly declined........

........But debate had shifted from whether to arm Syrian rebels to how to do it. Discussions about putting the Pentagon in charge of the program — and publicly acknowledging the arming and training program — were eventually shelved when it was decided that too many legal hurdles stood in the way of the United States’ openly supporting the overthrow of a sovereign government..........

...........Besides the legal worries, there were other concerns driving the decision to make the program a secret.
As one former senior administration official put it, “We needed plausible deniability in case the arms got into the hands of Al Nusra.”........