Assad’s regime can withstand limited hit

A limited strike against Syria might convince the Assad regime not to use chemical weapons again, but it won’t change the balance of power in Syria’s civil war or bring about President Obama’s stated goal of regime change, Middle East analysts and rebel leaders agree.

Syria’s President Bashar Assad has behind him Russia’s veto at the United Nations, Iran’s military backing, Hezbollah’s foreign fighters and a rebel adversary infiltrated by Islamist groups the United States worries about arming.

Breaking up this morass will likely take more than the cruise- missile strike Obama and Western allies are considering.

“The threats to our interests have only gotten worse, and our inaction has been quite harmful to our interests,” said Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy and a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.

“There’s no reason to think those consequences won’t continue to worsen, and yet you don’t see any momentum toward any kind of effective action by the United States and

up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him,” Kerry said.

In Syria, members of a United Nations inspection team traveled through government- and rebel- held territory Monday to look for signs of chemical weapons use. One of the team’s vehicles was attacked by snipers.

If cruise missiles are used, they can be fired by surface ships or submarines, said Sen. Jack Reed, D- R. I., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Four Navy destroyers, the USS Barry, Gravely, Mahan and Ramage, are positioned in the eastern Mediterranean, according to a Defense Department official who was not authorized to discuss their whereabouts publicly.

Jets could fire Joint Air- to-Surface Standoff missiles, weapons with warheads that could be released outside the range of Syria’s air defenses. These cruise missiles can be fired from hundreds of miles away.

Firing cruise missiles avoids exposing pilots to Syria’s air defense system, which is large though mostly outdated.

The White House is wary of getting pulled into a wider war in Syria and considers most rebel groups as unreliable partners.

David Deptula, a retired Air Force three- star general who led the service’s intelligence and surveillance operations, declined to speculate on what option Obama would choose, but he said any attack would be designed to respond to the chemical allegations and not to choose a side in a civil war that is more than two years old and has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

“The issue on the plate is not the civil war that is going on in Syria,” Deptula said. “It is the illegal actions of the Assad regime in using chemical weapons.”

Even striking from a distance is not without risk. Missiles can cause collateral damage and prompt retaliatory attacks, as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a letter last month to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D- Mich.

U. S. allies, such as Great Britain and France, prepared for action.

British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin to outline the evidence of chemical weapons use by Assad’s regime.

Cameron’s office said the British government would decide today whether the timetable for the international response means it will be necessary to recall lawmakers to Parliament before their scheduled return next week. That decision could offer the clearest indication of how quickly the United States and its allies plan to respond.

Britain and France led the way in calling for military action after the first reports of alleged chemical weapon use in Syria.