The United States and Great Briton are moving naval forces into place for a possible missile strike on Syria, in response to an apparent chemical attack of 300 or so civilians reportedly carried out by the Assad regime.
Royal Navy vessels are being readied to take part in a possible series of cruise missile strikes, alongside the United States, as military commanders finalize a list of potential targets.
Government sources said talks between the Prime Minister and international leaders, including Barack Obama, would continue, but that any military action that was agreed could begin within the next week.
As President Barack Obama continues to contemplate a possible military intervention in Syria, a new poll asked Americans what they thought about such a scenario.
According to Reuters, they overwhelmingly oppose it, even after news of an alleged chemical attack against Syrian civilians last week.
Reuters reported that “about 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria’s civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act.”
The Assad regime has been under mounting pressure to allow United Nations inspectors on to the site to establish who was to blame for the atrocity. One international agency said it had counted at least 355 people dead and 3,600 injured following the attack, while reports suggested the true death toll could be as high as 1,300.
Syrian state media accused rebel forces of using chemical agents, saying some government soldiers had suffocated as a result during fighting.
Despite the appearance of gruesome videos showing dozens of bodies of Syrian babies, children and adults, the support for the idea of U.S. involvement actually declined over the past week. The last Reuters/Ipsos tracking polls dated August 13 “found that 30.2 percent of Americans supported intervention in Syria if chemicals had been used, while 41.6 percent did not.”
As CBS reported Saturday, the Pentagon is making “initial preparations” for a cruise missile attack on Assad’s forces after suspecting them to have employed chemical weapons against civilians.
Obama met with his national security team on Saturday to discuss what steps if any the U.S. will take. The AP reports that the administration has still not determined if Assad’s forces used chemical weapons. This as Assad has killed an estimated 100,000 people, yet it took the killing of a few hundred to stir the president to some type of action.
Veteran Saudi Power Player Works To Build Support to Topple Assad
Officials inside the Central Intelligence Agency knew that Saudi Arabia was serious about toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad when the Saudi king named Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud to lead the effort.
They believed that Prince Bandar, a veteran of the diplomatic intrigues of Washington and the Arab world, could deliver what the CIA couldn’t: planeloads of money and arms, and, as one U.S. diplomat put it, wasta, Arabic for under-the-table clout.
Prince Bandar—for two decades one of the most influential deal makers in Washington as Saudi ambassador but who had largely disappeared from public view—is now reprising his role as a geopolitical operator. This time it is to advance the Saudi kingdom’s top foreign-policy goal, defeating Syrian President Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies.
Prince Bandar has been jetting from covert command centers near the Syrian front lines to the Élysée Palace in Paris and the Kremlin in Moscow, seeking to undermine the Assad regime, according to Arab, American and European officials.
Meanwhile, an influential protégé, current Saudi Ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir, is leading a parallel campaign to coax Congress and a reluctant Obama administration to expand the U.S. role in Syria.
The conflict there has become a proxy war for Middle East factions, and Saudi Arabia’s efforts in Syria are just one sign of its broader effort to expand its regional influence. The Saudis also have been outspoken supporters of the Egyptian military in its drive to squelch the Muslim Brotherhood, backing that up with big chunks of cash.
