The Sydney Morning Herald
US baulks at talk of Syrian intervention
By Simon Mann
THE independent US senator Joe Lieberman has raised the prospect of military intervention in Syria should a government crackdown against protesters escalate, as Washington grapples with upheaval across the Middle East.
A former Democrat who sides with Republicans on most foreign policy issues, Senator Lieberman said the multinational action against Libya's Muammar Gaddafi stood as a model of how the world could best deal with dictators who turned on their own people.
After a weekend of violence in which hundreds of Syrians were reportedly killed or injured in clashes with police and security forces, the one-time Democratic vice-presidential candidate said he would support military intervention if President Bashar al-Assad resorted to the slaughter of civilians.
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Senator Lieberman said Syria risked other countries imposing a flight-exclusion zone ''just as we're doing in Libya''. He urged Mr Assad - who came to power after the death of his father, Hafez, in 2000 - to negotiate with the ''freedom fighters'' in his country.
''There's a precedent now that the world community has set in Libya, and it's the right one,'' Senator Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told Fox News. ''We're not going to stand by and allow this Assad to slaughter his people like his father did years ago.''
But the Obama administration showed little enthusiasm for embarking on fresh military action, despite accusations that its approach to the various democracy uprisings throughout the region has been inconsistent and hypocritical.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appearing in a round of weekend interviews in advance of President Barack Obama's televised address to the nation today (Melbourne time), said the US had no plans to interfere in Syria's domestic affairs.
She described clashes in the country as part of a ''police action'' and not a military campaign like that deployed by Colonel Gaddafi. ''Each of these situations is unique,'' she said in an interview on CBS. ''Certainly, we deplore the violence in Syria.''
But she added: ''What's been happening there the last few weeks is deeply concerning, but there's a difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities.''
In another interview, Mrs Clinton was asked: ''What do you say to the people in Ivory Coast or Syria, who say, 'Where's our no-fly zone? We're being killed by our government, too.''
She responded: ''Well … there's not an air force being used. There is not the same level of force. The situation is significantly different enough that the world has not come together.
''So you know, each of these situations is different, but in Libya when a leader says, 'Spare nothing, show no mercy,' and calls out air attacks on his own people, that crosses a line that people in the world had decided they could not tolerate.''
The push-back came as administration officials talked up the success of the no-fly zone over Libya and what they said was the remarkable speed with which NATO's 28-member states had agreed terms for taking control of the mission after several days of US-led bombing raids. President Obama is under pressure to assure a war-weary American public that US involvement in the Libyan crisis will be short-lived. At the same time, he is likely to restate during his prime-time TV address that the mission is a humanitarian response to Libya's troubles and not an invasion of the oil-rich country.
Even so, Defence Secretary Robert Gates was cautious in putting a timeline on US involvement, declining to say whether the mission would be over by the end of the year.
''I don't think anybody knows the answer,'' he told one interviewer.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-baulks-at-talk-of-syrian-intervention-20110328-1cdcy.html
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