In an interview with Fox Business Network host Neil Cavuto, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued against military intervention in Syria. “There really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation,” Rumsfeld told Cavuto.
Anyone with a good memory and a healthy sense of irony will remember that as secretary of defense in 2003, Rumsfeld helped lead the country into the Iraq War with what many would view as insufficient “national interest” for the United States, reports Mediate.
Strike against Syria stalled by British political debate
According to the Guardian, allied air strikes against the Syrian government over the alleged use of chemical weapons could be delayed until next week in the face of strong opposition in the U.K. Parliament to British involvement in immediate military action.
Prime Minister David Cameron conceded that MPs would be given a second vote to approve military action to defuse a parliamentary revolt, ahead of a House of Commons debate on Syria on Thursday. Whitehall sources indicated that the U.S., which had planned to launch the strikes by the weekend, is prepared to revive a back-up plan to delay the strikes until Tuesday when Barack Obama sets out for the G20 summit in Russia, the Guardian reports.
Such a move by the Obama administration would effectively hand Cameron a political lifeline after the opposition Labor party threatened to inflict a defeat on the Conservative-led coalition in parliament, the report states.
Obama, referring to the chemical attacks during a PBS television interview on Wednesday, said: “We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out.”
