President Barack Obama rejected calls from four of the most senior members of his foreign policy team to arm the rebels fighting to overthrow the Syrian regime, it emerged on Thursday night.
Panetta disclosed that he and the Pentagon supported a proposal by Hillary Clinton before she stood down as Secretary of State last week to supply rebel forces with weapons. Photo: GETTY
By Jon Swaine, Washington 8:54PM GMT
07 Feb 2013
Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, disclosed that he and the Pentagon supported a proposal by Hillary Clinton before she stood down as Secretary of State last week to supply rebel forces with weapons,
Gen Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, also agreed with Mrs Clinton's plan, which received the further backing of David Petraeus, Mr Obama's CIA director until late last year.
Answering questions at a Senate committee hearing, Mr Panetta became the first senior Western official publicly to propose arming the rebels to oust President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces are estimated to have killed 60,000 in a bloody civil war.
"How many more have to die before you recommend military action?" he was asked by John McCain, the veteran Arizona senator. "Did you support the recommendation by then-Secretary of State Clinton and then-head of CIA General Petraeus that we supply weapons to the resistance in Syria?" "We do," answered Mr Panetta. "We did," added Gen Dempsey.
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Mr Obama resisted pressure from his colleagues, rejecting their plan at the height of his re-election campaign last year. He has said that the risk is of American weapons being obtained by radical elements of the rebel forces, who are linked to al-Qaeda, was too great.
"One of the things that we have to be on guard about – particularly when we start talking about arming opposition figures – is that we are not indirectly putting arms in the hands of folks that would do Americans harm, or do Israelis harm," the president said last November.
Following an Israeli air strike on a Syrian regime military facility outside Damascus, Mr Panetta last week warned that the growing "chaos" in Syria could see government weaponry "going across the border and falling into the hands of Hizbollah", the militant Islamic group based in Lebanon.
US officials on Thursday stressed that their assistance to the rebels would remain limited to humanitarian aid and non-lethal equipment. Regional American allies, such as Qatar and Turkey, are however believed to be arming the rebels with tacit approval from Washington.
Britain has called for a review of the EU arms embargo on Syria, which expires on March 1, to make it easier to help rebels and allow equipment such as body armour and chemical detectors to be given to the rebel alliance.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, the Syrian regime's closest ally, yesterday urged it to negotiate with opposition elements and to allow free elections to be held.
Mr Ahmadinejad did not say whether he supported a peace bid by the head of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, who last week offered to sit down with Syria's vice president, Farouq al-Sharaa. President Bashar al-Assad has yet to make a formal response.
Mr Panetta's remarks came during a hearing by the Senate armed services committee focusing on the September 11 terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which the US ambassador and three other Americans were killed.
He defended the administration's security presence in the country. "The United States military is not and should not be a global 911 service capable of arriving on the scene in minutes to every possible contingency around the world," he told the committee.
The hearing was due to be Mr Panetta's final appearance before Congress, where he sat for California in the House of Representatives for 16 years from 1977 before joining president Bill Clinton's administration.
The Senate is due to vote on the confirmation of former senator Chuck Hagel, Mr Obama's nominee to replace Mr Panetta, in the coming days.
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